Lachez Tout - Annie Le Brun

The following book / text should be read in conjunction with The Chicago Surrealists (A modicum of explanation around Annie Le Brun's Lachez Tout) by David Wise

Also by Annie Le Brun:

• L'humour noir, 1966, in Entretiens sur le surréalisme, Mouton, 1968.
• Sur le champ (illustrated by Toyen), Editions Surréalistes, 1967.
• Les mots font l'amour (surrealist quotes), Eric Losfeld, 1970.
• Les pâtés et fiévreux après-midi des villes, Edition Now, 1972.
• La traversée des Alpes (with Fabio De Sanctis and Radovan Ivsic), Editions Now, 1972.
• Tout près, les nomades, Editions Now, 1972.
• Les écureuils du orage, Editions Now, 1974.
• Annulaire de lune (illustrated by Toyen), Editions Now, 1977.

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Further Additions:

• Castles of Subversion (1980)
• Vagit Prop (1990)
• 1996: Preface to the Unabomber's "The Future of Industrial Society"

and many others.....

Below: Editorial Comment:

(Within the last few years a couple of Annie Le Brun's books, The Reality Overload and A Sudden Abyss have been published in America and not before time as the latter is the best reflection on De Sade ever written. However perhaps her two most important (and controversial) works, Lachez Tout and Vagit Prop have only relatively recently seen the light of day in the English speaking part of the world most likely because they will almost certainly upset stereotypical Anglo-American feminist responses, (Annie's preferences are by way of insurrectionary anarchist women like Flora Tristan and Louise Michel enmeshed with individual Dadaists and Surrealists). Hopefully the inclusion of Lachez Tout (Abandon Everything) here on the RAP website spurs some publisher to take up the challenge. Annie Le Brun's French, which is heavily influenced by André Breton's sometimes dense style of writing - itself legacy of wide-ranging symbolist association - is difficult at the best of times, so don't get too frustrated as you will be rewarded by unmasking hidden depths. Moreover, we hope people will begin to get some idea as to what her arguments are about and for those with little acquaintance of the French language resorting to the translation tool bar will also be useful. Furthermore, we have just heard, translator software is said to be on the cusp of dramatic improvement, so here's hoping.........? One further technical point: the formatting of Lachez Tout still leaves much to be desired and there are minor mistakes especially in applying all the grave and acute accents etc, which will take some time to put in. )

David and Stuart Wise: December 2010
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Chapters for Abandon Everything

1. Introduction
2. Ideas and Wrinkles
3. Gynocratia Song
4. Zhdanov Changes Sex
5. From the Headless Woman to the Legless Woman

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Introduction

"... I live in terror of not being misunderstood."

Oscar WILDE.

"I'd like to talk about crystal party howling like a dog in a night of beating sheets."

Benjamin PERET.

When I was sixteen, I decided that my life wasn't going to be what they wanted it to be. This determination and luck, perhaps, allowed me to escape most of the misfortunes inherent in the female condition. If I am delighted that girls are showing more and more the desire to reject the models that have been proposed to them until now, I nevertheless deplore the fact that they do not hesitate to recognize themselves in the formal negation of these old models when it is not in the simple updating of these models. While people today take pleasure in repeating everywhere that one is not born a woman but that one becomes one, it seems that one does not care much about not becoming one. On the contrary, even. Unlike the feminists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who worked to erase the illusory difference that invested men with real power over women, the neo-feminists of recent years have sought to establish the reality of this difference in order to claim an illusory power of which women have been deprived. And this to such an extent that revolt in the face of an impossibility of being tends to disappear under the blows of militant stupidity, establishing an obligation to be. Is it necessary to remind you: when it comes to revolt, no one needs ancestors, but also to add: and above all not technical advisers in a hurry to exchange the recipes of feminine insubordination from A to Z?

Faced with the magnitude of the more or less legal crimes perpetrated not only against women but also against all those who resist the social codification of sexual roles (and among them, in particular, homosexuals), I consider this revolt too necessary not to want to disturb the concert of voices of those who claim to abstract it from this individual darkness from which it violently takes shape and draws its overwhelming forces. I insist that this revolt is always an attack on the morale of the community, regardless of the foundations on which it is founded. So, how can we fail to see that each woman today finds herself virtually dispossessed of this individual recovery when she does not take care that each of her misdeeds risks being diverted to serve the construction of an ideology that is as contradictory in its proposals as it is totalitarian in its intentions? Here she is, more or less tacitly encouraged on all sides to expose the demands of her sex, ever since the so-called cause of women has been exhibiting an image of the revolt tamed under the nets of negative normalization that our age is so well able to extend to the remotest lands of our sensitive horizon.

I have always despised masters who have the habits of slaves, as well as slaves who are impatient to slip into the shoes of their masters, but I confess that the usual confrontations between men and women have not bothered me much. My sympathy goes rather to those who desert the roles that society had prepared for them. They never pretend to build a new world, and therein lies their fundamental honesty: they will never do good to others in spite of themselves, contenting themselves with being the exceptions who deny the rule with a determination often capable of upsetting the order of things.

Oscar Wilde interests me more than any bourgeois woman who has agreed to marry and have children and who, one fine day, feels restricted in her very hypothetical creativity.

That's the way it is.

I will not list my preferences in this regard: it would be unnecessary and damning to the cause of women.
That I have done everything possible to give as little dedication as possible to the psychic, social, and intellectual consequences of a biological destiny is my business alone; but I will not consent to an attempt to make me feel guilty in the name of all women in order to bring me back within the limits of this same destiny. This suddenly inevitable promiscuity in search of each person's identity actually threatens women to the depths of their freedom when the assertion of a generic difference is made at the expense of all specific differences. Let us only calmly consider what each of us has had to endure indifferently in the name of God, of Nature, of Man, of History. However, it seems that this is not enough, since everything is starting again today under the banner of Woman. Specialists in the field of coercion are not mistaken, and they zealously multiply national and international bodies devoted to the status of women, without any real change in the legislation. Moreover, they cannot be much mistaken since Gu'Aragon, the chance of repression for nearly half a century, announced that woman is "the future of man". I have the greatest doubts about this future when it happens that I take on the features of Elsa Triolet.

In what is said or written in the name of women, I see the return – under the pretext of liberation – of all that thanks to which women have traditionally been inferior: they declare themselves against the family but exalt the triumphalism of motherhood on which it is founded; we attack the notion of the woman-object, we work on the promotional rise of the feminine mystery; Finally, if the relationship between men and women is denounced as a balance of power, it is to become the starting point for a theorization of the most damning conjugal jousting. So many new reasons to congratulate myself once again on having definitively left the cul-de-sacs of the so-called feminine sensibility. Moreover, nothing can make me reconsider my natural aversion to majorities, especially when they are composed, mainly in Western countries, of part-time martyrs.

The more deafening the noise of the times becomes, the more certain I am that my life is elsewhere, gliding along my love whose figures bury the passing of time. I'm looking at you. We will meet on the bridge of transparency before plunging into the night of our differences. We will swim, near or far, distracted or tense, going up the current of our enigma to find ourselves in the uncertain embrace of our fleeting shadows. We are not the only ones who have risen from the depths of our solitudes to meet our ghosts, regardless of whether they are male or female. And if there are only a few men who have no great difficulty in recognizing themselves in Picabia's admission: "Women are the depositaries of my freedom," it is perhaps because it is a matter of conquering a marvel that women and men have yet to discover. That is why I object to being conscripted into the army of women in struggle simply by biological chance. My frenzied individualism is the exact measure of everything that works for the interchangeability of beings.

This book is a call for desertion.

1. Ideas and Wrinkles

"Thought has no sex; does not reproduce."

André BRETON, Paul ELUARD.

This fin de siècle dies under the pressure of ideas that never cease to die. And it is as if life were spread out before each one only to be marked with the tense imprint of some tired idea. The great animals that advanced against the horizon return weary but terrible to guard herds of men. If there are still a few wild ideas, there are above all domestic ideas, circus ideas, carnivorous ideas, creeping ideas..., that is to say, ageing ideas. Their old age is ferocious, despairing of lack of rigor and excess of severity. Everything then sinks back to the bottom of the well of the future. The eyes are the colour of blue jeans. Men allow the ball of their dreams to bounce a little less each day. Can they even hope that women will try to revive it beyond the river of their gestures when feminism has become an aging idea in a few years?

I know, feminism is not two centuries old and it could be youth since time doesn't matter in the aging of ideas. But ideas draw their vigour only from the rarefied air of necessity. A necessity as dark as Louise Michel's petticoats, irreducible as Flora Tristan's London wanderings, sovereign as Lou Salomé's departures. It is a necessity that works to broaden the horizon and not to reduce it, as today's feminists seek to do, folding the world into the contours of their own misery, whether real or not.

There is no specifically feminine thought, there are only beings here and there who feel compelled one day to violate the limits assigned to them. The fact that these beings are women does not change the matter. Is it enough that they have always been kept out of the way, for them to recognize themselves today in this gap? The landscape in which we are moving forward is only enriched by our departures. With everything in place for us to stay in place, our chances of progress merge with the bridges we throw beyond ourselves. Our only hope of putting an end to life as it is caricaturally lies in this determination to force perspectives until the symbolic horizon emerges, unfolding between the crossed shadows of words and things, of flesh and language, but also of the masculine and the feminine. We have been living beside ourselves long enough not to suspect all that separates us. It is as much a political problem as it is a poetic one, posed entirely in this well-known Zen apologue: Kikakou having said: "A red dragonfly - pluck off its wings - a chili pepper", Basho substituted for it: "A chili pepper - put wings on it - a red dragonfly." And that's why I'm worried that, discovering itself mutilated, women's speech must have been mutilated.

Simone de Beauvoir has the sad privilege of having theoretically inaugurated this weakening of the feminine discourse that the Marxist and psychoanalytic facelifts of recent years have only aggravated. Theoretically, this is saying a lot when The Second Sex first presents itself as an industrious embroidery on the existentialist canvas, with all the muted contradictions, obscure heartbreaks, and feverish inconsistencies that such an act of allegiance implies. Perseverance taking the place of impetus and repetition of conviction, we are a far cry from all those laundresses, gold-beaters, corset-makers, burnishers, boot-stitchers... of the Paris Commune, which revealed to us the roots of the feminine revolt at the very heart of life, at a time when it was most threatened. Not that I want to pit action against reflection here. Rather, I seek to contrast the irrepressible emergence of an idea with the hazardous speculations, more or less self-serving, of which it gradually becomes the target and which never fail to reduce its scope. When we remember the tension of these women of the Commune caught up in the passionate invention of their particular and collective destiny, the false academic objectivity of The Second Sex on the general condition of women becomes unbearable to be nothing more than an artifice capable of deceiving the anxieties of a personal philosophical devotion.

Let it be reassured, however, that I shall not take the trouble to bore myself by refuting here point by point the theses of a book which bores me itself. I am all the more lightly shirking this thankless task because The Misunderstanding of the Second Sex has been masterfully analysed by Suzanne Lilar, who has been able to highlight the fundamental contradiction that Simone de Beauvoir strives to conceal by concealing it from herself:

"Throughout the book, we will hear the timid but obstinate claim to a feminine specificity, elsewhere denied and condemned. Thus we confirm an impression we feel at the beginning of our reading: it could be that The Second Sex is not a firm but an indecisive work, which tries to compensate for this lack of firmness by the peremptory nature of the assertions and the obsessive force of the repetitions."

(The Misunderstanding of the Second Sex, p. 62.)

Simone de Beauvoir's entire enterprise is in fact inextricably linked to Penelope's work, which aims to mask a reality that is slipping away. In the absence of being able or willing to tear the veil of lies, one prefers to weave another lie without abandoning the old framework, but in the hope that the excessive use of objective materials will give the work an aspect of ironclad novelty. Simone de Beauvoir's contribution to the feminine question would seem to be reduced to this rambling, which is more or less deceptive; This would only be derisory if this traffic did not lead to the deception of a militant conception of difference, which consists in retaining only its negative impacts. Thus, for having made the mistake of considering the feminine question in the light of Sartrian theses, whose sadly phallocratic character I am surprised that no one has yet noted, Simone de Beauvoir can boast of having become the pioneer of a long march towards sensitive mutilation. A march in which separation, hostility and aggressiveness end up sounding deafening as the only echoes of difference. Hence probably the incredible and enduring fortune of The Second Sex and the certainty I have: feminism had more to lose than to gain from the paper block thrown by Simone de Beauvoir. No doubt it is the same with ideas as living organisms, diverted to serve ends other than their own development, they lose their independence at the same time as their youth.

From this point of view, The Second Sex marks an indisputable date in the history of feminism. Doesn't it represent the sum of everything that has come to heavier, slow, parasitize the first impulse of the feminine revolt? It is enough to consider this work physically, others would say verbatim: it is neither a big nor a great book. It's not even a plump or chubby book. It is a bloated book whose various swellings cannot make us forget the repetitive fluctuations of the subject. Of course, intellectual chatter is rife, from false erudition to the most questionable approximations, but this is to distract from the uncertainties of the journey, when the very "feminine" sensitivity of certain evocations is not enough to soften with its useless volutes the rigidity of the existentialist corset used to contain the inconsistencies of the project. In the end, isn't this vaguely scientific overweight, thanks to which the Second Sex has managed to impose itself and impose itself, symptomatic of the slumping of the feminist revolt into uninterrupted recrimination? Then I would explain to myself the silence on Suzanne Lilar's remarkable critical work, since the loftiness of her point of view can only have the effect of removing Simone de Beauvoir and her innumerable followers from their militant porridge. What femininity can one invoke, in fact, in the face of this remark of principle:

"Only the thesis that emancipates the Feminine from the woman in order to the other sex is compatible with the correct handling of the concept of otherness"

(The Misunderstanding of the Second Sex, p.104?)

If the women in struggle did not give as one man in the nominalist mania of the time, it would be enough to no longer give credence to the bluff of The Second Sex , where the ambiguity worked on to the small point enhances the vagueness of a drawing that can be as suitable for hardcore feminists as for sex collaborators. Only, since both sides are in a hurry to find an identity for themselves at little cost, it is not surprising that they pay little attention to the innumerable manufacturing defects of what is offered to them. What would they have to say about the noisy negation of a femininity that the author of The Second Sex seeks to affirm obscurely and even suddenly claims by declaring lately "I am never betrayed when I am pulled towards..." absolute feminism, if you will"? What could they oppose to the claim to replace the image of the caricatured otherness that man would have made of woman, an improbable feminine figure of the Same, yet somewhat handicapped by nature? And disability is an understatement when you remember the grand-guignolesque chapter on menstruation where the evocation of those storms in a vagina could illustrate the worst commons of traditional misogyny about the hierarchy of the sexes. It doesn't matter, then, that Simone de Beauvoir is now allowing herself to be made to feel guilty by a few muscular feminists for having, etc., a woman-alibi", when they do not think of questioning either the premises or the conclusions of The Second Sex. Would they like to, they would not, from the moment they have chosen to recognize themselves in the obsessive and demanding circularity of this book, whose chapters follow one another and resemble each other in order to imperturbably confirm what etc has been set as a starting point. Except that by peremptorily affirming that sexuality is only the cultural experience of non-reciprocity and that woman, as a result, "a product elaborated by civilization", Simone de Beauvoir, although eager to erase the difference between the sexes, comes to represent a world divided into two unrecognizable categories. that, in order to be authentically, woman would have to cease to be a woman, and that the freedom of human relations would therefore be at the price of a generalized de-sexualization. I'm not making this up since, according to the author of The Second Sex,

"two human beings who come together in the very movement of their transcendence, through the world and their common undertakings, no longer need to unite carnally; and indeed, because this union has lost its significance, they are loath to do so" (vol. II, p. 226).

The general nature of the wording allows us to assume that this finding would apply to both heterosexual and homosexual relations. Let us take note of that. Such a decision to amputate life of its foundation, attributable as much to a philosophical puritanism as to a personal puritanism, would only account for the particular aberrations of Simone de Beauvoir and the extreme weakness of her proposals, if the feminists, who are weighed down with the Second Sex, did not seem to have found their raison d'être in it.

I don't want to say that they all recognize themselves in the theories of the Second Sex, far from it, but that their reflection is frozen in the same simplistic approach, desperately narrowing the field of vision to a back and forth between misfortune and the greatness of women, for lack of power or will, considering that the feminine is no more the exclusive of women than the masculine is of men. Today's feminists' calls for sexual liberation, which is probably more overt than lived, and for good reason, should not deceive us about the consequences of this separation of the genders initially posed. Affirmed, claimed, exalted in turn tones to the point of disgust, it becomes the foundation of a dangerous enterprise of desexualization or rather neutralization in that it also and above all affects the functioning of thought at its center, inevitably depriving it of the resources of analogy. What can we expect, in fact, from the inexhaustible interplay of "one within the other" and the infinite journeys that it announces, when the very idea of the Other is caricaturally invested with all the negative? Of all the ravages of feminist ideology, this one is not the least, and I will come back to it to invalidate the specificity of a feminine sensibility. But already, given the limits it has set for itself, it is not surprising that feminist discourse is reduced to aping, in the feminine, the one-dimensional monstrosity, not of the masculine discourse it claims to denounce, but of totalitarianism in its purest form. Its rigidity, full of artifices, will cover the same inconsistencies, will allow the same sensible misery that the men and women of the end of the twentieth century, faced with the successive catastrophes of their deceived hopes, nevertheless say they no longer want to endorse.

Whatever we are led to believe, the horizon of women's revolt is narrowed by what it excludes. And in this impoverishment of the gaze, the affirmation of the famous right to be different only contributes to the establishment of a dictatorship of the Meme.

The most delusional, and certainly the most honest, of the American feminists were quick to revolt against this ideological pressure as soon as they were led to feel it as a new impossibility of living: long before Kate Millet had confusedly expressed her doubts in En vol without ever having the audacity to investigate the nature of the poison, as early as 1971 Ti-Grace Atkinson, accused by other feminists of betraying their cause by attributing importance to the political assassination of the former mafioso Jo Colombo, saw fit to make a statement that European neophytes would benefit from remembering:

"And I, the Super-Feminist, The Extremist, the man-hater, I separated from you because of the image of a working-class criminal, the corpse of an uneducated man, a second-generation immigrant. I accepted the irrefutable evidence of his revolutionary spirit, despite his belonging to the male sex. And in the future, I will accept that spirit whenever I meet it. If need be, I'll be left alone. Yes, my "sisters," if necessary, I will even fight against you. (...) NOW, my "sisters," you will have my value judgment on Violence and the Women's Movement. To use violence on violence that has already been done in the name of "justice" is shameful and repugnant. Yes, my pretty "revolutionary sisters," you are far worse than "criminals." You are human impostors! "

(Odyssey of an Amazon, pp. 242-243.)

I am not the one to judge the merits of Ti-Grace Atkinson's interest in Jo Colombo. But even if she had been in love with him, the Women's Movement dealing with violence did not have to deny the violence committed against this man, on the pretext that he was a man.

Ideologies take it upon themselves to teach us that there is a good evil and a bad evil, and neo-feminism seems to show remarkable zeal in this branch of pedagogy. Éditions des Femmes provides us with a delightful example of this in their presentation of T.G. Atkinson's book: it is easier to understand that the compromising text of 1971 appears in it when we are careful to specify that "his last text, in 1972, marks his desire to continue the struggle after having recognized his mistake and the impasses of verbal violence" (emphasis added; Catalogue 74-75-76). Nevertheless, I will never be led to believe that these exclusives are the necessary phase of a liberating process: much more directly threatened than women, atrociously repressed, odiously ridiculed for centuries, homosexuals, sometimes claiming with rare violence the right to be what they are, have never had such totalitarian pretensions. I am forced to note that beneath its rebellious coquetry or masochistic adornment, neo-feminism lives on the same rot as all forms of racism.

For those who would think it necessary to rebel against my exaggeration, I propose an interlude that is as feminine as it is feminist, since this dialogue with ruptured vaginas is provided by Les Parleuses de service, in this case Marguerite Duras and Xavière Gauthier. I only wish that we would not lose a word about this little masterpiece of terrorism and Jesuitism combined, springing quite naturally from between the jars of jam that Marguerite Duras and Xaviere Gauthier represent, as in herself, in their, pride themselves on having made, no doubt to rest from the heights where their babbling between women has enthralled them:

"M. D.- There is a para in every man. Some people dare to talk about nostalgia for wars, but I see that it's a very unspoken nostalgia, isn't it? There's the family para, there's the women's para, the child's para, the parapapa [laughs], but already in place to welcome them. I believe that every man is much nearer to a general or a soldier than to any woman.
"X. G. - That's what you say. I really like it because that's what it is.
"M.D.- It's the phallic class, it's a class phenomenon. It has to be said.
"X. G. - Yes.
"M. D. - I'm not accusing them at the moment.
"X. G.- No, it's an analysis. I don't think there's a need to be aggressive either.
"M.D. - We have to wait for this to happen, that is to say, we have to wait for generations of men to disappear."

(The Talkers, pp. 34-34.)

Without dwelling on the spectacularly detergent and even stripping character of these "cleaning products", we will only remember that the psychological subtlety usually recognized by critics in Marguerite Duras, seems to be at the very least cruelly lacking in the solution, like a false note between the Moderato Cantabile. What do we know and this gluttonous enzyme ardour? It is also a pity that his inventive genius has lost a good opportunity to represent us, such as in itself, if we are to believe him, must exist. Novalis in battle-dress, Mozart unpinning his grenade and perhaps even Jarry, abandoning La Passion, considered as a side-climbing race, to carry out, without a blunder, the obstacle course. But I won't wait for this new version of the squadron's Gaieties to draw attention to the desolation of the scenery already in place to welcome them.

That we deny difference, while otherness remains difficult to overcome, as Simone de Beauvoir's innumerable contradictions on the feminine question testify; or that we exalt difference in order to tend to make otherness the absolute evil as today's feminists want, this reveals the same inability to be in front of the Other, the same panicked fear of facing a sensitive world, making and unmaking itself according to the passionate attraction between opposites. One would like to dream that a feminist would one day decide on the problem of difference with the same calm assurance as Benjamin Peret:

"We have passed through this avenue planted with blue breasts where the day is differentiated from the night only by a comma and the sardine from the chafer only by a hair to scratch."

Yet, this avenue planted with blue breasts will disappear from no longer being caressed by the commas of the night as long as I feel obliged, to consider the neo-feminist misery, to timidly point out that biological similarity does not solve the problem of otherness. On the contrary, it complicates it, it makes it more subtle, sometimes resolving it in a superb metaphysical insolence but always above the abyss of differences. Perhaps I have too deep a taste for luxury, even in human relations, not to suppose that the delightful Diane de Poitiers at the bath, touching the bosom of her companion, takes pleasure in touching the last point of otherness, and not in seizing upon a formal resemblance. Perhaps my imagination is too eager to be satisfied with the fact that women today talk about their bodies with an originality that has nothing to envy to that of any tourist brochure: it's good, it's hot, it's cyclical, it's round, it's cosmic, it's on fire, it's wet, it's swollen... And it is all this, and it is desperately only that, because not only has the opposite sex become the occult foil of this delusional matriotism, but because, as a result, any possibility of counterpoint is implicitly excluded from the viscous circle of this "Woman's Word", since it must be called that. I don't get caught up in the controversy. Didn't Gisèle Halimi (La cause des femmes, p. 56) see fit to single, after Simone de Beauvoir and Xavier Gauthier, the phallocracy of André Breton who dared to write: "My wife with champagne shoulders"? To the few peasants of the Danube, of whom I have been one, who would not have seen where the crime was, this is proof that every man, even if he be a poet, and especially if he is a poet, seeks to reduce woman to an object.

In the face of these recriminations, as stupid as they are poisonous, I come to hope for the time when men, rightly, will reproach women for not having been able to consider the male body in the excess of love, that is to say, for having deprived them of that voluptuous gaze which never diminishes its object but makes it the distraught centre of life when thought glides along sensation. At a time when the principle of efficiency has managed to insinuate itself into the erotic realm, to the point that jouissance is privileged at the expense of voluptuousness, I suppose that neither women nor men yet measure what escapes them, the former in this ulcerated refusal to be loved until the neutrality of things is conjured up by their grace. the others in this deprivation which binds their gestures with the most deceitful prosaism. To me, however, when neo-feminists lash out with prudish acrimony at this bond of intelligence, in the most diverse senses of the word, between beings and things, and this in relation to the feminine evocation, it becomes clear that we are losing everything - those legs as long as the sunset, the candid fan of your loins, the allusive scaffolding of the night - in favour of a functionalism that, before being pure and hard, is still only soft and tasteless. For example, how can we forgive the monster Baudelaire for degrading women by saying:

Your throat that comes forward and pushes the moiré
Your triumphant throat is a beautiful wardrobe

He who didn't know that "BEAUTY and EFFICIENCY must be supposed to be antagonistic" as a certain Catherine tells us in an "article on the femmage of a bearded lesbian met at the Lesbian Food Conspiracy in New York" (Les femmes s'entétent, pp. 456 and 459)? As for the beard, I don't doubt its beauty; Its effectiveness, however, does not seem very obvious to me.

To have the surly stupidity to pull the kites of our lives in this way, presumably for the sole pleasure of seeing them descend, we will not be surprised that, even this search for the similarity of bodies, the praises of which recent women's literature never ceases to sing to us to the point of ridicule, leads more surely to stupidity, calm or furious, than eroticism. When it's not two imbeciles who discover, between women, the sublime happiness of which the male sex would have scandalously deprived them: "I spread your toast, slipping your pyjamas next to mine, to me toast my toasts" (and this in a chapter entitled Desires-deliriums (!); Les Femmes s'ententent, p. 400), we are given a tenderness that has more to do with mothering than with love. It's not the interplanetary eroticism of Le Satellite de l'Amande, the first feminist novel-fiction by the no less fictional Frangoise d'Eaubonne, that will make me change my mind on this point: the reports of a few girl-scouts are limited to making compresses, telling each other stories, or even exchanging biftek pills for anti-fatigue pills.

The striking vision of this future world, centred around a stone phallus with reckless movements which, it was to be expected, wreaks havoc on the virginity of the stratosphere, does not make me forget the furies, the amazons, the new look witches, a mare as they would say - on ecology and feminism: their ardour to evoke a golden age of feminine naturalness, An astonishing bric-a-brac of the worst cultural gadgets welded together by hatred of man, it does little to hide an impotent aggressiveness, seeking to adorn itself with peacock feathers of a somewhat un-feathered sexual violence, so much has it served the writers in need of erotic imagination.

Let us judge by the tricky article in the unspeakable Brouillon for a dictionary of lovers:

"The lovers of the age of glory love all kinds of traps. They use it in love wars. They set traps for their favourite animals and even their bed animals. They then have the great satisfaction of taking them in their arms and rocking them to make them forget their mistreatment, just as they do for their lovers in love wars. There are traps of wood, iron, words. There are dream traps and telepathic traps" (p.199).

Written in masculine, this text would become a damning piece of evidence against the most shameless machismo. And in front of these lamentable "favourite animals" that we flirt with with the proto-historical means we have, in front of these symbols of subversive eroticism that neo-feminism promises us, I suddenly feel nostalgic for the love courts, the trials, and not the traps, thanks to which the lady recognized her rant.

All this is to say that the paradise of absolute femininity is as suspicious as all paradises: it is inhabited by everything that is loudly declared that it is not. And this inflation around an idyllic world that man would have come to disturb without us really knowing why (hypotheses differ on the question), is proportional to the lie on which today's feminism feeds. If there is only one sex worth living, as we are being convinced, or the very idea of a fundamental sexuality is lost to all its cultural diversions: from sisterhood to maternal love to militant camaraderie; Or else, the sexual domain, falsely abstracted from the analogical movement that creates it, closes in a closed field on compulsive aggressiveness. It is between the mask and the disfigurement that neo-feminism gives us to choose. In either case, it has invented nothing: it is only a sad means of maintaining and camouflaging the same misery that phallocracy has maintained and camouflaged.

The reluctance of feminists to Kate Millet's latest autobiographical story is significant in this regard, even if it is difficult to imagine that the author's innocence, more silly than feigned, in showing surprise at the emergence of aggressiveness, jealousy, hatred, at the very heart of her sapphic loves, could constitute a serious ideological danger for the neo-feminist imposture. Knowing the misfortunes of this new Justine of radical feminism, one would be tempted to doubt it. But how could the neo-feminist paradise not be threatened as soon as the temptation of a romantic solution appears, even in a negative way, to suggest that every sexual relationship generates a multiplicity of phantasmatic presences, both feminine and masculine? Or that the misery of human relations is not due to one sex more than to the other, but to a dominant sexual misery that neo-feminism helps to reinforce by locking women into a particularism that is within everyone's reach and whose triumphalism can only distract them from the root causes of this unhappiness?

For, after all, how can women, because they have not been able or able to love men, love women all the better? I don't understand why those who have always had a taste for women have not already revolted to see lesbianism become in a few years the position of sexual withdrawal par excellence. In the light of neo-feminism, female homosexuality is no more than a caricature of herself; Before it has been recognized as one of the landscapes of love, it has become the sad maquis from which one can hate man without much danger: it is enough to howl with the wolves.

Flora, delicious Flora, the curls of your passionate writing have not gotten the better of everything that prevents us from living this "immense life" of which you said you were "so ambitious, so demanding, so greedy". Everything begins again very badly, when from your "burning thirst to be loved" only a burning thirst to hate seems to be retained. I reread your letters to say more forcefully that it is luxuriance and not impotence, excess and not lack, that has made you "the daughter of rays and shadows" as Jules Janin called you.

"Do you know, strange woman, that your letter sends shivers of pleasure down my spine?" You say you love me – that I magnetize you, that I put you in ecstasy. You're playing me, perhaps? But beware of yourselves—for a long time I have long desired to make myself passionately loved by a woman—oh! that I would like to be a man in order to be animated by a woman. I feel, dear Olympus, that I have reached the point where the love of no man can suffice for me—that of a woman, perhaps?... Woman has so much power in her heart, so much in her imagination, so many resources in her mind. But will you tell me that since the attraction of the senses cannot exist between two persons of the same sex, this passionate and exalted love cannot be realized from woman to woman? Yes and no. There comes an age when the senses change places, that is, the brain encompasses everything."

(Flora Tristan, letter of August 1, 1839.)

Flora, distant Flora, it is not a question of age, nor a question of time, but a way of conceiving love, which is yours, carrying with it the beacons of difference or similarity. You know too well that everything is in place to prevent "the brain from encompassing everything." If we have succeeded in tearing open the wall of horizons that is proposed to us, the breach is immediately sealed. All materials are good, as long as they are still deceptive enough for the grim reality of this rebuilding enterprise. The feminist idea was too dangerous to be allowed to venture any further where you and a few others had brought it up. It had to be caught in the lasso of the world-as-it-goes and subtly mutilated according to the problem of overpopulation, economic imperatives and above all the search for new markets. While the old world is running out of steam to renovate itself, women are slowly gaining independence, but an independence as consumers. Neo-feminism serves to urge them to access this happiness, reinforcing them in a junk identity that is only valid in the light of market exchanges and the relations of the forest that they engender.

Thus, the exploration of love today should obey the Laws of Anthropometry. Desperately clinging to these deceptive points of reference, today's feminists nevertheless drift elsewhere since their homosexual and heterosexual loves are submerged under the waves of the same aggressiveness, which brings them back at high speed into the sensitive banality of the time. Thus, above all careful to strike the pose of a few worldly writers who, in matters of eroticism, blithely confuse intensity with violence, the indefatigable Xavier Gauthier is not afraid to declare: "A mutual and avowed aggressiveness, far from any sentimentality, makes it possible to establish interesting relationships between man and woman, both executioners and victims. 'Pacification' (Befriedigung) arises from the struggle of the sexes." (Surrealism and Sexuality, 275.) I am hardly persuaded that it was necessary to seek Hegel (?) to the rescue and, on the way, to translate him falsely in order to enunciate a proposition which seems to me to cover the practice of any bourgeois association between man and woman. On the other hand, I am sure that by describing these relationships between men and women as "interesting", Xavière Gauthier admits not only their spectacular nature, but also their belonging to the sentimentality of our time, obeying an exhibitionist rhetoric of aggressiveness. Having become the pilot product of this sentimentality of violence thanks to shock activists such as Xavière Gauthier, neo-feminism had to make its contribution to the erotic kitsch of the late twentieth century, infinitely reproducing the misery of all human relations where the exaltation of difference actually accelerates the processes of "pacification" underway. Let us also give credit to Xavière Gauthier for sparing no effort to make available to all this spice of aggressiveness capable of reviving the soothing vigils of the cottages: she has succeeded in training a commando of witches, moving only with the flamethrower of absolute femininity in her hand. But it would be an insult to this undisputed manager of the struggle of the sexes to believe that, when the time comes, she does not hand over to the specialists of "pacification".

To know where we stand on this pacification sanctioned by neo-feminist orthodoxy, it is enough to consider the Weddings to which Annie Leclerc invites us, with the help of a philosophical lyricism that is reduced to lubricating abstraction and coinciding with this famous whale the sensation of eternal truths. Which gives, for example: "I stir the vinegar of enjoyment" (p. 29) taken and the oil of the body, and I would like to despair male who is not lying that the sauce can be consumed on the spot in the movement of his agitation." (Espousilles, p. 141.) After acknowledging man's only "green energy, (...) his fertile cruelty (...) his extreme ability to lie" and again the "innumerable tricks in which he indulges in order to poison what hurts him, outrage what humiliates him, and flee from what threatens him" (Parole coup de femme, p. 133), the new little bride of the world thinks it is good to oppose the idea of power to that of power. A hypothesis that could possibly be accepted, with all reservations about the exhibitionism with which the author sticks his mouth to the "yes of everything that says yes", if this opposition did not ultimately serve to make women the miraculous depositories of this power and men the sad henchmen of the monster-power "And if woman is the body of the greatest suffering, she is also the one who, having been exempted from exercising power, can access, without risk of being deprived of sex, outside of virile hesitation, and by the most immediate listening, not turned away from the body, to the liveliest word, that in which the body asserts itself, where the power unfolds." (Marriages, pp. 27-28.) Observing with sudden magnanimity "the harm that power has done to men, men perverted by power, turning away from the body" (p. 28) and this to the advantage of women who would be virgins of power in a way! - Annie Leclerc nevertheless works imperceptibly to make a "body enjoying" with the feminine universe, a body acquired without detour, to the detriment of the masculine universe, which is not "full of this power" as Annie Leclerc teaches us (p.101). And that's how it's done so that we can, after this edifying reading, go away repeating one of those phrases that shake the world: knitting, yes; DIY, no.

Let me explain: under the pretext of being "in the driver's seat" (p. 93), - the dishevelled nature of the so-called feminine writing has not ceased to amaze me - Annie Leclerc discovers that "history is a knitting" (p. 75) - I point out in passing the novelty of the metaphor, the ancient spinners still had more allure! Very well, but I do not see why Annie Leclerc should need to have wool and needles in her hands rather than a saw and boards in order to taste the joy of an activity that is not imposed or to "access the history from which the human being is made" (p. 96). However, a more careful reading of Annie Leclerc's "100 Ideas" made me aware of the immensity of my naivety or my alienation, as you wish: in fact, tri cot, a hard school of silent patience and modesty (we learned nothing else in the pens of yesteryear), is a highly subversive activity because the pleasure it provides "tells us what it has to tell us that the Phallus cannot tell us" (p. 99). Between two needles and a phallus, there is no hesitation!

This is how, one thing leading to another, "pacification" comes to be confused with normalization in which we end up exalting the embroiderer "who sews the truth" (p. 87) and the "strong and skilful hands, the sweaters" (p. 188) of the T.E.E. railway workers who are taking our knitter "down the road to radical subversion". (p. 196). Annie Leclerc may apply the veneer of enjoyment to every page to make us forget the sordid pompierism of these tomorrows that have never sung, but the fireworks of all these chromos are about as subversive as "the father sitting in bed, the mother sitting sewing, the child sitting in play" with the unbearable addition of "wanting-to-say" which strangely resembles a "will-to-power", So, I am hardly surprised by the "cultural" choices to which this radical subversion through knitting leads: continuing her work of normalization, Annie Leclerc does not fail to salute the achievements of order that are the work of Descartes or the park of Versailles. It is enough to suppose that she will attack, in one of her next works, the degenerate art of not having always already sung of the sunny joy of a job well done, of motherhood and of the jubilation of being that some bad jokers have found strange to doubt.

Let's face it, between the misfortune of banality and the banality of unhappiness, neo-feminism hardly invites us to travel. The wind, the night, the love become unrecognizable within the desperately parallel walls of this parapet walk. Everything takes on the dull colour of communities based on the glutiness of promiscuity. I want to cry out: beings wear themselves out by resembling each other. Is not our mind sick enough to handicap it with a new wound? Don't we see that by representing the masculine and the feminine as two enemy entities, it is the unhealthy gap of Western dualism that we are thus working to enlarge even further at the heart of our existence? Don't we see that by depriving us, through the mask or disfigurement, as neo-feminism incites us to do, of the reality of love, it is the body that is sent back to its misery and the mind to its maddening strangeness? Once again, neo-feminism does not invent anything; Once again, he is behind what he calls the masculine discourse, which is only the dominant discourse. It is only the feminine replica to the point of caricature of the dreary and subtle celibacy of thought that has been taking place for more than a decade among the intelligentsia.

And if I try here to represent the danger of such a process, it is because this celibate thought, being the work of clerics and not of dandies, becomes imperceptibly the theoretical foundation of that de-sexualization of life of which I have previously spoken and of which neo-feminism is the latest and overwhelming conquest. So much dandyism - such as Baudelaire, Wilde, Vache... have practiced it to a point of extreme tension where the mind comes to challenge the sensation so that the sensation comes to challenge the mind through an implacable reciprocity in the one-upmanship we still have to learn a sumptuous eroticization of revolt against a background of nothingness; As many clerics, anxious above all to submit to a sensitive world that resists them, we always have to fear a neutralizing systematization obeying a project as parsimonious in the means employed as it is interested in its ends. Against erotic or poetic spending, an avarice of rationality and abstraction asserts itself here through the implementation of parasitic rhetoric. This rhetoric lives in fact on a perceptible misery whose effects, and not the causes, it seeks to denounce through its skilful developments, but which these developments further contribute to reinforce as long as their one-dimensionality is not questioned. The thought of clerics, a thought that claims to preserve itself from everything that is not itself, a miserly thought that cannot be confused with the reductive concern for scientific investigation or the poetic encounter, a thought led to maintain - even involuntarily - the order of things in order to be maintained in the illusory purity of its solitude.

From the most depressing angle, we confront here the obscure tragedy of Western thought, whose poetry nevertheless never ceases to cast doubt on its fatality. Surrealism deserves the credit of having wanted, with full knowledge of the facts, to put an end to it once and for all, encouraging everyone to reconquer the weapon of the "lost powers" whose absence hollows out the place of this tragedy. Where it is played out, it always seeks to impose on itself a deceptive neutralization that seems to me today to be exercised on the notion of desire, as it was exercised at the end of the eighteenth century on the notion of energy. While Sade was seized with the vertigo of discovering in it the force that denies any attempt to level the life of the drive, the philosophy of the Enlightenment abstracts it to the point of seeing in it the ideal fuel for the setting in motion of its utopian machinery. In the same way today, while surrealism has brought to light, through the exaltation of desire, the infinite dynamic of love, freeing it from the monotonic of a lighting that is alternately pink or black, here is the intellectual avant-garde (composed of professors for the most part - a not insignificant detail) questioning the disconcerting figures of an increasingly abstract desire, for lack of ever being inscribed in the reality of love.

Body language is parasitized by a discourse about body language. And it is a new way of preventing us from accessing the unity of the symbolic body by pretending to superbly occupy the silence between words, the discontinuity between gestures, the emptiness between beings, to the point that words, gestures, beings exist only in their formal order. So "single machines" are built on an assembly line, their poor quality due to the specifically rhetorical material they are made of. Woe betide anyone who would put an end to this most fruitful production: the irreconcilability of desire and its realizations, whether fantastical or not, is a terrain where literary or artistic misery grows all too well! And one can only deplore the fact that neo-feminism did not hesitate for a single second "widow of the cyclist", the avant-garde supplied it with somewhat worn spare parts: Marxist wheels that do not move forward, a rather false psychoanalytic framework and a saddle - with totalitarian extension.

Whether it is the result of hasty tinkering and outrageous make-up, this conformity of the feminist machine to the norm of the intellectual production of the moment raises doubts not only about the specificity of feminine thought but also about its revolutionary value, whose universal influence we are not afraid to boast about. There is no revolutionary thought except that which is capable of inverting infinitely, and not in one direction only, the up and down, the up and down of the individual body, the top and the bottom of the social body. There is no revolutionary thought except that which opposes the hierarchical verticality of Western thought leading to "sexual organization, submission to the tyranny of a single partial drive, leading to the absolute and exclusive concentration of the whole life of the body in the representative person" (N. O. Brown).

There is no revolutionary thought except amorous, that is to say, capable of travelling between all that Western dualism, "the result of philosophical operations with very precise political and social significance" (Mabille), has represented to us as irreconcilable, and among other things the idea of the masculine and the feminine. Whether the reality of love subverts one or the other of these boundaries, the social organization is implicitly threatened - representativeness, the delegation of powers, suddenly no longer has any real basis. But I know too well the weight of things to believe in the immediate - and not even general - effectiveness of a solution that we are in the habit of taking as strictly personal. As far as individual and collective life are concerned, the passage from the unconscious to the conscious presupposes a difficult and slow journey. I am speaking only of the possibility of a radical change of perspective that the Western discourse on love has always been careful not to mention - with the exception of the Gnostics, Romanticism and Surrealism (regardless of the respective mistakes of the one and the other) - and that the present avant-garde, entirely occupied with the gloomy delight of contemplating the ravages (undeniable, moreover) of twenty centuries of frenzied dualism, only pushes back with all the force of his celibate retention.

Thus, when I see women, who have always been cut up according to the changing pattern of the shadows cast by a frontier planted at the heart of life, wanting to cross, unarmed and without luggage, to the other side of this frontier, and not to tear it down, I am assured that feminism has surreptitiously allowed itself to be seduced by the order of things. Hypnosis of illusory omnipotence in which tired ideas never fail to be damaged. I am far from claiming that Western dualism, by the emptiness it causes in us, is the only one that promotes this hypnosis; it identifies only one of the possible modalities. For if the fate of women is hardly more enviable elsewhere than in the West, and perhaps the exercise of power refers to nothing that it defies: always to a celibate activity which, in order to combat the solution of love, must systematically—but with more or less skill—be the possible incarnation.

There will doubtless be some recent scholars here to remind me of what, for more than a century, we owe to the celibate activity of a few high-flying characters, whether it be Jarry, Duchamp, but also Huysmans, Roussel and perhaps especially Stirner. I hope that the mere mention of these names and the autonomous worlds they suggest is enough to go round in circles in the history of the world. constructed with a view to imposing as objective, even universal, the particularity of a thought or a behaviour that aims to avoid the affirmation of any other particularity. Fundamental divergence between the quest for sovereignty and the quest for power, between voluptuous spending and ideological investment, between the affirmation of the One and imperialist negation. It follows that authentic "celibate machines", operating at an abnormal rate in that they determine their own norm, produce an excess of meaning. It is Jarry deepening the vertigo of love through the madness of numbers: "Love is an unimportant act, since it can be done indefinitely"; it is Stirner working to reveal the icy transparency of the One in order to better consider the nothingness she defies : "I have based my cause on nothing." It also follows that celibate-looking systems, functioning to conceal the inadequacy of a particularity since it is first sought to make it share, willingly or by force, inevitably work to impoverish reality of meaning so that the representations of these come to confirm the deceptive objectivity of their own norm. It is a certain cultural avant-garde exhausting itself by shedding the "unbreakable nucleus of night" of love in order to throw itself into the hollow of its absence and go round in circles in the imprint of insignificance. But it is also and above all neo-feminism, compulsively and indiscriminately kneading all the images of the world, with the sole aim of sealing the gap of a sexuality worried about itself.

This is another way of saying that power is nothing but the monstrous caricature of sovereignty when it first presents itself in the derisory light of a sovereignty assisted by all that it enslaves. We will then understand his frequent collusion with senescence: the sceptre is only a staff of old age, and tired ideas need this assistance; Thanks to it and the petrification of human relationships that it establishes, they can claim to reign over a reality that escapes them. The clerics are those who have mastered the camouflage of this assistance; their powerlessness to be becomes the foundation of their power to define. Monopolizing meaning, they believe they are appropriating life when they impose one representation of it to the detriment of all others. Nothing in the neo-feminist approach allows us to doubt that it does not refer to this fundamental invalidity: it displays the same theoretical fanaticism to cover the same practice of irresponsibility, since here and there, in the name of life, thought is reduced to being nothing more than a ruse to constrain life.

Thus, to the intoxication of honesty of dandyism, gestures, words, attitudes contribute to unveiling the unbearable nakedness of the One, is always opposed to the muffled deception of the clerics who, supreme lies, gather to speak from the height of their rhetorical solitude. If today few men have the audacity to be alone, I would like us to show less particularity and specificity. To the feminists whose peculiarity consists in vaginalizing the enclosed space where this clerical thought is exercised, and whose specificity consists in clitizing its universal pretensions, I would ask them to consider the lack that they share with their enemy brothers and that allows them to speak so easily of nothing and everything with easily terrorist accents within the confines of a room condemned to be their own alone.

Asserting itself in the verticality of its solitude made up of prudence and prudery, despite appearances, neo-feminism is organized around the abyss of impossible love. It is only strengthened by being undermined by this absence, elevating its form, which could be called Draculean - if it were not a rag but the castle that burned - on the feminine reality whose richness it exhausts more and more every day.

Thus, following Simone de Beauvoir, who one day seized her partner's weapons to colonize, as a missionary sister of existentialism, the wasteland of feminine identity, neo-feminism works to counterfeit the overwhelming silhouettes of all rebellious women, by illuminating with an abusive light the passionate night from which they have risen. From among the waves of an anonymous memory that assails me, I know brothels, forests, monasteries, countryside, salons, factories, where women have invented their destiny, aided indifferently by the virgin creeper of the panelling, the crystal of the knives, the perfumes of madness, the brazier of lace, the softness of soot. Under the pretext that everything is very simple today, simple to the point of miserabilism, women in the process of liberation have succeeded in giving feminism the wrinkles it did not yet have, striking it with a mental disability analogous to that which has never ceased to justify (the use of phallocratic prostheses). While most women still go back to love or lose themselves behind the misty barrier of their eyelids, neo-feminism takes advantage of this infirmity in the belief that it finds its rigor in it. So, women are acting, women are writing, women are editing, and it's catastrophic. Not because they are women, but because, pretending to be aware of the reality of their misery, they do not perceive in their militant blindness the misery of the reality they are trying to establish. The misery of a celibate reality that some, as always, have every interest in maintaining in order to exercise a power that the organization of society or their lack of means, depending on the case, had hitherto denied them.

Ideas proliferate only as long as they degenerate, and feminism only degenerates when it has found its bureaucrats.

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2. Gynocratia Song

"For if I had known Latin at eighteen, I should have been emperor."

Arthur CRAVAN.

There are geographical slips of the tongue that are unforgiving: the parent company of the Des Femmes bookstore in Paris is located on rue des Saints-Pères. A sign of the times, a sign of the times, small wrinkles make great ruts. One of the greatest ruts of this time is the claim to an absolute feminine specificity that neo-feminism is hell-bent on digging with the frenzy of empire-builders. And in order to take the world as a witness to the existence of a great current, industrious intellectuals are working to widen this rut into which blind, blinding misery does not fail to throw itself. It will then be enough to wave the kaleidoscope of misfortune until the shreds of a painful reality find a place in the reassuring evidence of an illusory landscape: under the pretext that male ignominy has driven it away, here is the feminine "natural" that returns at a gallop, and all the more quickly because it is lightly whipped by a cohort of intrepid Amazons with short ideas and long teeth. A training as thankless as it is fruitful, assumed by a neo-feminist agitprop that stops at nothing to disguise the recurrent specificity of the totalitarian discourse it holds, in the specificity of the female voice. In the first instance, these professional revolutionaries have the upper hand, so desirable is it to substitute the coherence of artifice for the incoherence of an unhappy life.

Has not the holy alliance of misery and femininity lasted too long for women not to be tempted by everything that may seem, even from a distance, to work for its destruction? And this is where the unhoped-for opportunity of neo-feminist activism lies: to the misfortune of a feminine destiny that would be acquired, it is all the more convenient to oppose the darkness of the most suspicious "natural" feminine, a darkness that can then be played on indefinitely to thwart any attempt to shed light on it. Hence the nested structure of the neo-feminist discourse prisoner: which would be specific to it, when it is only a specifically feminine ruse, in the sense that generation after generation women have been forced to resort to it in their slavery: when you believe me here, I am elsewhere; When you think I'm somewhere else, I'm here. Not to mention that this technique of systematic evasion has contributed in large part to the swindle of the feminine mystery, I wonder what women have to expect from an army of liberators who use it electively to the point of subjugating the feminist idea under the glue of this obviously unspeakable "naturalness". It's no longer a question of momentum, of taking off and even less of leaving. The women we have loved vanish once more, sovereign and lost, in the trembling fur of their loneliness.

Claire Demar, Natalie Barney, Virginia Woolf, you are not so dissimilar, since you are also strangers to those who claim to be your sisters. The space you had to conquer to invent your lives is once again closed to you. We're looking to take you where you'll never be. The time of the small neo-feminist world is stuck at ground level on an organic dial which, despite its outrageously visceral material, is built on the same model as those by means of which we are still tried, here and there, to convince us that zero is confounded with infinity.

But let us judge only by this "reflection" on the specificity of feminine, "reflection" in the optical sense of the term, since it obstinately evokes the prison of distorting mirrors of which the feminine is in the process of becoming a prisoner:

"Is there such a thing as what we could call a 'specificity' of the female gaze? Yes, in the sense that women see with their own eyes, whereas men too often no longer know how to look with their eyes, that they only see images that are shown to them."

(Regards feminins, Anne Ophir, p. 237).

And to this man, whom it is very convenient to declare blind in order to convince us of the privilege of women to have their eyes in front of them, the author has nevertheless the condescension to grant a trace of existence by the disgrace of masculine discourse, which would fit entirely into the following formula; "I claim that I know, therefore I am" (p. 238). But this is still too much because we are taught to "spout words as he does gestures, in a hurry, mechanically, without understanding any more" (p. 7). So, while men speak, talk, talk, women feel, women live, women see. If I understand correctly, the feminine specificity, the world of sensation, rhythm and silence, would therefore be implicitly based on the rejection not only of masculine discourse, but of any discourse insofar as it is masculine.

And this is where neo-feminism bites its clitoris: how can feminine discourse, to be uttered by women, escape the general misfortune of discourse? And it is here that the totalitarian circle comes full circle, slowly strangling life until nothing remains of it but a rumor that is easy to tame in rhetoric. Moreover, it is only necessary to pay attention to the varied sampling in the field of orchestrated noise for imperialist purposes that the slightest neo-feminist bibliography provides us: here are The Language Thieves (Claudine Herrmann), the inexhaustible Parleuses (Marguerite Duras, Xavier Gauthier) who scream at Dire nos sexualités (Xavière Gauthier); In other words (Annie Leclerc, Marie Cardinal) obviously but desperately out of breath (Hélène Cixous), such is this woman's Word (Annie Leclerc), prisoner of her own echoes: Words... they rotate (Musidora's Women). But if I listen attentively to the redemptive words of these Messengers (Evelyne Le Garrec): Silence... we shout (Marie Vaubourg), I feel like I've heard that tune somewhere.

Here, I expect the spokespersons for women's liberation to unfurl the infinite fresco of battered, raped, aborted, exploited, excised women to underline the impropriety of my words. And in the event that some of them have managed to keep their composure, which I doubt from hearing their war songs, I suppose they would appeal to the priorities of the struggle, rendering null and void the fundamental objection I make to the way in which it is being conducted. But that doesn't mean I'm going to give up. In the first place, these unbearable convulsions, these unfathomable collapses of flesh, these gaping wounds like despair, I know too well how they hem and shape the history of the female condition to bear to be made into a fresco. I hear these howls, ripe up by obscurantism, too much, even on the edge of the silence that arises between men and women, to foolishly endorse the birth of a new "cult of carrion." Because that's what it's all about.

As much as the piece of raw meat, thrown in 1971 by a group of homosexuals (men and women) into the organdy cradle of "Let Them Live", revealed an indelible stain of blood on the barbed wire frame of this rat's nest, I am surprised that the noise made around the problem of abortion seems to reverberate at the expense of information on contraception. Of course, I am not talking here about the very real struggles being waged in France and elsewhere for the freedom of abortion. I only claim that the difficult reality of this struggle is obscured by a literature that is as degrading as it is parasitic in that it is written first and foremost with the blood of others. Aren't feminist publications too prolific on abortion so as not to appear too discreet about contraception? From a militant point of view, the continual representation of crime has pedagogical virtues, that I cannot allow these lives, stolen by twenty centuries of procreation or as militant, to be stolen once again for edifying purposes.

The more a thought has totalitarian pretensions, the more it seeks spectacular martyrs and, therefore, convenient to oppose to all those who do not bow to it, even if they should perish. Was there not a time when the seventy thousand executed by the Party of the same name were stripped of their deaths to serve to conceal the existence of an infinitely greater number of corpses? I may be going a little too fast, but there are tricks of ideology that can be recognized as far away as possible from the place where they have acquired their titles of shame.

No, Hélène Cixous, you cannot proclaim in a preface puffed up with demagoguery to Phyllis Chester's lightly lonely book, Women and Madness, that "we are all hysterics," as long as there are still hysterics locked up in asylums and women of letters who pursue their careers by pretending to be such, occasionally. To people who have gone mad from having been dispossessed of themselves, we do not have the cunning, in the most phallocratic sense of the term, to steal the haggard memory of their shadow.

Let me be clear: the world was enriched by a revolt of solidarity when, in 1968, a few, declaring themselves to all German Jews, had to gain only the anonymity of the bludgeoning, while the world is impoverished when an academic is reduced to appropriating the madness of others in order to adorn herself with a new literary makeup. If really "They: the falots therapists, men Psychiatrists-Ladies-Men-Family-Dad Moms Chain of Substitutes. Equation of Death" as Hélène Cixous vociferates (p. 7), perhaps it would be a question of not seeking more than deserving of their rattles: I am referring to their Medici Prize, their academic functions, their prefaces to official exhibitions, their television, which Hélène Cixous, among other gratifications of their system, does not seem to particularly despise. And if really a man "elevates" woman by lowering her, as this hysterical volunteer judiciously points out to us, then we must conclude that Hélène Cixous has fallen very low.

In the face of so many obscene minauderies, I would like us to remember Unica Zurn, her light solitude "like a white void": having thrown herself from one of their windows, she opened a breach in the wall of life, letting float on a sky leaden with explanations the transparent lace of the frantic questions of childhood. " What does the man say who, born in '99, wakes up one morning in the year '66? His beautiful 99 has turned upside down over time and he himself knows better than anyone what that means. The 66 is ready to throw itself headlong into eternity with him. (The Jasmine Man, p. 16.) This "revolutionary sympathy" from woman to woman, this "revolutionary sympathy" from woman to woman, this "transformative active sympathy (...) a true affective learning (...) counter-education" that Hélène Cixous claims to justify the diversion of madness to her advantage (p. 8), when does she discover the "immobile presence" around which Unica Zurn's world is organized in large glass panels? "Much later, keys are turned in it, one after the other, but it will not open. We quickly get tired of this little unusable box and throw it away. For in the years to come she will see nothing over the shoulders of men on which she bends over anything but the Jasmine-Man. She will remain faithful to her wedding as a child. (The Jasmine Man, p. 14.) In the light that slips and dies on days of fine pearls, Unica Zurn invents the "game of transparent acts". And here we are, so far from her, that from her madness we have nothing to take but everything to learn, as from those improbable explorations the expectation of which makes all the bush of childhood. Because we have not experienced its madness, it is impossible to boast of its rigour, an imperceptible Ariadne's thread above the void, which can only be broken under the insidious pressure of this "new style" whose suspicious composition Hélène Cixous praises to us, "a mixture of love, solidarity, 'sonority' " (p. 8).

Thus, one comes to doubt that the verb to have "in its sense of possessing " has really "fallen into disuse" by the mere grace of the muddled and neo-feminist lovers of whom Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig make themselves the bearers (Brouillon pour un dictionnaire des amantes, p. 30). To be, or at least to give the impression of being, do the stars of neo-feminism really have to go through all the baseness of intellectual "maternalism" or of rhetorical militant promiscuity? By talking too much about an "I that says we " (Hélène Cixous), these neo-feminists seem above all eager to have, among other attractions, the exotic tattoo of misfortune. I will not dwell on Marguerite Duras's latest finding in this matter, believing herself suddenly obliged, moreover on the occasion of an exhibition of women's painting, to exclaim in front of the representation of very hypothetical whores revised and corrected the hagiography of femininity: "My sisters? Yes. My sisters, these uprooted Barbarellas, deprived of fiction, with vaginal and mute mouths? Yes. My sisters. (Witches [Libcom note: Sorcières in French], No. 3, p. 39.) This is neither very touching, nor very new, because if it took Marguerite Duras the enlightenment of neo-feminism to discover, in fear and trembling, that in the end whores do not differ essentially from her, one is left to regret the platitudes of humanism where these things are self-evident. But what is more, have we not been pleased for too long to call these mouths "vaginal and mute" in order to give rise to the worst literature, as we can judge here? As for this sorority claimed in vain and through it, wouldn't it rather be up to those who are scandalously declared to be "deprived of fiction" to decide it? For the time being, it seems that we are left with rhetorical solicitation in the sad limits of literary exhibitionism, as long as the whores, and not the other way around, have not recognized themselves in Marguerite Duras or in what she writes.

I know that looking at the world like this is blasphemy. But what can I do about it? I have not yet been touched by the neo-feminist revelation and I hear nothing of

"The obscure and confused and mucous mother tongue, with its warm flow, the language of origin, whose words have the downiness, the softness of a flesh with satiny skin, are the result of that passionate attention that the body naturally brings to the body and to the environment that surrounds it, words of comfort spoken to nourish, language that does not need to demonstrate, prove or represent (...), language that exists ."

(Chantal Chawaf, Witches, No. 3, p. 4.)

To the distracted reader, I would point out that we are not being extolled here the merits of a carpet but of a language that is revolutionizing the world according to the loudspeakers of this time. This language may exist, but for my part, I can never meet it when, in the barbarity in which I stand, I have the misfortune to listen, and not only to hear, the professions of faith or the revelations it conveys: "If the pimp puts the girl on the sidewalk, it is because he himself would like to go on the sidewalk, possess this knowledge. And if he is violent with her, it is precisely because this knowledge escapes him, and this knowledge is enjoyment." (Jouissance-Pouvoir, Witches, No. 3, p. 52.) Let's admit that we had to think about it, but this language still has many other surprises in store for us:

"Prostitution is the only profession where you can really learn about life. There's a whole part of me that I would never have been able to express if I hadn't gone through prostitution. Before prostitution, I was like many other women. Too repressed, too stuck. Prostitution helped me to become truly me."

(An Initiatory Journey (!), Witches, No. 3, p. 48.)

Surely this language does not need to demonstrate or prove as we have been warned, otherwise we should ask ourselves for what obscure reason some feminists waste time also dealing with battered women or women's creativity, when all these little problems could be solved, according to what we are told here, through prostitution. This question is as useless as it is misplaced, since in order to perceive these "carnal words, phrases of knowledge to the glow of which is kindled what, if these words do not come from the body, remains immersed in the unconscious" (Chantal Chawaf, Witches, n° 3, p. 4), it is undoubtedly necessary to endorse the definition of truth to which Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig have chosen to cheerfully adhere: "If you repeat a statement twice, the third time it becomes truth." This is clear for once: from this tried and tested technique of ideological bludgeoning will emerge the neo-feminist truth.

Hence probably my incurable on the feminine word. All the more so because if we remain insensitive to this "ornate outpouring of sound" (Chantal Chawaf, p. 6), there is a reality that is stark: lady patronesses had their poor, cutting-edge feminists have their whores, their madwomen or their excisees. The thesauriation of the martyrs is directly proportional to the mediocrity of the subject. After much hesitation, I will nevertheless give the prize to Benoîte Groult who, from offensive to stealth, pushes her boldness to the point of wanting to interest Marie-Claire's readers in the pro-excision in an issue (January 1977) where they also praise the intrepidity of Meme Carter (sic) who went to India under the leadership of the Peace Corps to sterilize at every turn. As long as Marie-Claire is not broadcast in Kenya or Ethiopia, we will be able to assess the exemplarity of such a thrill-safari in the distant lands of female humiliation.

One could retort a little hastily that the homosexuals of the FHAR [Libcom note: Front homosexuel d'action révolutionnaire] have nothing to envy to the neo-feminists and that, if the latter loiter with a tearful scoundrel in the slums they have chosen for themselves, the former flatter themselves of maintaining privileged relations with Arabs, counting on the sexual, social and political provocation of such an admission in a sweetly racist France. Perhaps, but in this case, the analogy doesn't work because the boys of the FHAR talk about those they love or those with whom they share their pleasure, whereas the Amazons of the pen seem to have a predilection for female misery when it is and remains a pretext for a well-felt preface or text.

Let us recall the recent quarrel of a former prostitute who, having worked in one of their bookstores, had the audacity to ask them for a proper pay slip. Let us recall the controversy that ensued in Libération on October 22, 1976, when Catherine Leguay, one of those who had occupied the Des Femmes bookstore as a sign of protest, invited women to leave "the ghetto of the Holy Union", the sacred Union of the women's struggle in the name of which anything could be perpetrated. The worst injustices, the worst infamies, the worst scoundrels, as if being a woman and a woman in struggle were in itself a virtue. Let us also remember the reply in the same issue of the stooge on duty, Victoria Thérame, defending the Des Femmes bookstore, obviously in the sole hope of preserving writers like them from scarcity: "It is thanks to Des Femmes that everywhere, with all publishers, women are published more than before" (I mean women who do not write bluettes), The promotion of women, women's collections, the woman, this unknown, woman, continent nine! Let Women die tomorrow, and you will see the turnaround! Women are in a strong position in publishers thanks to Des Femmes! That's something that would have to be understood! "We understood that and so did Barbara" especially when these same women tell us that they disdain the exercise of power and the use of force as specifically masculine! Finally, let us remember the irreparable blow that this labour dispute brought before the labour courts has given to the neo-feminist idyll to which Victoria Thérame, still on duty, does not fail to cling:

"Yet it's simple: something is happening at Editions Des Femmes that has never existed elsewhere, a mini-society that functions differently, without hierarchy, without organization, corseted, a group of women who work differently an active freedom, a germ of a new world, the little green bud, a breach in the city...."

Indeed, things must be happening in this little "new world" so that "the little green bud" suddenly turns into a stick, to silence all the women who are not in line, to discredit all those "unnatural enemies" as Victoria Thérame refers to the "other groups of women" in her naïve servility. But the fact that all this is really not the fault of Des Femmes but of a simple prostitute in whom we had detected "fantasies of prostitution" and who had the militant generosity to offer an analysis (Le Monde of May 1977, Barbara's dismissal) to overcome her dissidence.

Thus, eager to feminize the vocabulary, the neo-feminists have succeeded on one point: they can now boast of having their own Katangese – Barbara, Monique Pitton. A worker at Lip's, Erin Pizzey, the host of a shelter for battered women in London, all three of whom were sued for defamation by the Des Femmes bookstore (Charlie-Hebdo, May 26, 1977, "Salades", Sylvie Caster) – just as it was the shame of May 1968 to have invented the word in the masculine form and to have so easily dissociated oneself from the people it designated. After such cases, among others just as glorious for the cause of women, I would still like to be able to share Louis Michel's passionate conviction about the future of women's struggle: "If only they wanted to govern!" Don't worry! We're not foolish enough for that! That would be to prolong authority; Keep it so that it becomes fines, faster! (Memories, ed. F. Roy, Paris, 1886, vol. 1, p. 107.) Perhaps I should not allow myself to be too keenly impressed by the overwhelming spectacle of a few women of letters in search of fame when some, ageing, discovering the beauties of a feminism they had hitherto cared little for, and when the others, anxious not to miss their first tricks in the literary arena, ostentatiously wear the bib of the fashionable stable. It is to have seen in life, grappling with the worst of realities, Marie Ferré, Mme Pauline, Mme Meurice, Jeanne B, Paule Minck., Maria A., Julie L., Andrée Léo.. that Louis Michel is so confident in the future. I have no doubt that there are women today almost everywhere "simply taking [their] place in the fight against it without asking for it" (Louis Michel, p. 104): I only doubt that they will join the neo-feminist ranks, or, if they have gone astray, that they will remain there for a long time, revolting against the impudence of some who want to regulate their sensibilities, their impulses, with the same jealous authority as the sad string of phallocratic scoundrels evoked by Louis Michel: "Gummies, flowers of gratin, pschutteux, in short, young or old, funny, cretinized by a heap of dirty things and whose race is finished", but who nevertheless weigh "in their dirty paws the brains of women, as if they felt the tide rising of those hungry for knowledge, who ask only this of the old world: the little he knows" (p.106). The irony of the story is that, given the false claim of what is done and written in the name of women, we have to admit that this skewer is dangerously enriched with a feminist, not to say feminine, colouring. With the same contempt, we continue to play ball with women's brains. And if the extras had changed gender, the stakes of the game remained the same.

How long will we still be watching this depressing spectacle? It is to all those whose despair will not be exhausted either by the vociferation of a few hateful slogans or by the miasma of a blissful sisterhood that I address myself, still convinced, in spite of the appalling demonstrations of recent years, that "women, when it is worth fighting, are not the last; the old leaven of revolt that is at the bottom of everyone's heart ferments quickly when the fight opens up wider roads, where it smells less of the charnel house and the filth of human bits" (Louise Michel, 106). It is to all those, denying by the extent of their revolt the discourse of the bureaucrats of the neo-feminist sensibility that we may owe to be able to measure from the depths of women's misery "how much some leather-ringers have a taste for the heroism [or misfortune] of others" as Séverine remarked, a long time ago. A re-reading of her Pages, which they call Red, allows us to see that things have hardly changed since Barbara's "fantasies of prostitution", discovered at the right time by the "tribunal" of the Des Femmes bookstore, seem to come from the same vein as this account of the shooting at Fourmies, which aroused the indignation of Jules Valles' young mistress:

"In the front row, and among the dead, there were, it may well be said now, women of very light morals."

"One point, and that's it. The charming conclusion is self-evident: the misfortune is much less horrible, the catastrophe much less heart-breaking, the sub-prefect Isaac much less to be booed, since the victims were not roses!"

(Red Pages, Choix de mortes, 244, ed. Simonis Empis, 1893.)

Whores, madwomen and promiscuous women, traditionally emblematic figures of female misery and all the more emblematic because they are always represented mute in order to brandish them as scarecrows or as holy images, according to the fluctuating needs of ideology. It is now a given that the neo-feminist revolution only gives them a voice in order to take it back from them. And should they persist in keeping it, it is enough to asphyxiate them with the mire with which the most all-encompassing lace of sorrows was modelled just now. O eternal "vaginal and dumb mouths" that we know so well how to make them speak or silence by pressing on their stomachs! Militant pressure is no different from parental or social pressure, we always wait for them to say "Mommy". But I'll come back to that.

In the meantime, I can already assume that I will be reproached in passing for having referred here to Séverine: she will be found to be at fault for having loved passionately and for acknowledging to the man whose "wandering old age" she shared: "You taught me to see, to hear, to meditate..." (Red Pages, Warning.) And yet, in her eyes like a burnt hazel whose joyful insolence sets ablaze the dark glitter of her bodice, I see the "revolutionary dandyism" that she attributes to Félix Pyat, Eugène Sue, Gustave Flourens who, in their struggle against the old world, also knew how to find "pretty women, exquisite corollas, generous wine, bewitching music..." (p. 76). And with all due respect to our professional mourners, this is the same lyrical necessity that illuminates from within the revolt of Louise Michel or Flora Tristan. In the quality of the gaze that one of them casts on the forests of Caledonia, the other on the night of London, holds all the stakes of their revolt.

All our reasons for living or dying sometimes depend on the colour of a sky: to perceive and transmit it, some people strip bare the vital source of revolt by discarding the ideological artifices that hide it from us:

"Doesn't everything depend on everything? Is it not hindering human development and the development of new meanings not to proceed with general views" (Louise Michel, 129)?

This is undoubtedly the basis of the "revolutionary dandyism" of which Séverine speaks: scandalously natural, it would be a challenge to recognize, in spite of everything, the luxury of life, where it is not necessarily degraded. I have to admit that this dandyism is cruelly lacking for neo-feminists, who are preoccupied to the point of obsessing over being seen as the goats of unfortunate femininity, less doubtless "by the deliberate dilapidation of their nipples, or the cleverly combined uncleanliness of their hands" to which Séverine recognizes "the pranksters of the revolution" (p. 77) than by a fever to be taken on at all costs, even if it were that of lies, all the miseries of the feminine condition. Which is not the same but at worst since the masquerade has become internalized. One would think that this kind of indecency would be a peculiarly feminine quality, but I am wrong when it is only done by a handful of bureaucrats.

I can agree that speaking out against what seems to augur a new exploitation of women by women does not solve the institutionalized exploitation of women by men. I argue, however, that the current feminist discourse only delays the moment when women will be free, in that it deceives them about their reality.

But what is this reality? Of course, the one that men have done to them and that neo-feminists do not fail to denounce with the verbal swelling that we know; but also all that each has consented to, consents to lose until nothing remains of her life but the very vague dotted line of the succession of her children, her husbands, and even her arrears. Is it not also time to say that the exercise of a masculine power which today would have the privilege of covering all darkness is authorized by this consent to banality, instead of inciting women to discover the well of wonders that they would naturally be? Isn't this condemning Sleeping Beauty to sleep eternally in a leaden sleep when, while discouraging her from waiting for Prince Charming, she is encouraged to rely on the hypnotizing omnipotence of a charming neo-feminism? Of this reality that it is, in spite of all self-serving plenitude, and I insist on it, given to each of us to find or lose in the discontinuity of a sensitive life that constantly comes to disturb the mechanism of liveries and roles, neo-feminism never speaks of for the simple reason that it seeks only to promote a new sampling of roles and of course liveries with clitoral decorations for its most faithful servants. It should come as no surprise that, from primordial femininity to life and militant femininity, via suffering femininity, these roles have in common that they are revealed to us in an outrageously positive light.

Hitherto an angel or a demon, woman now attains the bliss of being only an angel, but an angel who possesses the particularity of presenting herself in the form of a winged vagina. From the toothed vagina to the winged vagina, as far as the female reality is concerned, I admit that I don't see much difference. And since we are talking about a revolution, I could agree that this is a revolution in costume, but nothing more. To appear today under a debauchery of organic fanfare, femininity remains just as stupidly mysterious, motherhood just as stupidly triumphant, feminine desire just as ridiculously made up. Neo-feminism can boast that it has brought the sad roles inherent in this misery to the taste, or rather to the disgust, of the body that characterizes this end of the century. I know that life is always invented against these roles that most, as usual, accept with frivolous docility, or into which some, as usual, will slip with a penny into the immense sensory distress of all those whom the reality of their misery or despair distracts from the frivolity or cynicism necessary to be part of that game. Like them, I have the fierce pretension to situate myself elsewhere. And I find it all the more difficult to say this because I think I detect the same gap between the dull, brilliant, convulsive, dreary, starry, torn, heart-breaking night, where each woman discovers her life, and between my life and the neo-feminist discourses.

First of all, I guess I'm not the only one who feels somewhat taken aback when I'm asked, for example, to "articulate my neurosis on the class struggle." I thought I was done with early childhood and the agonies of dismantling a celluloid bather. However, this sentence, heard in a café, caused such dismay in the young recruit to whom this speech was addressed that I thought I had gone back twenty years; Just like me with the bather, she struggled to place the pink leg of her neurosis in the right place on the plump and fleeing body of the class struggle so as not to recognize anything of herself and of the others, after a few scathing returns of ideological elastics, in the monster without tail or head that she was congratulated for having spawned and which escaped her hands of astonishment.

On reflection, I came to understand my retrospective panic, which was just as useless as that of this young person whom I had met by chance. Because we had not read the reference texts, we were both ignorant of the clarifications that the neo-feminist discourse brings us about our situation in the world. So much so that the problematic articulation of our neurosis on the class struggle becomes child's play when we learn that: "the failed wealthy are all the time on the ladder of active aspirants to collateral. The few rebels (...) advocate a collective climb up a collective ladder and shoulder to shoulder to put an end to hand-to-hand combat and the proliferation of private ladders" (Michèle Causse, L'encontre, p. 132).

I bring up these pearls less to have fun - a little anyway - in setting their stupidity than to represent the point of no return that theoretical (?) or lyrical (?) neo-feminist discourse manages to operate in a vacuum. This is something that the hurried textual equilibrist is not afraid to reveal to us with superbness:

"My manuscript has one flaw: it's difficult and it's only for women. It is also political."

"All women can read it. Even those who don't decode the language will understand my thesis.

(Michèle Causse, Warning to the Opposite, Catalogue des Éditions des Femmes. Emphasis added.)

Now I understand that if I don't understand anything about this climb, it doesn't matter; It is enough to believe in the validity of the neo-feminist word, and therein lies the secret of understanding. I haven't forgotten that "the water of Lourdes can help out a car" (Picabia), but this kind of miracle still escapes me when I consider the reality that their miraculous nature serves to erase: neither my body nor that of other women is "caught up in language" as this little masterpiece of natural contortion would like us to do. entitled O Mother, Kiss Me Again; no more my life than that of other women "gasps", does not "breastfeed" to let the milk flow" or "steal the writing" (Hélène Cixous, Warning to Breaths); finally, if "women do not close themselves" (Cixous), neither does the neo-feminist mouth, opening more and more to the gap between a word which, from being primordial, no longer has any hold on reality, even if it is historical, in which both women and men are immersed.

I affirm that this gap is political, in the sense that it is atrociously real, like the gap that opened up between the feminist activists and the defendants in the Bobigny trial, at a time when it was a question of collectively preparing its defense: did the former not argue about the future, about the radicality of the movement, while the latter, as Gisèle Halimi reports in La cause des femmes, were playing for their very concrete freedom, their very concrete life? There can be no eternal divorce between theory and practice. This discrepancy is inherent in the maddening whiteness that is levelling the feminist landscape today. And if we can applaud the dismantling of the mother-whore couple that until now shared the image of women with the rage of Judeo-Christian dualism, we cannot be very happy to see neo-feminism replace it with the witch-martyr couple that perhaps unifies femininity but in the dazzling and antiseptic light of absolute innocence.

Since frenzied virginization is never gratuitous (look at the former and future Stalinists in Western countries), I wonder when I hear these "young people" born of the last neo-feminist downpour tell us

"History? telling the story in their own way: The story of bloodshed... It wasn't our actions. We came from the dawn, we came from the beginning , and we were the ones who gave, who nourished, who cared for life, and who had, or could keep, any means of preventing life from being destroyed, wasted, bloodied, by the barbaric rage of men whom knowledge, paradoxically, did not snatch from ignorance, as if the so-called superior values became accomplices of savagery."

(Chantal Chawaf, Witches, No. 3, p. 6.)

What can I do about it? I don't have the bad taste to be moved by this evocation of femininity in the Salvation Army that is unravelling. But even if I did, it would still be difficult for me to sympathize with this tearful stupidity, to see these gaping sheep - who give, who feed, who take care of life with the tips of their enchanted feathers - allow themselves this immaculate whiteness to blacken, in the quiver of their existential generosity, all that is masculine. In order to give an idea of the typhoon of stupidity that threatens us, I will give the floor to Christiane Rochefort, whose humour does not seem to have resisted this virus of virginisation by femininity:

"We are now colonised in the process of decolonisation: we have not participated in the enterprise of conquest, of violation, of rape, of the massacre of the Earth, accomplished by Man - and now the meaning, long claimed to be generic, appears in its precision, reveals itself to be real: it is indeed man, in the restricted sense."

(Christiane Rochefort, in Regards féminins, Anne Ophir, p. 90.)

At the risk of sounding like a sexual enemy that must be crushed, I would nevertheless point out that there are certain languages where this linguistic quibble is impossible, by the very fact that different words are used to designate man and human being.

But no matter, such litanies have infected women's literature in recent years with such constancy in debility that I will stop at these two examples. At other times, in other places, did it not seem necessary to swallow everything with the same ardour in order to unleash packs of positive heroes on all those whose restless shadows came to question the deadly whiteness of a new world? Would this be the infantile disease of the oppressed who no longer want to be oppressed? It is possible, but there are childhood illnesses that leave serious sequelae once growth is complete, and, in the first place, this kind of psychic infections that curiously metamorphose the oppressed into oppressors. I can understand that having been denied, humiliated,, raped, dispossessed for too long, women today go in search of a primordial integrity. But I don't understand why they claim to find it in the pure and unblemished image of a femininity that is deceptively positive because it is absolutely positive. Having said that, I am fully aware that I am engaged in sabotage here, of which I am sure to be accused. And this brings us back to the famous priorities of the struggle.

As it sometimes happens that, from priority to priority, one day we have the priority of ending up in a camp or in a psychiatric asylum, I am stubborn, I tremble. Not because "the witches are back," as the Italian feminists like to announce, but because I see the shadow of the Inquisition rather than the will-o'-the-wisps of revolt illuminating the moors of the great refusal stirring under the ready-made thought of this mass sorcery. Once again, one might think that I have the unfortunate tendency to dramatize the inevitable excesses of a struggle that is nevertheless legitimate. Only, when I hear the Italian feminists, who in this respect do not differ from their "want" to change the world, "from a woman's point of view" (Le Nouvel Observateur, n° 633, "the revolt of the mamas"), I get chills down my neck. And my neck becomes more and more sensitive when we are told in the same newspaper what "ten thousand women are screaming" in Rome on the evening of the 27th of November:

"The white moon shines on the rooftops, my sisters. Let us take our lanterns and candles, let us walk through the hostile city, denouncing the violence that this masculine world is doing to us. We are another power. We are the new power that is rising. We will set you free, O city, we will set you free, O male chained by the exploitation to which they inflict upon us.

I will not insist on the novelty of the refrain tirelessly vociferated as soon as there are liberators in need of power. But I would like to know by what sorcery 'rising power' would be salutary, while we are constantly told that men's unhealthy desire for power and violence is at the heart of all problems" (Les Femmes s'entententent, p. 209). Perhaps, there is already a special brigade of neo-feminists to make recalcitrant subjects understand that there is power and power, just as I can't understand that there is police and police, army and army. While waiting for this explanation, which I won't have, I resign myself to going further into the night of neo-feminist obscurantism to find out what is hidden under this unanswered question: if women can today reproach men for having made the world go round "from a man's point of view", how can they claim to liberate "males" with them "from a woman's point of view"? Would this not be a kind of theoretical contradiction which, in practice, would remove any ambiguity about the extent of the neo-feminist horizon?

In this regard, most of the exemplary actions illuminated entirely by this "woman's point of view" leave the greatest doubts about how today's feminists intend to "change the world." Twenty years after Jean-Pierre Duprey - he who used to say: "a gesture of life would make me laugh" simply went one day to piss on the flame of the Arc de Triomphe, annihilating, consciously or not, it doesn't matter, the deceitful fire of the fatherland, of the nation, of war, which feeds in the heart of Paris on the body of an anonymous individual, So of any individual, Parisian feminists have found nothing better to do than to go and lay a wreath of flowers to the wife of the unknown soldier. Clitoris in the lead, they walked up the Champs-Élysées, no doubt to show what ancient Amazons they could make, already dreaming of their future wooden breasts. I will not venture to scrutinize the murky waters of their real motives. I will only ask one question: before coming to this degrading recrimination to the non-grateful fatherland, would it not have been better, "from a woman's point of view," that is, to ask oneself first of all whether the sublime wife of the unknown soldier had not first been one of those sluts who send men to war with flowers in their guns? Or who do nothing to prevent the man with whom they live from participating in any way in the mass killing? It's a pity, a pity, too, that these feminists didn't have the idea of extinguishing the patriotic fire in the manner of Duprey, because it would have been an opportunity to repossess their legs-objects to make an arc of shame out of them that would not have been forgotten; It's a pity that they didn't find it a good idea to raise funds for their movement, like the brilliant con man who, in recent years, has made a very successful quest from house to house for the same wife of the Unknown Soldier. But as I can already imagine the choir of virgins in fatigues springing up to remind me that we don't laugh at these things, I hasten to return to a subject that is otherwise important to the struggle of women.

Let us see, then, in what light this famous "woman's point of view" sheds light on the problem of rape, of which women are the direct victims and to which only they can testify. Here again, this light seems to me to be flickering, to say the least, in spite of the means used to make us believe that it alone can make the distinction between good and evil. If it is up to all women to establish the criminal reality of rape, which is too often evaluated with extreme complacency by the justice system but also by public opinion, is it really up to them to hand over rapists to a judicial system which, according to them, is the guarantor of everything they claim to be against? How can we forget that it is the same justice system that condemns abortionists and rapists and also condemns them when neither of them has enough means or support to prevent such crimes from being prosecuted? How can we suddenly rely on the repressive authorities of a power that is said to be phallocratic when rape is the crudest and most miserable manifestation of this same power?

The very laudable ambition of Italian feminists to want to make every rape "a trial against the state" is in fact answered by a completely different reality, judging by Susan Brownmiller's authoritative work on the subject and in which feminist statements of this kind can be noted:

"I am not one of those who use the word revolutionary lightly, but the full integration of women into the police service - and by total I mean 50/50 no less - is a revolutionary goal of the utmost importance for women's rights";

or again:

"I wish to point out here that I am one of those who regard a prison sentence as a just and legitimate solution to the problem of criminal activity, the best solution we have today as a civilized punishment and to exert a preventive effect against future crimes."

Is it this forest of truncheons and bars that guarantees us the radical novelty of the neo-feminist paradise that we are promised?

A strange "woman's point of view" that consecrates the break between the neo-feminist discourse and the reality experienced by both people, even the darkest. For if today's feminists call for recourse to justice in cases of rape - which they could not really be reproached for without being led to cover up a scandalous state of affairs - it is therefore because they in fact separate power from machismo, which their discourse nevertheless tries to systematically confuse. And this can teach us about the nature and function of the current feminist discourse, which, in the specific case of rape, contributes to considerably obscuring the problem. This is too serious to think that the confinement of rapists can erase anything from the physical, but also psychic and sensitive destruction of the raped: "We were so desperate that we even thought about committing suicide," say Araceli Castellano and Anne Tonglet, raped in August 1974, while camping on the edge of a beach near Marseille. has hitherto made people bear silently the shame of having been raped, that is to say, of being nothing more than the body of the crime, in the most trivial sense of the word.

But in order to do so, the rigour of their testimony must prevent the ideology that overwhelms the victim in order to excuse or even glorify the aggressor from being replaced by a new ideology that denounces the aggressor in order to exalt the victim. From their experience of suffering, women know that misfortune is useless, teaches us nothing, except to do everything possible to prevent it. And as much as it seems to me necessary for women to break the conspiracy of silence that favours the practice of rape, I cannot accept that "in view of these testimonies, rape" appears "clearly as a terrorist tactic used by a few men but serving to perpetrate the power of all men over all women" (Cahiers du GRIF [Libcom note: Groupe de recherche et d'information féministes], "Violence" No. 14-15, p. 103). I am very sorry, but being a woman and a violated person does not in any way authorize us to have recourse to the expeditious convenience of the principle of collective responsibility to which totalitarian discernment has always referred. I have a bad mind, but when we hide under the drapes of pain and enunciate the following psycho-sexist law: If not all men rape women (...), all benefit from the fact that some do", I can't help but think of the "all sluts" who have known the fortune we know. And seeing the neo-feminists wanting to place their pawns on the lamentable generic chessboard, I have the impression that as a result, women who have actually been raped are condemned to disappear one by one in the darkness of their suffering. Otherwise, why does neo-feminist discourse always end up presenting rape as the implicit model of all male behaviour, reducing it to its most derisory negativity, while rape accounts for an analogous reduction of femininity that unbearably goes beyond the very notion of the woman as an object?

Let me explain: with rape and its imaginary representations, it is a notion of woman-place that is established at the cost of a definitive flattening of femininity in a danger zone. Excusable for all follies would be made by anyone who approaches them: it is well known that every rapist at one time or another claims to have been provoked, and that this system of defence is classically most gratifying, inasmuch as public opinion, the result of two thousand years of Christianity, generally derives from it the vain pleasure of being in a familiar country. Progress in this area seems to be going in the direction of the worst, since when it became difficult to doubt that Anne Tongle and Araceli Castellano had been victims of an outright assault, they were not accused of "having been raped, but of being homosexual. We are judged, we are condemned, and some even go so far as to think that we are worse than rapists" (Interview given to Marie-Claire, n° 294).

For my part, I don't know to whom, the rapists or the employers of these young women who used such arguments to deprive them of work as a result of this affair, should be given the palm of ignominy. In either case, the woman is no longer even an object, with her contours, even her peculiarities; it is the indefinable place of the curse of the flesh. It is the feminist tradition that it has denied this cursed topography that whitens the marching virility with all its darkness, simply because femininity would spread like a pre-trapped place. And that's why I'm surprised that neo-feminism finds nothing more to oppose to the very real macho criminality than the virgin lands of a principled innocence. But this is such a fundamental point of neo-feminist ideology that it naturally arises even from the pen of those who are charged with educating the idle masses. As an example, I will take only one of the unforgettable diatribes of Benoît Groult, who for the past few months has been making neo-feminist entryism in the magazine Marie-Claire:

"We hear a lot about certain categories, exclusively male, of course: immigrants, the disabled, certain poor perverts, even, who are said to need specialized nurses. (...) It is true that there must be some problems with their situation. But these are THEIR problems. They must not be sacrificed at the expense of innocent women (emphasis added), sacrifices to the sexual equilibrium of this or that group of individuals."

(Marie-Claire, No. 295.)

Whatever one may think, the innocent readers who have read these lines are not sacrificed to the mental disability of Benoît Groult, but to the one that governs neo-feminism. Black levelling becomes white levelling. The criminal fatality that excluded any representation of the feminine universe is now succeeded by a fatality of innocence that indefinitely stretches the feminist claim to display it in tearful imperialism.

Seeing the women of the GRIF gather testimonies, documents and information to consider the problem of violence without wanting to ignore its complexity (n° 14-15), I hoped that we would avoid falling into this theoretical ridiculousness of neo-feminist ideology. But I quickly became disillusioned as soon as I read the reflections of a certain Aline Dallier on the "image of violence in women's art": if we are to believe her, the main merit of the women mentioned (and among them Léonor Fini and Dorothea Tanning, that says it all) would be to have inaugurated a hagiography of the female martyr. Which, let us note in passing, hardly brings menstrual blood to the mill of feminine specificity. ray, whether it is Dorothea Tanning's Grandguignolesque Maternity or Frida Kahlo's mining miscarriage: "thick ropes come out of her navel and connect her like a cannonball to a stillborn, skeletal and black child" (p.114); whether it is still a question of the Tampax used by Gina Pane to evoke "the painful vagina from which emerges not only the child but the pleasure-pain of being a woman" (p. 115), and the blood-stained sheet on which Ana Mendieta exhibits herself, there is no doubt that it is here the draughtsman (and not the viewer as Marchel Duchamp claimed) who makes the painting here. And this draughtsman is always, it must be said, the cruellest male spectre who inscribes on canvases as well as on bodies real or symbolic tortures inflicted on women " (p.115).

This detour through neo-feminist aesthetics at least has the merit of teaching us that the feminine universe is only whitened to better highlight the bloody writing of the masculine principle. Red on white, we can see the lie on which the neo-feminist discourse feeds. From rape, we will retain the violence of penetration to establish that all penetration is violence against female auto-eroticism. And in order that we may get an idea of the degree reached by this bloody casuistry, I will give the floor to one of the theoreticians of feminine specificity, who does not bother with nuances, to affirm with the aplomb of scientific objectivity: "The suspense of this auto-eroticism is effected in violent inflenter; the brutal severing of these two pounds by a rapist penis. (Luce Irigaray, This Sex That Is Not One, p. 24).

At this rate, we can hope for the imminent withering away of neo-feminism, when its adherents will have discovered the violent intrusion into their mouths of all the purple spoons and forks by means of which they are still unconscious enough to feed themselves. In the meantime, the great ideological washing is in full swing to lead to very poor results: the feminine horizon may be getting bigger and bigger, but it is still that of passivity, while black or white the phallic hero continues to advance in front of his ignominy as in the past in front of his glory. Nothing has really changed, we have only tampered with the lighting by reversing the place of rays and shadows. And no matter what we want us to believe, an optical illusion is not enough to shatter the mold of human relationships.

Also, I hardly see how the neo-feminist bureaucrats, who have not yet succeeded in eliminating sex collaborators from their ranks, also because they are careful not to assume the coherence of their delirium as T. - G. Atkinson or Valeria Solanas have the audacity to do, will change the world "from a woman's point of view"; Or on the contrary, I see it all too well: whether they refuse or consent to have relations with the enemy – strategic relations, it goes without saying – the invention of their freedom is confused with a disconcerting guilt of the masculine world. And it is not even homosexuals, in spite of the multiple forms of repression they arouse, whose belonging to the male sex is reproached, as evidenced by this hallucinatory Response of Lesbians to their Homosexual Brothers:

"Dear Men,
"You whose name designates both the male and the species
"You who are constantly reinventing power
"Why does your language have to evoke domination and violence at every turn? (...)
"Certainly, it is fair and necessary to show that homosexuality is found in everyone. To do this, is it essential, because one is a man, to address oneself implicitly only to men?

(FHAR, Report Against Normality, p. 80.)

Something that we cannot reproach women in struggle, as we have seen! And we are all the happier to note that these Misses Lapalisse, who could also accuse musicians of liking music, do not show any sexism by declaring: "The penis symbolizes in turn the sceptre and the truncheon. What's in it for women to do all this? None. Finally, it will be noted on what biological imperialism their ineffable broad-mindedness opens when they conclude this address to their "homosexual brothers" as follows: "WHERE IS THE PROLETARIAT? It's your army of housewives. This is the Dark Continent. It is the eternal Third World: the people of women. (p. 81.) A stupid "woman's point of view" that does not shy away from sacrificing to phallocratic competition in order to win the palm of misfortune.

Perhaps, under these conditions, it will be understood that it is once again difficult for me to take Simone de Beauvoir seriously when she affirms without laughing: "There is nothing monolithic about feminist thought." (Women Are Stubborn, p. 11.) First of all, I doubt very much that we can speak here of thought when the innumerable contradictions and inconsistencies of the neo-feminist discourse cancel each other out to refer to a disturbing mystique of femininity likely to reinforce in its pettiness and self-importance this famous "woman's point of view," which is entirely based on hatred of the masculine. On the other hand, monolithism never excludes formal diversity when it serves to cover the lie with its one-dimensionality. Look at the Soviet choirs and today the neo-feminist choir or the multiplicity of voices modulating the same theme: "I'm not a racist, but I wouldn't want my daughter to marry a man."

And it is here that my repugnance to neo-feminist discourse finds its raison d'être: under the pretext of denouncing this or that crime committed against women, I will never be made to believe in the biological roots of these rhetorical scaffoldings that only emerge similar to each other to make us forget that they collapse one after the other around the a-historical perspective from this "woman's point of view." Doesn't this frenzy to build, to occupy silence, refer to a phallocratic fear of emptiness, or at least reproduce phallocratic representations of femininity? Just as the traditional woman compulsively furnished the space of her home, compulsively adorned the surface of her body, so the feminine word seems to me today to occupy, adorn, furnish, overload with its own echoes, repeated ad infinitum, the space of discourse for the sole purpose of closing it in on itself.

Then, I suddenly understand my difficulty in breathing within the restrictive limits of this small world that blends wonderfully with the pheasant worldliness of its official painter, Léonor Fini. Everything I love about women would wither away: that light freedom that made Virginia Woolf dream of a secret, marginal, elusive, anonymous society between women; that strange vegetal rumour that rises from the Lotus meditations of Pafni... There is no need to continue, this nostalgia is not appropriate, although I cannot yet bring myself to examine, right now, why and how neo-feminism manages to fit history into the woman's sex like a rabbit in a hat. I get up to see Paris moving forward in the obviousness of the early morning: women who are still crepuscular glide between pelisses of young lights. Distant and immediate, they go, having no other memory than their silent childhood that carries the wake of the mirrors towards the high seas of their love. Ascending with the day, the night shines through the portholes of their purple, beige, plum or black lips. Their hair swells the city, revealing and submerging the roundness of their small pearly skulls to save them from becoming the target of "a knife without a blade that lacks the handle." I'm talking about the rhetorical assault on women's lives and the fundamental fraud that enables this aggression: I'm talking about the ideological terrorism of femininity.

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3. Zhdanov Changes Gender

"A charge of revenge; has a spare yard."

Marcel Duchamp.

Are we not in a position today to be able to recognize the mad beast of totalitarianism by its easy seductions as well as by its crude imprints? Are we not capable today of knowing how to detect, without ever again misunderstanding it, the smell of death that floats around the underground of obscurantism where it is hidden? Perhaps, but it seems to me that this assurance is generally acquired by us only after we have been obliged to become archaeologists of misfortune in the face of the overwhelming pieces of evidence in its passages. And if there is a disconcerting unanimity today in denouncing the ravages of the historical forms taken by Stalinism, it is because the beast has other tricks that are difficult to unveil as long as they are useful. Indeed, I see it stirring these days behind the demagogic undergrowth of an ecumenism that is as rhetorical as it is strategic, where, among its numerous offspring, the neo-feminist scope frolics at its leisure. Spotted with pink and black, this litter doesn't worry at first. The most paternalistic of men even go so far as to attribute to it the charms of juvenile delinquency. Yet, camouflaged under the most tragic lace of flesh with which it adorns itself to disarm the enemy, it is the same beast that returns to devastate to poverty the world in which it prospers; and by the added misfortune, this world being the historically occult one of feminine sensibility, the field is free for all possible counterfeits.

And to begin with, this one, which goes back, to say the least, very far back in the origins of neo-feminist activism:

Marie Cardinal: "For me, writing is still fighting. I write my body. I sweat a lot when I write".
Annie Leclerc: "Actually, you're fighting out of necessity. If you hadn't fought, even in a place to take centre stage in your mother's womb, you wouldn't exist. When you say that you didn't settle until you were twenty years old, whereas at thirteen you already looked like a woman, that's also a struggle". (That is, 199-200.)

Everything starts from there and will come back to it. From her intrauterine life to her last colt, every woman would be the vaginal guerrilla on her own. Woe betide the one who doubts it when we miss no opportunity to remind everyone that "I say we" without ever saying "I" to us. Here we are in familiar territory: the time of the conscious masses is coming back into fashion through the muscular grace of the Stakhanovites of femininity.

It seems that neo-feminist ideology has come at the right time to occupy the centre stage that has been somewhat deserted since the prominent intelligentsia, one evasion after another, has succeeded in convincing its audience of the death of history, of man, of the subject, of meaning. The appearance of the little neo-feminist monster was favoured. We were ready to forgive him everything as long as he entertained. And it is entertaining and entertaining more and more to disguise as a feminine the ideological aberrations of the last fifty years with which we had managed to become familiar and even to become a little too familiar. So, in other words, or change in continuity. Neo-feminism was the exquisite corpse we were waiting for. Cobbled together from the successive transformations of the totalitarian temptation, he was able to give it a second wind at the same time as a second sex.

The fact that each issue of the magazine Witches allows us to contemplate the spectacular results of this delicate operation should not make us forget the difficult development of this hybrid totalitarianism, which we had to succeed in blurring what it did not owe to the feminist and libertarian tradition, as well as what it owed to the intellectual fashions of the moment.

I have spoken of a "knife without a blade with the handle missing" because it is the instrument that neo-feminists seem to have chosen to make femellitude shine with all the fires that are not its own. They are not wrong: given this initial bluff, the non-existence of the instrument guarantees its effectiveness. The future of an illusion depends on the greater or lesser illusory quality of the means with which it is manufactured. This is why I will first examine the non-existent but nevertheless effective blade of this knife to make us believe that the world incised on its illusory edge opens up like a fruit that has never been opened.

Let us submit to the charm of this dawn, let us admit for a moment the virginity of the neo-feminist gaze that follows. Just for a moment, the time to realize that this virginity implies a disturbing devirginization of the existing landscape: we slice, we separate, we dissociate, we loot in order to advance in a new light. An astonishing devirginization which, in order to appear justified, must be scientific or it must not be. And this is indeed what the knife needs, the totalitarian need par excellence to master the edge of scientific law. Indeed, even if it were usurped, the scientific weapon would lose all reality with its edge, it is nevertheless likely to have a fetish function since its unreality is the necessary condition for this fetishization. Hence the totalitarian relentlessness in wielding this knife without a blade: if the instrument of truth can serve lies, it is scientific proof that the illusion is complete, and it is, because this non-existent blade kills, sometimes.

Obviously, with neo-feminism, we are not there yet, but there are many ways of attacking life. Starting with this strange slip of the tongue that leads neo-feminism to point this non-existent blade against itself. Because, in the end, doesn't this requirement for scientific rootedness implicitly see in neo-feminists the same desire to "question nature " that they do not hesitate to reproach scientific thought? How can we forget all of a sudden that, from Kant to Claude Bernard, the same fantasy of violence punctuates the scientific process:

"The experimenter must force nature to reveal itself, the experimenter forces nature to reveal itself by attacking it and asking it questions in all directions"

(Claude Bernard, Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine), p. 39.)

Neo-feminism does not escape this problematic by not experimenting strictly speaking, and a fortiori when it finds its raison d'être in not asking questions in all directions, but in one direction only. So, more than ever, the blade has no existence except through the wound it causes, phantasmatic violence increases by being reduced to manifesting itself compulsively in the form of rape. And the mere fact that the virginity of the female gaze must be paid for by this act of phantasmatic allegiance to the worst phallocratic practices allows us to augur the specificity of this gaze, it seems scientific, and especially when it claims to be scientific.

And so it all starts again, with this counterfeit on top of it: by wanting to be too aphallic, neo-feminism exhausts itself in searching for this blade that cannot be found. And it would be pitiful if it were not dangerous, because this is the door open to all intellectual misdeeds so that a new world can be born from a very old lie: the intolerable need to clean up the mess, without worrying about the battles that have been going on for a long time in this place and even less about what is at stake. To this now classic evasion of history, neo-feminism does not fail to sacrifice, but I am struck by the zeal with which it indulges in it. No doubt it is the non-existence, redoubled in his hands, of the scientific weapon he uses, that leads him to practice his dark cuts even in feminine history. Proof of this can only be found in the systematic elimination of all those who have had the misfortune to love with an extraordinary intensity, to the point of sometimes modifying the sensitive landscape of their time. Héloïse, Julie de Lespinasse, the great Mademoiselle, but also Ninon de Lenclos and Caroline Michaelis, to name but a few, are simply erased from women's memories. And it is in vain to look for any trace of romantic women who have made the mistake of loving men and despising manhood. But how could it be otherwise, since their mere existence fills the rut at the bottom of which neo-feminism claims to find the scientific justification for its totalitarian claims?

The least that can be said is that in this respect, as in many others unfortunately, Simone de Beauvoir, skewering Montherlant, D. H. Lawrence, Claudel, Breton, Stendhal, with equal ardour, on the stylus of her feminist intransigence, set a precedent. And since I am referring here to one of the sacred texts of neo-feminist ideology, I will quote the peroration of this review of the great bad men, in that it is a harbinger of the militant discernment that is de rigueur today: "We could multiply examples: they would lead us to the same conclusions." (The Second Sex, vol. I, p. 382.) Would we not be entitled to ask why these examples were chosen if, in the end, we are taught that their choice does not matter? This would be naïve, only forgivable to those who do not know that neo-feminism has only one turn in its sex. Moreover, Simone de Beauvoir is quick to dismiss the overconfident reader: "In defining woman, each writer defines his general and singular ethics that he makes of himself." (The Second Sex, vol. I, p. 382.) This allows us to conclude, from the subtlety of the analysis reported above, that the singular idea that Montherlant, D. H. Lawrence, Claudel, and Breton have of woman refers to the general idea that man has of woman. This in itself is absurd but nevertheless constitutes an advance on Simone de Beauvoir, who tries to define woman, not in terms of the singular idea she has of herself, but in terms of the singular idea that someone else, Sartre, has of himself and of others. Needless to say, I wouldn't pay too much attention to this highly dubious singularity of Simone de Beauvoir's approach if it didn't constitute the model of singularity that neo-feminist discourse loudly claims. Indeed, it is enough for him to take history with the umbilical lasso of a vaginal totalitarianism to put an end to all those little details that make some people think they see a difference between Bataille and Larteguy, with all due respect to Benoîte Groult who must still feel closer to the Centurions than to L'Expérience Intérieur. This is a new sport that requires as much sensitive depth as intellectual bad faith and seems to be gaining more and more favor with our Amazons, eager to shine in the buzzing lices of rhetorical violence.

Haven't we been witnessing a farcical rereading of Western thought in recent years according to the whims of neo-feminist consciousness? However new it may be in the ridiculous, this terrorism is not unknown to us: others have taken pleasure and still delight in denying from the past any form of expression that cannot illustrate, by means of some premonition in servility, the glorious advance of the proletariat on the march. Like all senility-stricken ideas, neo-feminism thirsts for blood, seeking it not only in all those who have not looked at the world in the exclusive light of its lights, but also in all those who have not foreseen its saving advent. Thus, in the purified perspective of a history crumbling under the vengeful rays of feminist revelation, executions are well underway. And the fact that we don't pay too much attention to the mattresses of works, for example Frangoise d'Eaubonne for anthropology, Benolte Groult for literature, is quite revealing of the novelties brought by neo-feminism in the exercise of power, even if it is ideological: it is up to the subalterns to carry out the dirty work, while Luce Irigaray is free to disguise his "interpretive rereading" as a "psychoanalytic approach", even if he has ... psychoanalysis, even with the help of the 94 science of language, cannot, as we have already seen, resolve the question of the articulation of the female sex in discourse" (This Sex That Is Not One, p. 73); or, while Xavier Gauthier can afford to parry his hatred of surrealism and his definitive closure to poetry, in the moirures of "a disappointed love" as his preface likes to emphasize (Surrealism and Sexuality, p. 9).

In the hierarchy of witches, the stars have the privilege of tasting cultural food that the rank and file must vehemently ignore and despise in order to preserve its ideological purity and feminist militancy. Only the most seasoned of the Amazons have the leisure to abandon themselves to the delights of psychoanalytical, surrealist or linguistic Capua, such as Hélène Cixous, with a few others, who do not fail to give us the proof in black and white, at each turn of the rotary. O the strange misery of power which must obey the infernal cadences of seduction!

Meanwhile, it is with glee that the underground miners attack the harsh realities of history: the presence of a few pollen seeds or a hand mill, reported during this or that archaeological excavation, is enough for Françoise d'Eaubonne's scientific erethism to establish the existence of a prehistoric matriarchy and to shame all modern anthropology. It does not matter, then, that his conclusions contradict those of Simone de Beauvoir concerning the same period; they have at least in common that they are as substantiated as those which allow the author of The Second Sex to strike us at the end of a paragraph devoted to the "We have just seen that in the world devoted to the male sex: a primitive horde, the fate of woman is very good" (T.I., p. 113).

Since this fundamental research takes the turns of history with the casualness that we observe, we must resign ourselves to seeing neo-feminism rely on Benoîte Groult to attack, through Poujadism, "Baudelaire (...), Sade, Lautréamont, Masoch, Bataille, Leiris and a thousand others" (Ainsi soit-elle p.185). The "thousand others" are probably only there to give us a glimpse of tomorrow that will sing with a soprano voice. It is probably carried away by her eagerness to see the arrival of this time when she will have to forget Les Chants de Maldoror for Le Journal à quatre mains, that Benoît Groult has read Gérard Zwang's books a little too quickly: I do not see, in fact, when she finds an eructant pleasure in degrading everything that would be aggressively masculine, what she can reproach Masoch for, if not for not participating in the normality of the neo-feminist Café du Commerce where she seems to have chosen to hold her meetings. But decidedly, I am incorrigibly naïve: how the uncertain trembling of the scarlet filaments of a desire caught in the ice of suffering, how the disturbance behind which the character of Masoch disappears, like the glass that becomes foggy to interpose itself between the glow of an overheated room and the implacable wind outside, how this disturbance could even be considered, And I don't say imagined, by a person who, in matters of eroticism, has the obscene pride of referring to his chansonniers, who are very much from home? I'm not making this up, since this gravell activist titles a chapter devoted to the male sex: "It's red... And it's fun! "as the chansonniers of La Tomate used to say a few decades ago" (p. 197). And it is from the height of this congenital baseness that, in less than ten pages, all those who have explored "the deserts of love and whose testimony will perhaps one day resonate like a desperate echo in the memory of women, well, all of them, Benoîte Groult throws them out the trap with the casualness of a scoundrel, drunk on the smugness of her new neo-feminist uniform. Would there finally be a few people to evoke the metaphysical emptiness from which these extreme figures of Western thought, sick of themselves, have arisen, that Benoîte Groult waits for them at the bottom of the manhole of his militant babbling to retort to them: "My eye, as Bataille would say!" (sic) (So be it, p. 193.)

Is it enough for those who imagine themselves as elsewhere, that it is not women who bother me but stupidity? And we are not ready to leave it, even if we were to flush it out under more sophisticated guises, it is, in fact, in the totalitarian nature of neo-feminism to play on the two complementary tables of spontaneous stupidity and concerted stupidity, so to speak. So much so, in fact, that the bad faith of some seems to compete with the narrow-mindedness of others, so that we are now in a position to see in the neo-feminist consciousness the equivalent of a gigantic enterprise of cretinization. To do this, nothing very new yet; To the arbitrariness of unjustifiable positions, efforts are made to give a justification of scientific appearance. Once history has been eliminated as evidence of a constant false testimony that would contribute to rejecting into the shadows the burning eternity of the feminine question, we do not hesitate to turn to biology, ethnology, psychoanalysis, linguistics, philosophy. It does not matter, then, that at their foundations, these sciences resist endorsing the neo-feminist pretension, because it is enough to find in both the epistemological break (which, moreover, is tirelessly confused with the drawing of the female sex) to proclaim the advent of another biology, another ethnology, another psychoanalysis, another linguistics, another philosophy finally put back on other feet that would finally be theirs, by the grace of neo-feminist revelation.

In describing this tendency, I do not seek to exonerate scientific thought of the widespread misogyny in which it participates to varying degrees. It is a certain use of reason for the purposes of domination, and not reason itself, which must answer for this crime among many others, of which scientific misogyny is only a special case. I only want to know that freedom would find scientific thought and that women would gain from it, by adopting this "woman's point of view" whose exclusives already assure us of the "objectivity" that would be that of the human sciences regenerated by the neo-feminist sap. Incidentally, the question of this objectivity, the suspicion of which has become the commonplace of scientific thought, does not for a single moment shake the scientific pretensions of neo-feminism: we are told that a revolution is taking place, one would have to be very petty to suspect the rectitude of its scientific conquests; or individualistic, which amounts to the same thing, in order to contest the universal value of his propositions. And so I will only remark that this scientific sap, of which we are promised miracles, seems doomed to pass through the channel of the phallocratic university. Isn't it curious that neo-feminist theorists continue to frolic in the academic "malic mold"? To get to this point, don't we need the famous "knife without a blade" really lacks a handle? Let us be clear, I ask this question only because it is these theoreticians who explain at length: "If we continue to speak the same language, we will reproduce the same story" (Luce Irigaray, This Sex That Is Not One, p. 205). Luce Irigaray can rest assured: feminanimity is likely not to reproduce the same story but to produce a caricature of it. Not only is it the same language, but what is more, it is held on an object that does not exist. For the non-existent handle of their theoretical justification, neo-feminists are forced to look for it outside their specificity. No matter how much they seize it with majorette gestures and whirl it above feminine reality, they condemn themselves to this simulacrum of theoretical activity, failing to admit that there is no more blade than handle, no more knife than caesarean section necessary to promote the birth of a theory of femellitude. Counterfeiting aside, this blindness does not cease to be disturbing, first of all in that it reiterates all the illusions of rational thought about itself. But above all in that it authorizes the most serious accusation made so far against women: I am referring to the necessity of simulacrum which, according to the wisdom of nations and today Lacan, would be constitutive of their identity, or rather of their non-identity.

And yet it is this simulacrum that seems to order the elaboration of neo-feminist theory. This raises a number of questions, each more serious than the last. First of all, how would the fact of being a woman and an academic confer scientific objectivity and feminine specificity on the discourse we hold? As a result, this objectivity and specificity also become questionable. What specificity would wrest from history a discourse that has found its legitimacy there? What objectivity could be the answer for a specificity that is claimed to the point of segregationism? To preserve again and again the femellitude of the mud of history, are we not plunging headlong into the mire of the most flatly totalitarian ambition: that of a scientific parthenogenesis? Year Zero, Degree Zero, The Clean Slate, The Great Clean-Up; The witches' broom suddenly looks like all the others, it's no longer used for travelling, it's for cleaning. It's sad, and it's all the more sad because it also serves as a barrier between those who know and those who don't.

Why seek to erase the origin of the conceptual tools we use, if not to bring back to neo-feminism the splendour of their deceptive novelty? Who can be deceived if not other women? Isn't this leaving the sad illusion of destruction to allow the stars to parade under the most common cultural frocks? Is this not a disturbing division of ideological labour undertaken in the name of the unity of women in struggle? Is it not as if, as soon as one of them proves to be more or less capable of handling the same weapons as her so-called enemy brothers, she hastens to turn them against her sisters in order to better defeat the latter than these weapons have been swallowed up in the fire of women's combat?

I am tempted to believe it when this betrayal makes clear the lack of logic that seems to order the spectacle of purges and trials of intent that neo-feminism makes a specialty of conducting in the realm of ideas, with all the vengeful pomp that it deserves. Since the problem is to make something new out of something old, is it not inevitable that its frenzy to find expiatory victims almost ignores the declared enemies of women and instead relentlessly attacks all those who have contributed, perhaps without even being aware of it, to the liberation of the reminin from its traditional representations? Thus Mao will get away with it better than the troubadours; Marx will have the right of citizenship and Novalis will not; they will leave Satre in peace, but they will disturb Breton to the point of derision. And as for those who, because they have deserted the banality of the rails, the differentiation of the sexes, and I am thinking more particularly of those who are called dandies, have escaped the ridicule of virility, and paradoxically have done women the greatest gift by depriving them of a mirror, it is very simple that we do not speak of it.

Considering the multiplicity of tricks that determine these absences, I agree that this purge is a difficult task reserved for the elite who must first deprive the base of an uncontrolled memory that can make it uncontrollable. In this regard, I will not dwell on the fiendish historical mixture of quotations in Surrealism and Sexuality that allows Xavierc Gauthier to impute to surrealism, the sordid moralism of the Stalinist poems of Eluard and Aragon on the subject of women. This is such a classic and miserable process that I would rather consider the fate that neo-feminism reserves for psychoanalysis: more than pure and simple dishonesty, it accounts for the fetish function of scientific discourse in the elaboration of femininity. At the same time, it gives an account of the quest for the unspeakable phallus, unspeakable for lack of existence, around whose absence neo-feminist ideology is organized.

On the pretext that Freud more than a century ago overturned the idea that men and women had of themselves, he is now reproached for not having spoken of female sexuality from a woman's point of view, forgetting only that, without him, the notion of phallocracy with the multiplicity of implications attributed to it, would have been unthinkable. This is another way of saying that psychoanalysis is a science that is not a science. And we don't hesitate to say it. This is the first stage of this quest I'Ilustree with a marine subtlety by Kate MiIIet who finds a way to trap Freud in his game of slaughter between Hitler and Stalin. You have to have really read The Politics of the Male to believe it. Yet, this is the way it is, since in a chapter entitled The Counter-Revolution, "the models of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union" are evoked under the heading Reactionary Politics, supplemented by the heading Ideological Reaction fuelled mainly by "Freud and the Influence of Psychoanalytic Thought". And we know that this enriched them; This equivalence has been taken up again and again by the heavy wing of militant neo-feminism, only too happy to be able to rid itself so easily of its reassuring simplifications of psychoanalytic handicap. In this respect, too, there is nothing very new, since neo-feminists have the modest ambition to shake the world: we remember how diligently the various totalitarian systems, fascist or Stalinist, found it necessary in their ascending phase to combat Freud's thought under any pretext whatsoever. This trivial denunciation of psychoanalysis is always aimed at safeguarding the basic health of ideology. Neo-feminism is no exception to the rule, even if, as times have changed, the bureau-ratie of the Amazons has had to adjust these untenable ideological bivouac positions somewhat.

And so it is that without ever fighting the absurdity of the thesis developed by Kate Millet and so many followers, with the possible exception of Juliet Mitchell, the neo-feminist avant-garde uses and abuses the psychoanalytic instrument to denounce psychoanalysis. Because it has been brought down by the neo-feminist hand, psychoanalysis will be revived under the neo-feminist hand. This observation brings us triumphantly to the second stage: psychoanalysis, like all the other human sciences, will either be erectile or it will not be. In other words, its non-existence is the very condition of its existence. Which would be cheerful enough in the perspective of a fluttering theory that does not seem to be the work of the Vestal Virgins laboriously pumping the neo-feminist sap into the narrow channel of psycholytic non-existence.

Moreover, the elitist nature of these occupations should not escape us: how can we believe for a moment that it is the same readers who devour the works of Luce Irigaray and those of Benolte Groult - for the author of Ainsi soit elle, whose immoderate taste for the worst Gauloiseries is well known, turns out to be allergic to Freud "The penis obsessive" (p.201)? Two audiences, two languages to serve a single ideological power: as usual, militant efficiency comes to terms with the world. At the base who dresses at Monoprix, L'assommoir culturel; to future young caddresses who have the leisure to hesitate between the creations of Laura Ashley or Sonia Rykiel, the theory of cultural charm with rhetorical finishes and its good-natured ideological cut.

Decidedly, these ladies are not ignorant of dialectics when it comes to agitprop because, from the flattest lived testimony to the most abstruse theoretical discourse, we come back to making Freudian thought the geometrical locus of the effects and causes that would determine female misery today. But why neo-feminism's hateful fixation on psychoanalysis? All the more so since when its activists use a psychoanalytic tool to denounce Freudian phallocracy, their discourse refers to the same sexist approximations and the same abusive adrage of theoretical reflection that they strive to incriminate psychoanalytic discourse. And if the important thing is really, as Luce Irigaray tells us, "to disconcert the editing of representation according to exclusively 'masculine' parameters" (Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un, p. 67), I don't see how we would be disconcerted, and with us "the montage of representation", when the famous "exclusively masculine parameters" are advantageously replaced by exclusively feminine parameters, if I stick to the sad terminology of an author who claims on every page to invent the language of femininity. But I forgot what the third stage of this improbable quest consists in: the erection of neo-feminist psychoanalysis is inversely proportional to the overwhelming of Freudian thought. And the recipe that Luce Irigaray gives us in the prayer to insert in Ce sexe jui n'en en non, to combat "the uniformity and autocracy of one sex", is significant in this regard: How can we already talk about woman? By re-crossing the dominant disours. By questioning the malting ales men. By talking to women, between women. By levelling out any emergence of phallocratic thought, neo-feminist science finds the energy to re-cross it. This is as stimulating as it is deceptive, because this call for a true theoretical fertilization, through the intermediary of a non-existent instrument, curiously echoes the spirit of scientific conquest that neo-feminism denounces as one of the main defects of masculine thought. Moreover, Luce Irigaray does not propose to cross the dominant discourse, but to re-cross it. This slip of the tongue alone says a lot about the specificity of the announced approach, even if it is a traffic in identity. Would we propose - and especially if we propose to talk to "women among women". Because if we are not referring here to "exclusively feminine parameters", it is because there is really something rotten in the neo-feminist realm. To the point that I wonder if the theoretical circle of these witches is not closing around a psychoanalytic simulacrum in order to better keep the secret of this rot that only psychoanalysis could pierce.

What do neo-feminists say when they are not content to praise with anger and glee Freud's errors on female sexuality? Let's listen to Luce Irigaray who, in This Sex That Is Not One, succeeds, among other feats of strength, that of snatching Alice from Wonderland to sequester her in the feminist loft of the Freudian school of Paris. Poor Alice, doomed never to go through the mirror again, but to sneak into the narrow reflection of a speculum! Needless to say, given formal notice to become the complete athlete of this new sport, the little girl who has delighted us, not only loses her friend the crazy rabbit to gain the cumbersome sisterhood of the hordes of liberated women, but transforms herself into a little Lacanian annoyer, whose unbearable speech there can be no question of interrupting with a few cakes to taste it. Taken hostage by neo-feminism, Alice is forced to meet the sad fate of Doctor Jekill and Mr. Hyde: Alice becomes the character-alibi who will cover up Aluce Irigaray's crimes, just as the fallacious use of psychoanalysis will authorize a monstrous traffic on identity.

Indeed, if the main merit of psychoanalysis is that it has never ceased to establish, confirm and enrich with many developments Rimbaud's intuition that "I am another", here is that his neo-feminist simulacrum seeks nothing less than to sink into all the feminine heads that I inevitably refer to the Same, that is to say, to the cretinizing nous nous femininity. The quest begins to bear fruit in the fourth stage: the one where the knife without a blade missing the handle is a sight to behold, as a mirror of the Same. To those who might doubt it, I would remind you that the same Luce Irigaray launched a 463-page Speculum on the market in 1974, thanks to which, still disguised as little Alice, she now claims to take us "behind the screen of representation" (This Sex That Is Not One, p. 9); This perhaps requires some clarification, and more particularly this one: from a "woman's point of view" there would only be male representation.

I agree that this is huge, but what else can we expect to discover when we walk the mirror of the Same on the paths of life? Otherness being concealed so that, always from a "woman's point of view", The Other is summoned to reflect the image of the "other woman", and nothing else, what representation can be conceived when everything comes crashing down against the reflections of the Uniform? Mental uniform, sensible uniform, theoretical uniforms, displayed in its redundant splendour at every wave of a magic wand, I mean at every breakthrough of the Speculum in the insignia of representation? And it is this highly imprecise instrument that today allows everyone (if they want to let themselves be degraded by a language whose ridiculousness equals the inaugural sexist pretension) to swallow raw this scientific truth of neo-feminist notoriety: wonderland is the land of absolute femininity, under the curious theoretical pretext that it would escape by nature to any possibility of representation. Nature definitely has a good belly. But I'm not inventing it, since we are told that "the prevalence of the gaze and the discrimination of the form, of the individualization of the form, is particularly foreign to feminine eroticism" (This Sex That Is Not One, p. 25). In other words, the representation is at the end of the phallus and the ecuture is at the end of the speculum, or at the bottom of the vagina, as you like. Let us have it on yours so to speak.

Optical illusion for optical illusion, this is the feminine adorned with all the charms of the un-representable. From the unspeakable, from the informuable. The novelty of the discovery is worth highlighting when we remember that the swindle of feminine mystery rests entirely on the systematic exploitation of this primordial vagueness that has never ceased to reduce the feminine to the inanity of its evanescence. Let's be objective, however, for once, it is scientifically that the famous "black continent" is today condemned to remain so. I understand that women in struggle are proud of this progress: no more outpouring, no more outpouring, no more lyricism, it is organized obscurantism that takes over. Where the vengeful speculum passes, representation does not repel, so that scientifically elusive, indeterminable, immeasurable, femellitude will find itself graced with all the attributes of the divine. The intellectual putsch is a major one, it is the fifth and final stage in the trajectory along which the lies constitutive of femininity flourish: it is science that founds this disturbing mystique of femininity of which I spoke earlier. The circle is closed, the female sex closes on the case of the Same, which swells to reflect indefinitely the absence of the Other. Ironically, feminanimity is organized around a phallus that is not a phallus. Hence the incredible devotion with which this fragile fantasy object will have to be surrounded.

This devotion seems even most necessary when we measure the extent to which femininity functions as if it were a continual denial of reality. And the neo-feminist prediction for psychoanalytic simulcre is far from hazardous. For if Freudian thought never ceased to evellopate itself as an object of audela unveiling, of sensation through representation, the neo-feminist approach, which ends up denying any possibility of representation in order to bet on the elusiveness of a feminine sensation and thus steal the foundation of femininity from any attempt at investigation, then asserts itself as a project of unveiling. And what better way to veil this unveiling than by simulating the discourse of the unveiling? The theoreticians of feminanimity brilliantly demonstrate this to us, by scientifically imposing under the fashionable guipure of a psylogorrhea and po a lie as old as the world: that of the feminine mystery.

This fundamental lie that until then women could sometimes, at the cost of their hand, reject as external to them, the sex of dark individual revolt, now the neo-feminists pride themselves on taking it up on their own, even claiming it as constitutive of feminine identity, with the frenzy of those who, to differentiate themselves, they are quick to cross-dress. Also, it will perhaps be understood that I find it more and more difficult to believe that female consciousness could be born from such a masquerade, even if it took on psychoanalytic or Marxist colours. Who do we want to deceive when we are promised this scientific disguise, the emergence of "another morning" (Luce Irigagay), as with every ideological coup de force? But the women, the women who laugh under cascades of silence, the women who love on the crests of shadow, the women who walk between the wild grass of pain, the women who struggle to snatch their lives from life. The immense people of women who have nothing to gain from this ridiculous travesty but ridicule and misfortune.

Should we overwhelm or pity all those who, from the depths of their misery, will take Luce Irigaray at her word extolling an auto-eroticism in women of which the man would be deprived, he who desperately "needs an instrument to touch himself: his hand, the woman's sex, the language...", while (the woman "touches" herself all the time, without being forbidden to do so, because her sex is made up of two lips that kiss each other continuously. I do not want to disappoint those who, no less than man having recourse to these new that would be their hand, the sex of man, and language, will find in the Copernican discovery of this feminine peculiarity a definitive ontological pride. Nevertheless, if it is really necessary to gratify the woman with this structural autoeroticism, I do not see why the man should be automatically deprived of it when, until now, the testicles, the penis, the thighs, the belly are not scattered to the four corners of his anatomy but are disposed to give him a pleasure of touch not very different from that which Luce lrigaray jealously reserves for the female body.

The fact that neo-feminists have the immeasurable merit of assuming the comic part of their discourse without fail, should not, however, hide from us what is at work behind this mystical-scientific jumble. For, finally, if the characteristic of femininity is, as we are proudly taught, to escape representation, how can we fail to see that this neo-feminist antiphon opens wide the female sex to the meteorology of an arbitrariness that is all the more undeniable because it is given as natural. Let's put up with listening for a moment to listen to Luce Irigaray hijack Sade for militant purposes and advise French women "not to make any more effort":

"And if the attraction comes to you from other things than Speculum laboriously ordain what the laws, rules, rituals, which are made to alter theirs, think that - perhaps - this is your 'nature'":

"Don't even look for that alibi. Do what comes to you, what pleases you: without "reason," without "valid cause," without "justification." (...) You have so many continents to explore that giving yourself borders would be like not "enjoying" all your "nature".

(This Sex That Is Not a Sex, p.202.)

Was there ever a more annoying justification of the unbearable feminine caprice? I don't believe it. These are the women theoretically poured in from this caprise. Wasn't it enough that this caprice made it possible to empirically diminish the feminine? Probably not, when neo-feminism posits this diminishment as a prerequisite for women's liberation. And I come to think that this theory of charm is dangerous only for women, especially since all the Pavlovians of the pleasure principle, of partying, of enjoyment, who have been bored and bored for more than a decade, have never claimed anything other than this kind of hedonistic laxity.

Make no mistake, there is nothing capricious about this assertion of feminine caprice: under the pretext of "enjoying" their "nature", the theoreticians of femininity give themselves a free hand to rule the feminine world with impunity, and to cretinize intellectually, sensibly and obviously politically other women. First of all, with regard to the specificity of a feminine way of thinking. If "a woman never closes itself in a volume", why is this Speculum laboriously "introduced into the volume in order to alter its economy", as Luce Irigaray simply does, nevertheless sacrificing to the most rigid form hitherto attained by the phallocratic logic that the ous'rage claims to denounce in principle? If "woman never closes herself...", what was the need to open it, to force it, with this formidable theoretical apparatus? Why , then , does Xavière Gauthier, who, according to him, does not speak but "vocalizes" like any self-respecting witch, take the trouble between two literary marketing operations, to get on her pen against "the appalling masculine way of talking" (...) To speak in order to place it: his word, his rod. Is wanting to say something" (Witches, 1) an activity marked by phallocratic infamy? Why these pearls and necklaces of shameless lies, which as never before derised the feminine condition in its tragic derision, if these Pythias, technocrats of a frightful feminine way of discourse, did not also seek to "place" it, and to place themselves as official singers of women's misery? In this regard, Benoîte Groult comes to our rescue once again with the sublime innocence of her stupidity when she does not hesitate to declare in the preface to a book on battered women: "It is up to us to cry out for them." (Shout quietly, the neighbours will hear you.) All said and done, it couldn't be clearer.

Yet, the more we venture to explore the twists and turns of the neo-feminist seraglio, the more the ridiculous fades away in favour of the odious. I will confine myself to the monstrosities spouted by Julia Kristeva following a trip to China, showing us the ravages of Maoism and neo-feminism combined:

".. A power (what I called above: (and not represented) by a woman, is already a power that has a body, and a body that knows itself to be power: a symbolic contract, an economic constraint, but also an impulse, a desire and a contradiction. Power in infinite process - un-representable power.

"So when Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, women after students (...); When women are also put in positions of command today, would it not be to signal that power in a society is not to be abolished (which would be nonsense or poetry: a completely different problem), but that it does not have to be represented, and moreover can no longer do so?

(The Chinese Women, pp. 226-227.)

What could be more idyllic, what could be more overwhelming than this outpouring of women and power? But let us not be deceived by the theoretical sentimentality that colours this picture; its structural inanity is worth escribing" to Minée's nostalgia: women escape by nature, as we are beginning to know, from the villainy of representation, so it would be enough for them to exercise any kind of power for it to be automatically freed from its representative fatality. You bet? By giving him a body that knows it has "power" and is obviously un-representable. Which is completely useless since, in reality, I bet she dreams of the end of this juggling, Julia Kristeva comes to shrewdly remark that, in any case, power "does not have to be represented, and moreover can no longer do so". Hence this novelty: the un-representable is as specific to women as it is to power, and there is no longer any impediment to women swimming like sirens in the water of power. A clarification for unrepentant dreamers, the People's Republic of China is not yet silonated by two hundred million Esther Williams.

But I forgot: Julia Kristeva recently said she wrote a "worried book" about Chinese women. The least that can be said is that this concern is very slight since it allows her to hardly remember Louise Michel's cry: "power is cursed," to impose on us, "as it is," the brave new Mao-feminist world. In the name of what congenital virtue, by the grace of what vaginal secretion, once in power, would woman more than man be able to dissolve in herself the representative function of a power based, in popular democracies more than elsewhere, on the lie, not of representation, but of representativeness? I leave it to radical feminists to decide whether Julia Kristeva, by exalting this "un-representable power", is nostalgic for Orwell's invisible Big Brother or for the "feminine mystery" whose essence is precisely to evade all representation. For my part, judging by the astonishing equivalence she establishes in passing between nonsense and poetry (it is therefore easier to understand why poeticity in arms has fallen, head down, into the panel of the cultural revolution), I bet that she dreams of the nightmarish alliance of the one and the other, the poisoned fruits of which the neo-feminist bureaucracy is beginning to reveal to us. In her textual laboratory, Julia Kristeva has managed to develop a few prototypes of this fruitful crossover: "I think we have to go into Chinese history and not ask it our questions about senter, sexual freedom, the free individual. (...) Chinese society does not necessarily operate with these notions" (Interview, Le Nouvel Observateur, No. 658, June 1977). Julia Kristeva probably didn't either, since the neglect of these trifles, allows her to affirm in the same interview: "I say that in China the history of communism was a history of the emancipation of women, even if this emancipation was also a recovery of feminine strength."

Have they not already tried to convince us of the emancipation of women in Stalinist Russia, with the same arguments? No doubt this is what "polylogue" means.

As long as my anger subsides, I must admit that this pimping between two totalitarianisms (Chinese and feminist) is likely to enlighten us on the novelty of the ideological function of feminanimity: all the shit that is done there or elsewhere in the name of the people, is certainly done here in the name of women, but with the added bonus of persuading them that it is not only for their own good but for their own sake. their enjoyment. Jouissance, it goes without saying is un-representable like power. Jouissance whose un-representable neo-feminist power has programmed the un-representable figures, oscillating from the most stupid hatred of man to the most stupid effusion between women, to obey a single watchword: no fractional jouissance. Only, I repeat, it is not enough to draw from it because it is the vagueness inherent in this collectivization of jouissance that will precisely allow the stars of neo-feminism to "enjoy" only an ideological power that they cannot represent, to "enjoy" a (masculine) culture that they cannot represent, to "enjoy" the exoticism of a misery that they cannot represent. And this by systematically robbing women of the foundations of a sensitive life in which it still belongs to them, and in spite of everything, to find their surest reasons for living.

And this is where we must put an end to the inaugural scam thanks to which neo-feminism can so easily deceive women to the point of making them forget that their lifeline and their heart-line do not necessarily diverge or at least that their entire existence is played out in the breathless indeterminacy of this convergence. Is the advent of neo-feminist mediocrity enough for Artaud's cry to cease to be valid: ...

"there are hands here for whom taking is not everything, brains that see beyond a fork of roofs, a flowering of facades, a people of wheels, an activity of fire and marbles"
(Letter to the Schools of Buddha)?

Is the advent of neo-feminist mediocrity enough to put an end to this quest in which women and men alike discover their lives between the successive ruins of a world of the useful and the pleasant? However, it is up to poetry, and not neo-feminism, to have always been the dark, dazzling, tumultuous, shimmering, subterranean chronicle of this quest. And I don't know anything other than this story about the years that are flowing steeply, drifting ahead of our acts of "dreamers, enigmatic swimmers" (Arp), opening up the space between the archipelagos of memory, to attack the levelling of order would tiify Western logic and the order of levelling. Let me be clear, I am speaking of poetry that is made, in a bed, in the street, in the most sordid as well as the most privileged places, and which, incidentally, is written. Its quality is not to oppose but to carry away like a wreck the weight of time in an unpredictable circulation between words and things, flesh and language, absence and presence. And at a time when everything is frozen in the livid light of equivalence and number, it is not surprising that it is confused with the most irremediable desertion, the meaning of which the dominant thought is increasingly trying to erase by resorting to the deterrent force of its cohorts of textual re-readers.

Only, life resists in the luxuriance of its refusals, in the opalescence of its encounters, in the transparency of its passions. And it is as if neo-feminism had emerged at the right time in order to crumble the last fragments of meaning still likely to escape this ambitious operation of linguistic cleansing. Aren't there too many people today, and more particularly too many women, who do not recognize themselves in any of the destinies that one offers them? Every day you see them going to the brink of their secrecy, uttering words that say nothing of their gestures, making gestures that make sense, testing their words. So, do you really believe that the distant revolt of women can for a single moment lend credence to the simplistic picture painted by neo-feminism?

Starting with the ridiculous theoretical framing that determines it. Because, finally, doesn't this rejection of otherness which, according to Luce Irigaray and others, identifies Western logic (but which nevertheless characterizes neo-feminist discourse, as we have seen) and of which women are the chosen victims, infinitely transcend the feminine question? Since this logic asserts itself to the detriment of all other modes of thought, since reason in order to triumph becomes reason of state, has not this rejection of otherness, which is also and rather contempt panic or criminal indifference of the mind to the obscure particularity of matter, ceased to lead to a confinement of the sensible life of men and women around the most buried point of the individual sphere? Therefore, the concealment of feminine forms of sensibility is only a particular case of a dominant mental aberration that has manufactured and continues to fabricate the history of madness as that of the repetitive denunciation and repression of political or poetic dissent? Do we hope that the unanimity of the neo-feminist chorus will change anything in this state of affairs? On the contrary, there is every reason to believe that it is working to strengthen it. One only has to look at the catastrophic intellectual, sensitive, moral conformism engendered by all totalitarian systems, to realize that the rejection of the Other tragically implies the loss of the identity of the one who utters it. In this sense, the affirmation of femininity, oscillating between the denial of masculine individuality and the exaltation of the feminine mass, participates in the highest degree in this normalizing violence which, contrary to what we would like to believe, is no more masculine than feminine.

To be convinced of this, and at the same time to convince oneself of neo-feminist dishonesty, it is enough to remember (which triumphant feminanimity tries to dissuade us from) that the history of Western thought has been troubled by men at odds with a "man's point of view" that has never been theirs: from Abelard to Sade, from Novalis to Rimbaud, from Fourier to Jarry, to name but a few, have we not sought to "reinvent love ", sometimes in the course of strange derailments, but always with a desperate rigour that allows us to evaluate, by comparison, the marshy level where swampy discoveries of this kind are hatched: "Love is the ranron of consent to oppression" (T. G. Atkinson)? This is to evoke the extent of the mutilation carried out by neo-feminist ideology, even if we remember the stupidities and crimes that the term love has too often served to conceal.

However, to try to forget that these stupidities and crimes have been rarely but continuously thwarted by beings in search of themselves and in defiance of the various coercive forces that weighed on their existence, is tantamount to once again robbing the women and men of today of the richness of a sensitive memory whose power is always applied with more or less intelligence to deprive each one in order to prevent possible harm. Backfires. And here again, neo-feminism hardly innovates, except perhaps by the pathological ingenuity and energy that it puts into tampering, falsifying, if not erasing the most diverse figures, of this fire that always returns to cast the shadow of its flames on the most assured constructions of Western thought, to the point of sometimes setting the whole landscape ablaze, as was the case with the Gnostic current. Romanticism, Surrealism. A veritable "heresy of love " (Radovan Ivsic) which, as a counterpoint to the history of dominant thought, arises with the constancy of despair to bet, by confronting the lightest and darkest lights of human love, on the improbable reconciliation of the individual and the world. I agree that there is no crazier bet, but only its madness is commensurate with the darkness that surrounds us, it alone can bring out infernos of transparency, it alone gives the audacity to explore the immense beaches of despair that life discovers and covers every day to better abandon us to them by surprise. One may then imagine that, on this point as well as so many others, the stubborn amnesia of neo-feminism does not cease to be disturbing when this "love heresy" has been implicitly held to be heretical by the various powers it has successively confronted, precisely because of the unrevealed power that it has passionately recognized in women.

Whatever one may think, I am not ignorant of the basic principles of the neo-feminist catechism, namely that if a man has the misfortune to invest a woman with a sovereignty that has traditionally been denied him, it is proof that he is on the contrary seeking to debase her. Very well, but if we do not immediately acquiesce to these acrobatics of the Amazons in the land of casuistry, perhaps we could argue that women would have nothing to lose by not ignoring the fact that there were constantly voices that dared to affirm that the invention of freedom coincided with the discovery of another female figure, and this at times when the feminine was condemned on all sides to be and remain synonymous with insignificance. The insignificance of a mould, fascinating or repulsive according to the tricks of ideology, in which one could indifferently stuff the sacred and the cursed and, for some years now, the non-existence with the loghorrea that it arouses in the psychoanalytic avant-garde. Blake, Novalis, Fourier, Breton, among others, have evidently erred in having put forward a visionary idea of woman - and one that is likely to remain so for a long time, for lack of an echo - have nevertheless revealed a feminine principle which makes woman the embodiment of a free and essential energy, and not a place within the limits of which all powers, and now neo-feminism, have tried to sequester it. And it is not useless to add, when the feminine revolt is caricatured as a formal recrimination, that this energy is free and essential only from its infinite transformations through the beings and things it invests with its power. Shouldn't women be afraid of themselves in order to take pleasure in recognizing themselves in the distressing reflections of a woman traversed by time, by desire, by fate, while a woman who crosses the path is already running to meet them on the paths of their buried memory? What will we know of love, except the dying perfume of the wave that is receding, as long as women of the same being as men consent not to become nomads of their desire?

In our age of noise without fury, I cannot blame women for not seeing what they would have to draw from this "long tradition of heresy in love" which has brought to the highest point the consciousness of a "native insubordination" to everything that prevents "embracing the whole horizon" (Radovan Ivsic). Less declarative than efficient, it has always been marked by a strange flapping at the temples of the most rigorous thought, keeping it from being identical to itself. And yet, it is up to her, unfolding like a continual discourse, alternately trembling or violent, "on the little reality", that it is always up to us to free ourselves from ageing ideas and the signs with which they encumber our lives. Would one look in vain for sensational declarations about feminine emancipation, that this sudden perceptible quiver made active at the very heart of speech or gestures, has worried authority in its phallocratic manifestations differently than the deafening professions of faith neo-feminisms. And if, in the name of what is at stake in Rimbaud, Baudelaire or Bataille, we can reproach men for having too often renounced these departures that solicited them in the depths of their love, we are appalled to see women eager for freedom, according to what is said about them, content themselves with tirelessly going around their sex with the very old lantern of literary exhibitionism in their hands.

I will be careful not to laugh at it when I am certain that it is a new way of blinding the sensibility. One need only look at the hateful allergy that, since Simone de Beauvoir, neo-feminism has seen fit to display incessantly with regard to mythical thought. This is a very vague notion for these ladies, since it seems at first to be a rhetorical convenience to denounce, with all the alienating models put into circulation by the mass media, any non-rational expression that it is impossible to fit into the narrowness of the neo-feminist universe. Thus, Annie Ophir teaches us that mythical language "does not deer il but affirms in a categorical tone" (Regards feminins, p.18), although we already knew that reportage and poetry are not the same thing.

However, in order to clarify what it means under "this categorical tone", she takes care to remind us in a footnote that myth "is linked to desire (...). According to Annie Leclerc (Parole de femme), desire is the property of men (while jouissance is the property of women). From this point of view, one can claim that myth is proper to man" (p.23). Except that men do not ask for so much, this astonishing precision is also useful because it at least has the merit of making us see that Simone de Beauvoir's susicion with regard to savage thought as well as mythical thought and quite simply poetry, is not the only fact of a particularly thick sensitivity: It is inherent in any idea that works to close the horizon in on itself. How, indeed, can we admit that ideas and words make love when beings, for fear of disappearing into otherness, think only of waging war? Can we then imagine to what miserable control words, forms, gestures will be subjected, before they have the right to be allowed to live in the den of so-called feminine sensitivity?

To get an idea of the essentially police character of the enterprise, one has only to consider the tissue of lies and stupidities straight out of Xavier Gauthier's meditations on the theme "Surrealism and Sexuality" patiently discreditating the obsessive "woman's point of view", by the myopia of the way he looks at the object of his study as well as by the confusion of the means he forces her to resort to in order to carry it out, Xavière Gauthier nevertheless aims to explain to us what the texts and works on which she works meant, obviously from a "woman's point of view". A project that may be commendable within the limits of the patronage of witches over which Xavier Gauthier reigns, but which is enough to convince us of the total incompetence of the latter to talk about poetry or any other form of lyrical expression. Is there any need to remind you of it? Poetry doesn't mean, it is, and it certainly is, somewhere other than where Xavière Gauthier stands to break the code of surrealist eneemia. For, for militant reasons that find nourishment in the most deficient art criticism, Xavier Gauthier is still to believe that the artistic approach is a convoluted way of saying that it is important for exegetes of his kind to translate into clear and definitive terms for a public supposed, therefore, incapable of understanding anything without the help of these same exegetes. And if neo-feminism has metamorphosed the good old transmission belts into transmission ribbons, let us already note that the contempt for the base has remained the same. Indeed, this suspicion of anything that is not as easily decoded as a phrase like "Pass me the salt" is not new: it is what led the Nazis to fight "degenerate art" and the Stalinists "decadent art" with the persuasive arguments that we know. We know the manoeuvre and it is easy to recognise it even if, after regeneration by race or regeneration by class, it is now allowed to be regenerated by sex, feminine it goes without saying. Finally, contemplating the final picture that Xavier Gauthier paints of surrealism - a gang of transvestite rugby players who are dying of envy and fear of being fucked - (which she managed to do by painfully explaining what a photomontage by Pierre Molinier means), we are certain that this suspicion continues to function well as a police detection of any lyrical expression, for the sole purpose of being able to put it in custody of a realism whose only reality is to defend and illustrate the ideological imperatives of the moment, here arienitude, there proletarianitude, today femininity.

Thank you Xavière Gauthier for learning that: "Surrealist art, more than any other, is exhibitionist. If the artist who hangs a painting shows something instead of his sex, the surrealist shows an erotic thing. (Surrealism and Sexuality, p. 312.) It is therefore easier to understand why surrealism indefinitely eludes you from being a little more than that, despite the intertwining of the rudiments of psychoanalysis, Marxism and philosophy with which you thought you were trapping it. It's also easy to understand why the work of Léonor Fini, whose production is in no way surreal, amazes you that it is nothing more than this crude sexual parade for erotically underdeveloped middle managers. Finally, it is easier to understand why you have become the high priestess of a feminine aesthetic that does not even show "a thing in the place of its sex" but its sex has become a thing to the point of crumbling in the junk of an overproduction of badges and organic-cultural gadgets.

So nothing moves and everything rots in the confined space of a fashion showcase revised and corrected by the official decorators of the gynocracy. This is feminine lyricism forced to go back and forth between the filth of an adornment that serves to conceal and the organic artifice that serves to exhibit. The imagination suffocates and the body becomes a false witness: this is the advent of feminist realism.

The worst chromos will follow one another to glorify the sufferings and splendours of femininity on the march.

First painting: There is no woman who, on seeing the small stain of the first menstrual blood appear on the road to Damascus of her femininity, has not had the revelation of her feminist ardour.

Second painting: Tirelessly, the most glowing evocations of rape, abortion, childbirth, when they are not simply sexual intercourse, are woven in a crown of thorns around female identity, and forbidden to leave it.

Third and last scene: Reduced to itself, the female body disappears under the smells, the smells, the humours whose invading sheet thickens only to camouflage a definitive syncopation of the mind.

I've never been here. Time rolls the jewels we have chosen for ourselves. Long ago, the spray of solitude swept the pink and white aviaries of the day to the bottom of the ocean. There are little girls who are already sleeping in matchsticks. They set off every morning wrapped up in the nakedness of their flaming silhouette. Slight of haughty destitution and un-submissive of sovereign indeterminacy, it is to them alone that they owe their journey. Is it not simply because "thinking is a poor man's job" as Jacques Rigaut was able to observe, after having travelled very quickly, at the beginning of this century, "suicide in the buttonhole"? And in the light of this insolent lucidity, isn't neo-feminist make-up in danger of swirling pitifully to reveal the shocking truth of a famine that is no more appeased by equality in difference than by equality in diversity?

I think of the famine that pushed Danièle Sarrera to dismember her life down to the still slightly pink bone of her writing pages. I think of the famine that made Laure advance, hypnotized by the emptiness of the azure and the mire combined, on the curvature of her lacquered eyelashes of ingenuous severity and distant perversity. I think of Virginia Woolf's great famine, prompting her to carve out inside the loops of time the prodigious silhouette of Orlando that has not finished slipping between our ideas like the summer light between our cloixes. Sovereign indeterminacy, not of sex, but of the quest that disperses the place, the definition, the cause on the hour of identity.

And even if most of them were to allow themselves to be convinced that this famine quickly disappears under the weight of things, the pressure of roles, the pervasiveness of genres, is it not enough that it has arisen to remain, even imperceptibly, in the heart of each one like a starry vertigo, like the whirling source of all departures? Poetry is not about anything else, and everything else is a lie, a veil or a breastplate to create mystery and repress the unseemly desire for transparency that always returns, here and there, to frighten or undermine the network of our certainties. It is driven by this famine that some people sometimes look up to the mirror of despair, denying at the same time its power of general fascination to hoist up the unsuspected wake of the One between its shatters. Women, by the grace of an ideology that has the poor charm of carving out a reserved space for them, have forgotten everything about the night waves that come to beat the fortresses of images that they would have us confuse with life. Could the immense glory of neo-feminism be . Root this lie at the heart of femininity?

"O my daughters, O my queens," who have always been made up to yourselves, is it not time that you ventured where neither you nor others expected you? Do you really think you're cheating your hunger by gathering to look like you? With its mouth full of sonorous words, its head full of totalitarian theories, its belly full of the lyricism of more or less sophisticated guard rooms, today's feminism seeks to make you lose even the memory of this famine in order to better domesticate you. The ruse is not new; it is even coarse. Is it really enough for you to be called women to the point of cretinization to give up on your enigma and prefer to bivouac indefinitely in the holiday villages of the new femininity? How long will you dread your nakedness so as not to see that neo-feminism parades with the excesses of the well-to-do, forcing you every day to sacrifice a part of yourself to serve, not your cause, but the cause of a few women servants of the old world?

It is no longer a question of serving but of leaving.

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4. From the Headless Woman to the Legless Woman

"We don't like women at all, but if we ever loved a woman we would want her to be our equal, which would be no small thing!"

Alfred JARRY.

But to go where, when, how, when feminist realism loops, criss-crosses, polifies the female body in the same way that socialist realism does before the social body? As times and genders pretend to change, we "come" to Scripture today as others once "came" to History. From one stream to another, individuality is swept away with the same contempt in the eddies of numbers. And the river of women's writing, like that of proletarian history revised and corrected, seems to exist, to advance, to take on meaning only from the multiplicity of these drownings of the One in the collective. So that the magnitude of their respective flows could be very accurately measured by the quantity of wrecks that Pun and the other ostensibly carry. Wrecks of all the missed voyages that float to betray even the memory of them. Wrecks that press against each other to become obstacles to all departures. Look closely, the caravan always passes over the fixed planes of deceived hope, only it is the feminine that must now be barked.

It remains to be seen, however, why Scripture is now taking over from History in the feminine avatar of the great cretinizing companies of this century. Just as access to history earned all those who were convinced that they had been excluded from it a place of choice in the prison of the most mediocre timelessness, so would not the "coming to Scripture" ensure that women, suffering from their insignificance, could blithely go round in circles in the prison of the gyrating signs of femininity?

However, it is not necessary to look much at the end of the spectrum to see the history of the women's revolt as the epic of a body in search of a head of which we have obstinately deprived, of which we still persist in depriving it. Not from a disirious body to appropriate the heads of other macs, from a body in search of its own cerebralization. Thus remarkable heads appeared above the fray, that of Sappho whirling like a solar shell, that of Heloise opening murderously at night, that of Teresa of Avila tangled up like a comet, that of Virginia Woolf drifting like a smile in the equinox..... Only, from their extreme diversity to find in common an indefinable strangeness, we know too well that these heads had the regrettable defect of pleasing neither men nor women, except as a curiosity destined to embellish a weightless representation of the collective body. A subtle operation of decollation that has the double result of throwing your head into the basket of a body that does not exist and of seizing your body in the mold of a head that has not been yours for a long time. So it is unfortunate to say the least to see the bureaucrats of femininity continue to push the wheel of this disjointed mediocrity with their detestable theory of the woman-alibi that implicitly reproaches all these women for not having been where they should have been, that is, for having tried to wrest their bodies from that of enslaved femininity. Beyond the obvious demagogy of the reproach, I see in it the sign of a constant and appalling feminine rite to deny and probably to repress this supreme effort of a head which, in order not to abandon to the traps of generality the body that has engendered it, shows itself to be most attentive to taking into account the metamorphosis of the latter; a transfigured body, a body unique by the very fact of its own cerebralization. Inviduality is always at the price of this desertion of the average body, be it masculine or feminine, and especially if it is feminine.

So, it would perhaps be less urgent than today's feminists to concoct a hagiography that is as deceptive as it is edifying, not to pass over in silence what atrocious feminine complicity has always benefited from a repression that we like to call phallocratic in order not to recognize in it the aggression of numbers, and not of gender, against those who try to escape their heaviness. As for the analyses according to which women's economic dependence explains why they have traditionally been able to act as guardians of order at the same time as those of the home, I only agree with them very much in considering the determination of the majority of them to defend, in all possible forms, a sedentary lifestyle which would plunge its roots into the depths of their nature. Strange complicity of feminine specificity and the infinite repression of feminine revolt, the mystery of which it would be time to unravel, instead of foolishly claiming the same specificity that has always been granted to women, and for good reason. For, after all, those heads which some had the audacity to invent for themselves in the destitution of their revolt, if it seemed simpler in times of crisis to cut them off like that of Olympe de Gouges, were they not rather employed themselves to tirelessly disturb the body on which they depended, to the point of leaving the choice to all the rebels - nature helping as if by a miracle - to bury themselves in them painfully or to leave it tragically? Was it not because they had been deprived of the alibi of being unique, because they had been plunged back into their generic femininity, that many of these women were driven to madness or suicide? It is this systematic confinement of women in the darkest organic labyrinth that the history of women's revolt has never ceased to oppose as the most fascinating attempt at escape, that of a body in search of its imaginary space, that of a prey running madly in search of its shadow.

And yet, all those to whom women today owe their ability to escape the ebb and flow of a femininity that is always artificially undulating on the fence of successive norms, this shadow, they have only discovered at the edge of their gestures by fleeing the beaten paths of their nature. Not that Flora Tristan, Louise Michel or Virginia Woolf ever refused their femininity, but each invented it from her own impossibility of living in a world that constantly worked to reduce women to the lowest common denominator of their nature. Each time, the same inaugural rupture decided the path of each one, without being able to say that it was specifically feminine; on the contrary, it is part of a rejection common to all beings who, at one time or another in their lives, have trouble with the world. Only the conditions of the ensuing adventure differ and, along the way, femininity would find a way to invent itself in the multiplicity of detours necessary to constantly lighten the weight of a so-called organic fatality, to escape that force of inertia that we never miss to say is natural in order to insidiously bring woman back into the prison of her body.

So, faced with this prospect of new stirrings and unknown movements, in the course of which the prey is freed until it is no more than the concrete reflection of the shadow, how can we fail to see that neo-feminism constitutes the most catastrophic regression when the ideology of femininity develops like an immense struggle to herd women into the deceptive uniformity of their nature? How can we not shudder at the appalling news of the enterprise, which lies only in the fact that women themselves are now the volunteer touts of the oldest and most abject attempt to sequester femininity? Failing to go in search of its shadow, the prey changes its claws; And in this clawed century, those of femellitude are as good as those of phallocracy, with this exception, however, that, assuring us that women have no more shade than head, but an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent sex, some leading women stubbornly insist on grafting the heads of masters onto a female body thus definitively enslaved to itself.

One would have to be very distracted to let oneself be imposed by the spectacular character of the operation: exhausted from rolling like a bullet in pursuit of a body that it only encounters at the end of its course, at the bottom of ravines of suffering or in the sewers of torture, did not the heads of masters wait for this regeneration? One only has to see with what good grace she shines her lights today like so many watchtowers on a feminine interiority giving itself over to her, bound hand and foot. This indulgence is not surprising, but neo-feminism is succeeding in doing what has never really been achieved before: in intimately convincing women to abandon their heads and legs in order to find their equilibrium by finding their equilibrium by finding themselves on the edge of their lives: curled up in the sacred lair of their wombs. I spoke of regression, I was below the truth when one is no longer content to take the prey with its mysteries but is already dismembered in full light. I mean in the light of the noisy obscurantism of our time and which, in this case, has made it possible to transform the famous "black continent" into a fool's supermarket in less than ten years.

Indeed, it is in vain to attribute to this light any other quality than that of blinding, and no matter how hard I can't believe my eyes, my ears, my skin, my loins, my waist, my legs, the feminine universe still fits in the same piggy bank, despite the considerable reversal wrought by the neo-feminist revolution: instead of being placed at the bottom of this piggy bank, The little slot has been opening up for a few years at the top and we delight in showing off what we used to delight in concealing. The eternal return of lies, the eternal youth of simulacrum, prudery and parade encompass, envelop, enclose the same cavernous fear of nudity.

Of this nakedness, I have not finished speaking: it is this that emerges at the forefront of thought, freeing the body-object from its shells of fear, as it is this that shines through between the deepest quivering of a body that sometimes refuses to become the coffin of life that ideologies aim to make of it. It is undoubtedly of her that Georges Bataille dreamed when he confided to us, "I think like a girl takes off her dress." It was also she to whom Danièle Sarrera ran to see her appear like a dawn catastrophe on the verge of her life: "I am a window in the palace of windows; I don't separate anything. In front of it, there is nothing to see. Behind it there is nothing to see." And I would like us to keep in mind an unbearable confession of this transparency, of this nothingness of nakedness, so that we can imagine that this is a merciless struggle against the fatality of appearances. I know of no other word than that of nudity - at best denudation - to account for this desire to snatch beings and things from the gangue of all pretences under which, for the sake of psychic convenience, we consent to keep them prisoners.

However, I do not dislike the fact that the evocation of this nakedness, which is so unphysical, immediately brings to mind that of the body, for, of all appearances, the body, and more particularly the female body, has never ceased to serve as a means of trafficking from their presumed fatality. Having always depended on this destiny reserved for the body, having embodied to the point of derisory its enslavement to procreative, erotic or only economic utility, the history of femininity is too tragically linked to the denial of this nudity for us to appreciate at its true value a neo-feminism that perpetuates it by spreading the misery of its make-up on the walls of feminine interiority. Without stopping at the composition of my body, these of the most traditional ones, I will first examine the three-stage make-up operation used by the ideology of femininity and how, at the same time, the coming of women to Scripture constitutes a leap forward in the tradition of the feminine simulacrum.

The first step is to apply a foundation that is likely to reveal a monopolistic structure that, here as elsewhere, comes to the rescue of impotence. Safe, colourful and embossed base. Feminine speech is said to be normative of all body language, as Annie Leclerc does not hesitate to teach us: "It is not to us that we can do the blow of separating soul and body; It doesn't work. This divorce was never of our own making. There was not a line of our hand that was not of the body proposed, of the body tried. (The Coming to Scripture, p.133.) So that, listening to the boast of this corporatious writing, the singularity of women's Scripture, the foundations of which both nevertheless continue to search desperately for, would be found in the sad and constant wonder of each writer about her own discourse: Mme. Jourdain discovers that she has always already spoken the language of the totality. Which could be, if this language of totality, like all totalitarian language, did not exhaust itself by tirelessly explaining to us that it knows no limits. A considerable advantage, let's agree: you only have to read one of these texts to have read them all. Thus, when Madeleine Gagnon reveals to us: "on corps est mots" (La venir à l'écriture, p. 63), Hélène Cixous confides to us: "Life makes text from my body. I am already of the text" (p. 57), while Annie Leclerc praises this

"text indefinitely sketched out from the body to the carried, from the body to the scream, from the body to the ground, from the body to smell, light, sound, from the body to space, from the body to memory, from the intimate, immense, obscure and certain body to body" (p. 133).

The flesh is decidedly sad when there is only one book left to read. And it is not the least merit of this diversity in uniformity to show it to us obviously.

However, the most troubling thing is that no one – and I mean no one – has come forward to challenge this neo-feminist claim to speak the language of the whole. Could it be because the bureaucrats of femininity have thus found an unhoped-for way to bring women back in herds to their organic den, or is it because men and women, increasingly despairing of ever recognizing themselves in the skin of sorrow that has been made of their bodies, are no longer a spare skin away? I will not venture to dismiss the scandal of their "natural" detention at the precise moment when everyone is exhausted by half-heartedly trying the summaries of the body that are offered to them. Thus, on the one hand, the inability of current feminine thinking to emerge from the meanders of the organic is correlative with that of a Western tradition, stemming from Judeo-Christian dualism, to think of the body other than under the sign of heartbreak, of misfortune when it is not of a curse. But, on the other hand, it is enough that this tradition, having denied the body too much, begins to lose its purpose for this feminine infirmity to have every chance of passing for the model of health, or at least for the beginning of an awareness of the body finally lived under the sign of reconciliation. Without much difficulty, moreover, since, by seeing the fragmentary images of a body caught in the nets of use, hypertrophied or atrophied according to its successive specializations, we become above all sensitive to the absence of what could reconcile us with this body without really knowing the nature of this lack. And how do we know when the extreme diversity of these specializations serves as much to familiarize us with this enslavement of the body as to dissuade us from seeking to put an end to it? Every day becomes an opportunity to widen the range of this misfortune. What would we complain about? Its variegated structure ensures that there is something for everyone.

Of all these specializations, that of jouissance, the latest addition to the general catalogue of a thousand and one ways of reducing the body to its simplest physical expression, is unquestionably the most gratifying: imposing itself as the specialization of the totality, does it not serve to cover, better than any other, the reality of separation? And it is far from indifferent that neo-scripters today boast of holding a monopoly on it, obviously through a Scripture that they are not afraid to define as "jouissance-texts, in perpetual extension" (Michèle Montrelay, Witches, n° 7, p. 44). This monopolization of self-indulgent specialization alone consigns the neo-feminist revolution to the realm of simulacrum. It is a simulacrum of a totality that leads woman back into the vanity of her alleged strangeness, but also a simulacrum of a totality that contributes to aggravating a general crisis of the body, by blindly betting on the process of specialization that allows it to take hold with the grip that we know. Let the sceptics listen to Hélène Cixous:

"Is it not enough for our women's waters to flow for our wild and populous texts to be written without calculation? We ourselves in writing like fish in water, like the senses in our languages and the transformation of our unconscious." (The Coming to Scripture, p. 62.)

Is it not enough to dip one's pen in the inkwell of the female sex to go away repeating: "I write, therefore I enjoy; I enjoy and write" and for the simulacra of Scripture to beget a Scripture of simulacrum?

Because to make people believe that they live "directly in touch with the writing, without relays. In me, the song but which, as soon as it is broadcast, accesses the language: a flow that is immediately textual" (Hélène Cixous, p. 62), these Lorelei of the totality had to make themselves reclusive from the most furious feminine interiority that is expected. And it is with feathers and antlers that we see them jostling to reintegrate the most traditional shelter of femininity: their bellies that they will strive to make desperately productive, as women have always been commanded to do. It is a question of survival when the image of the new femininity seeks to impose itself as the exclusive fruit of these entrails, but also a question of make-up, and this is the second stage of the operation I have mentioned. The crucial moment on which the success of the enterprise depends: it is the enhancement of the part for the whole, a totalitarian trick to enlarge the belly disproportionately with a fashionable shadow placed on the whole of the sensitive life and supporting the arch of reflection. Admittedly, the result is astounding: the specialization is completely concealed by the enormity of the claim. Wandering in the night of the absent body, how could only most of them not let themselves be dazzled by these spotlights on the belly, coloured with a garish red that is found to the tips of the fingernails, to the tip of the pen: "The overflow of femininity overflows you since you are men. But are you sure you're human? (Hélène Cixous, p.41)!

In these times of scarcity of meaning and inflation of signs, it is difficult to contain the rise of women's inks! Besides, who could accuse neo-feminist ventriloquists of forging body language? Who could blame them for lying and lying to themselves at a time when the existence of the body tends more and more to be confused with that of the object, whose complacent circumvention or furious tearing to pieces constitutes the alternative of a thought rushing into its powerlessness to grasp what it apprehends as foreign to itself? For such is the misfortune of Scripture today, and the little space in which it consents to develop as the Scripture of misfortune, in the shadow of which, despised or exalted, the body always dies of being reduced to itself, while signs proliferate for want of ever finding incarnation. Hence the incontinent theory of flows irrigating the arid body of Scripture and filling, more recently, vaginal inkwells.

Hence also the little trouble of the feminine Scripture to make its non-existence exist in the midst of a formal insignificance of the best quality, under which, however, the masters have found and still find the means of availing themselves of the suffering of their victims in order to root their power in the soil of misery. Let us only consider the indecent exploitation of Artaud and all the possible "suicides of society", which are dug up on demand in order to allow everyone to sacrifice without risk, to a rhetoric of separation through which illness insidiously imposes itself as the norm of intensity. And the literary fortune of this astonishing "who loses wins" is conceivable only because the reality of the body is constantly denied, whether it is that of pain or that of pleasure. It is obviously in the field of eroticism that the lie is most revealing: the compulsive representation of a wounded, tortured, torn body, gives a very accurate account of the masters' taste for playing with bodies or as a bloody puzzle; it would even seem to slavishly conform to it by retaining only the interesting figures of dried blood, once the blocks of pain or the shreds of distress hastily thrown into the dustbin of History or Scripture, it is the same. Thus from being textual and never passionate, this Scripture condemns itself to be nothing more than an unbearable rumour around a body that has become obsessive, because it is deprived of everything that could make it vibrate and discover itself in the metamorphoses of its analogical shadows.

And this is where the coming of women to Scripture takes on its full meaning and that we arrive at the final touch of this makeup: the one that is supposed to give it the radiance of naturalness. By asphyxiating the female body with the smoke and mirrors of the Same, neo-feminism also deprives it of its imaginary space. Henceforth rising as an obstacle and no longer as a lack, this body will be able to shape the dreary landscape of Scripture with all its force of inertia until the horizon sinks beneath its gravidity, which we never hesitate to say primordial: "For me, there is nothing lacking in this height.

"It is there that this mother fantastically engulfs the phallus child to leave only your penis headlight that suddenly rises from this replaced story. Her clitoris sparkles. Seeing my hands, my mouth caress him to sum up three children together in pleasure. (Madeleine Gagnon, The Coming of Writing, p. 99.) Is that clear? I can't claim it, but perhaps enough to see how the female body - I mean the belly - swells here from having been fattened by the pen of Scripture and how the words, caught in this humoral centrifuge, will enter into the composition of the most effective emulsion to conceal the bedsores of a body driven to the immobility of its organic indigence. This is the ultimate artifice thanks to which the bloated nature of the subject matter and the glutiness of the style allow women's writing to claim a natural fullness and periodicity.

Also, to be formally reversed, the relationship to the body of feminine Scripture is no less deceptive than that of the textualizing rhetoric that has been going on for a long time. However, I will give it credit for having created the framework for tearing the body to pieces, whereas the claim of feminine Scripture to totality rests entirely on an activity of ravauding that diligently follows the empty spaces highlighted by this same canvas as figures of separation. Thus, on page 84 of The Coming to Scripture, you will find all the necessary explanations to carry out for yourself this work of patience that will throw you into the adventure of The Feminine Scripture:

"Write to me and let all my history flow in the infinitive. To write to myself endlessly, to let myself be fibred in the consonants, to relax in my body through, underneath, above, all the perforated tissues. Darning them, taking up all the threads at once"

Which will perhaps also allow you to understand the neo-feminists' promotional insistence on their coming to Scripture: in the narrowness of this textual domain, at least, the revolution would be underway since the feminine fullness would thus come to fill the masculine emptiness, without upsetting anything. Let us note this in passing. This is not without contributing to the declared exemplarity of this rhetorical guerrilla war, since the structural conformity of neo-feminist production to the cultural stagnation that has marked recent years - from Tel Quel to hyperrealism by disorienting itself through the fantastic, neo-realist, conceptual variants of the same miserabilism - unexpectedly serves the feverish neo-feminist concern for redundancy in the It is a grotesque idea that one has of oneself as soon as the world is reduced to being nothing more than a complacent mirror. Not that every woman who comes to Scripture, as Hélène Cixous, Madeleine Gagnon, Annie Leclerc and their emulators prolixly testify, does not seek to show off her thousand and one faces, her thousand and one bodies, not differentiating herself from the foot-gun who wades in the textual onesie. It is the banal matter of literary fatuity. But when this ridiculous parade is doubled in the feminine form by the pride of upstart owners, tirelessly ready to give you a tour of their text and their sex, we come to ask ourselves this monstrous question: would he be in !' What is the essence of femininity to interpose oneself at all departures?

I would be remiss if I were to paint an outrageous picture, because the issue is so serious. But I find myself having the greatest fears when, one after the other, the neo-scripters seem to manifest a very curious desire for a pen to describe to us in detail how they wipe, wash, peel, knead, knead their Scripture. And the recipe that Madeleine Gagnon gives us, from sex to ear, is a perfect sample of the immense literary cookbook that is being written:

"My body is scattered writings. Stretch them out, relax them and pick them up for me. Each of the parts, text to be constituted. I take my breasts as an example. With both hands I work them. They speak into my hands that write them. They and slip me between dissimilar stories" (p. 84).

Having said that, I wonder where the pen went.

This is perhaps an unseemly question, but it is nevertheless the only one that women's writing really asks, for the reason that neo-feminism seems to be reduced from a literary mediocrity that is beginning to do well. How could it be otherwise when, constantly coming to give its head against the walls of the Same, this Scripture proves incapable of opening passages of meaning between beings and things? Her soul hope is textual and that is why this genitalization will merge with the advance of this portable pen in the mass of a Scripture that will find its feminine specificity to close more and more in on itself and thus to allow itself to be determined entirely as the envelope of this little phallic substitute, which has become invisible. Needless to say, this genitalization is not contrary to the enterprise of desexualization of which I have previously spoken, but it promotes it and contributes to its phantasmatic installation since it aims to create a fantasy without a textual reconstruction of the female sex alone, since any representation of the world must therefore conform to this hypothesis."hollow place" that feminine Scripture claims to fill: "The cave, both support and sign of the hollow. The woman's body, considered as the matrix of Scripture, of what is traced in her, in the crucible of her enjoyment " (Claude Boukobza-Hajlblum, Witches, n° 7, p. 47). The neo-feminist hatred for the very idea of representation is easier to understand. The purpose of women's Scripture is only to impose one to the detriment of all the others, this "Mississippi-belly" as Victoria Therame so modestly puts it (Witches, no. 7, p. 50).

Under these conditions, it is hardly necessary to refer to the texts to know that feminine fullness rings hollow, that there is not, and will not be, feminine poetry as long as women stubbornly believe in a feminine specificity that condemns them to go around in circles around themselves. This is also confirmed by Eight Centuries of Feminine Poetry (Anthology by Jeanne Moulin), which falls like a stone into the pond of current feminist pretensions: with a few exceptions, this feminine poetry would have great difficulty in passing for anything other than an affected translation of the discourse of ordinary femininity, always wrapping itself around itself in adornment, in sailing, in mystery... And I don't think I'm venturing to think that it is this traditional narcissistic exploitation of the world by writing femininity that Virginia Woolf attacks in A Room of One's Own, which neo-feminists brandish today without having read it, it seems: "(...) It is harmful to one who can write to think of his sex. It is harmful to be purely a man or a woman; You have to be woman-masculine or male-female. It is harmful for a woman to lay even the slightest accent on an injustice; to plead even a cause with reason; somehow, to knowingly speak like a woman. And "nefarious" is not a figure of rhetoric; for every deliberately tendentious writing is you at death, ceases to be fruitful, sleeps. Even if this writing seems for a day to be full of force and masterfully done, it must wither at nightfall and cannot grow in the minds of others. In order to be fulfilled, the art of creation requires a certain collaboration between woman and man to take place in the mind. A certain marriage of opposites must be consummated (...) The writer, I thought, once his experiment is over, must be able to surrender and let his mind celebrate his notes in the dark" (p.141). Can we say more discreetly the misery of all committed literature, and the misfortune of feminine engagement in Scripture? This is why I doubt that Shakespeare's astonishing sister, to whom Virginia Woolf dreams of "offering a new birth", of giving her the opportunity "to take that human form which she has so often had to renounce" (p.154), will ever recognise herself in this proclamation of a certain Marie-Ange Guillaume: "Starting from the nucleus and knitting branches in the shape of arms. To start writing, you have to fame (...) It's not about vertigo. (...) No, it is a question of this nucleus, to which ramifications must be knitted at all costs or it will become, irretrievably, a forgotten writing. (Witches, No. 7, p.16.)

I didn't ask for so much to dissuade the reader from any malice on my part. But after this revelation, which all feminine textuality illustrates, I look for what women in the process of liberation can reproach the male gaze, apart from its scopic function, of course, since we remember it, the gaze is a phallic function. It would probably not be reproached for reducing half of humanity to a collection of more or less desirable objects (we are all sexual objects and that is the least we can do) than for having carved up feminine reality according to a useful and simplifying dotted line that retains and holds all femininity within the limits of a containing body.

A piggy bank woman within the reach of all budgets, a trunk woman within the reach of all fears. Organized circuit of appetite and disgust, birth and small death, nourishment and putrefaction, origin and end. Lightweight LunaPark transportable with the brilliance of the exterior reassuring the darkness of the interior. And everything else being only accessories, the head and legs go away in curls, in adornments, in clouds, around this pocket abyss. A woman without a head, a woman without legs, malleable to the extreme of being confined within herself: she is taken by the neck, she becomes a land of conquest and exile; we take it by the waist, it becomes an hourglass to ride the passing of time; We take it by the sex, it becomes a plant whose flowering we will jealously watch in the talons of desire. So, if the official history of the female body is hopelessly caught within the limits of these successive hunting scenes, sometimes splendid coats of arms of a body embraced in the glass of its reflections, how revolutionary would an ideology of femininity be that completes this confinement of its blissful circularity to impose an image of the woman cul-de-jatte, which in no way invalidates the all-too-famous formula of St. Thomas Aquinas: a "Tota mulier in utero"? Would women have used the very slow lifting of the Christian curse from their bodies only to become the inexhaustible guides of a prison which they pride in not deserting, and to find themselves authorized to make themselves the guardians zealous by the mere miracle of their coming to Scripture?

Could this be the neo-feminist revolution, looking at everything through the smallest end of the textual lens and claiming loudly that we see the unknown lands of female sensitivity, while the landscape is only modified by the pusillanimity of the point of view? I am willing that "a woman occupying a function in relation to theoretical elaboration that is both a mute exterior supporting all systematicism and a (still) silent maternal soil on which all foundation is nourished, does not have to relate to it in a way that has already been coded by theory," as Luce Irigaray is careful to remind us in her Speculum (p. 458) and with that grace so little theoretical which is only hers, but this is no reason why each of the past, present or foreseeable elongations of the paper phallus of the theory should correspond to a deepening of an equal length ofThe Textual Den of Femininity. However, this is what is happening and opens up to women in struggle, it must be admitted, undeniable horizons of the kind of this one: "To bury oneself under someone's skirt is the metaphor for understanding that with the enjoyment of the clitoris, one touches a capsizing in the historical body of the species." If I, it's because I'm reversing something of my balance, of the role that enlists me. I reverse the order of the words. Syllables. I overtake Adam on his left. I split with my smooth belly button. And it's my sure page" (Nicole Brossard, Witches, no. 7, p. 46). From this certain page, we at least acquire the certainty that we are at least certain that we are far from having finished with the tribulations of this untimely pen, especially since in order to make up for the lost millennia of non-"smooth" navel (there is a subtlety that escapes me) and to occupy without further delay the sacred space of Scripture, we are doubling down: "Speech accelerates more and more, jostles in slips of the tongue. Stuttering. Twirl, pieces of spiral torn from the spring. She ends up not saying anything anymore without ceasing to be active. (Michèle Bloch, Witches, no. 7, p. 16. Emphasis added.) So woe betide anyone who dares to find the most classic definition of small talk! Woe betide anyone who is a little put off by this logorhea of femininity, it is a question of: "Do you think we could say to them, do you think I would be able to explain to them..." (...)

Hydrewriting

"Pleasure, too, of words that rise, staring to the point of vertigo, the whirling of life, the words eroticized, because it is only a sensual creation. My little ones, my book, I have not given birth to you in sorrow but in the euphoria of the senses, the joy of a body in trance, joy; in a tremendous aquatic orgasm, rhythm like the flow of blood and the flow of breath. The words gushed with the water from my superb belly, it exults, it squirts its cry always the same, it I give myself life, death, life"
(Françoise Fournier-Tauran, Witches, no. 7, p. 18).

This is a very useful controlled designation that allows us to keep all our illusions about the diversity of these neo-feminist products launched with a great deal of warlike vagaries on the literary market: "Writing is a struggle, we will be told who we are, what we will be when we have spoken enough..... women. (Frédérique Witches, no. 7, p. 17).

Only, judging by the inexhaustible quality of this "hydre-writing", there is no hope, in the eternal return of this tidal wave, that any saturation point will appear as a lifeline. Here we are, condemned for a long time, it seems, to the glutiness of every man for himself and misery for all; And this will continue as long as separation continues to be exploited in such a frenzied way as to do everything possible to prevent it from being averted, as neo-feminism is relentlessly trying to do. Thus, for the time being, it is completely irrelevant whether most men seek to account for this separation with gestures, language, fragmentary images, or whether women seek to disguise it in generic fullness, instead of both of them being passionate about defying it. Here and there, doesn't the same fiction of sensible autonomy serve to convince us that being is restricted to a sampling limited by the same gender imperialism?

It does not matter, therefore, whether the Same is affected by a masculine or a feminine sign, since its supremacy is moreover, in both cases, most doubtful: in this triumphalist perspective, has not the male sex always been forced to fantastically gorge itself on all the conquests it has not made? while the female sex, always obeying the same movement, but in reverse, has never ceased to dig itself phantasmatically behind simulacra that are so many evasions?

It is to be perpetuated but above all to be revived, with the heavy weaponry of modern cretinization, this tradition of separation and pretence that the ideology of femininity owes its incredible success. To talk too much about a neo-feminist revolution is to forget that it is a market revolution, consisting of a clever redistribution of the junk of the eternal feminine. At a time when it was above all eager to be mystified by the charms of demystification, it was unthinkable that the female sex should remain the mine of mysteries it had been until then. Everything was ready for a few women, combining the irresistible virtues of militancy and solicitation, to exploit the mysteries of this mine. They arrived carried by the women's revolt and managed to circumvent this revolt.

It is no longer surprising to see neo-scripters feverishly grasping the pen as if it were a pickaxe in an attempt to deepen the representation of the female sex; On these forced labours of femininity depends the glorious edification of feminine identity. At the same time, all that can still remain of the artisanal, allusive, approximate production that had spontaneously developed around it, starting from the feminine mystery, is in the process of being blithely requisitioned, stored, re-evaluated to be ventilated on the conveyor belt of an industrious "woman's word". The complete collection of the magazine Witches constitutes a very detailed catalogue of the nature and quality of what is offered in the aisles and counter-aisles of this new Bonheur des Dames, and it will be seen that by opening chains of vaginal lairs for consumers of clitoral brimborions, neo-feminism proposes to women nothing less than to self-manage their misery at the same time as their mystery. As long as they, through weakness or distraction, let themselves be caught up in the force of attraction of this brand-new uterus, they will find everything in the neo-feminist Samaritan: giant bottles of menstrual ink to have the feminine pen, a large choice of pot-bellied heads to give birth to child-books, indestructible word-teats so as not to stop parsing and then, and then, this exciusive veneer of pleasure is supposed to sleep a stroke of brilliance to the flattest sentences: "My tongue is not dry and I will write all that saliva I have left. I slowly stroke my. Her drips from the vagina. I bring my fingers closer, slide them in and feel the scars of childbirth on the walls. They hurt then; Today they tickle and laugh. (Madeleine Gagnon, La Venu à l'écriture, p. 73.) And Madeleine Gagnon is far from being the only satisfied and overwhelmed customer of this neo-feminist supermarket. There is no doubt that every woman will find in it all that constitutes the panoply, which is very limited, of the new femininity, provided that she abandons herself, body and soul, to the textual energy of this matrix of distribution where she is promised to be fed, housed, heated, washed... With the added bonus of fidelity is the revelation of a feminine periodicity that seems to have always taken care to pass off as natural: the miraculous virtue of curing the taste of travellers.

Besides, what need do women have to worry about this tension towards the other, this bet against emptiness, this distant famine that decides the greatest departures? Here they are, once again captive to the banalized labyrinth of femininity: "And all women feel, in the darkness or the light, what no man can experience in their place, the incisions, the births, the explosions in the libido, the ruptures, the losses, the pleasures in our rhythms. My unconscious is plugged into your unconscious. (Hélène Cixous, The Coming to Scripture, p. 61.) Here they are threatened by the most insane stuffing of sex, in comparison with which any phallic taking possession proves to be very ephemeral (the phallus always withdraws), when we consider the bludgeoning of providential and textual breastfeeding which seems to constitute the absolute weapon of this colonization of the feminine space: "This is why, how, who, what, I write: milk. Strong food (emphasis added). Giving without return. Writing, too, is milk. I feed. And like all those who feed, I am fed. A smile feeds me. Mother, I'm a daughter: if you smile at me, if you feed me, I'm a girl. Goodness of good exchanges. (Hélène Cixous, The Coming to Writing, p. 54.) Wouldn't it be to prevent women from one day letting themselves be poisoned by the mush of that Picabia dreamed of The Girl Born Without a Mother? But there are dreams which the prevailing mediocrity strives to destroy with a relentlessness which it always takes care to pass off as natural:

"Now listen to what your body didn't dare to let come to the surface.

"Mine says to me, 'I am the daughter of milk and honey.' If you breastfeed me, I am your child, without ceasing to be a mother to those I feed, and you are my mother. Metaphor? Yes. No. (Hélène Cixous, p.55.)

Can we still speak of regression when the repeated assaults of this forced breastfeeding leave you only the leisure to stammer a few "areu" of acquiescence? In fact, like Blédine Jacquemaire, neo-feminism is a second Mother and every woman, writing to feed my presumed feminine gluttony with her pen, is a mother to me. We thought we were done with the obscenities of the mother country. Not at all: a flipping of the skirts, and here is the mother's homeland silently closing the mucous membrane of its borders on the feminine.

It's a strange land of self-righteousness where the service Amazons, obviously "fat" with their self-righteousness, work tirelessly to teach women to enjoy (again and again) their self-righteousness. Although we call ourselves witches, they are not witches: as usual, in what way is it enough to believe in such a case, in order to swallow the snake snake of mothers of the feminine Scripture:

"Where I am, I'm there too, and the others too. And love is to want to comfort one another in each other, certain knowledge.

"But why you then, and not some one else? Oh it's very simple, it's what you want. It is so rare, so precious, at least to be able to believe it" (Annie Leclerc, La Venu à l'écriture, 132.)

It is decidedly only faith that saves in this nursery of Scripture from the sufficiency and sufficiency of Scripture where indefatigable ingenious women of the feminine soul, whose gelatinous omnipotence is reminiscent of Dali's "Hitler nurses", arrive "more and more numerous, more exposed, naked, strong, new" (Hélène Cixous, p. 60), to smooth out the thorny question of the transition from quantity to quality under the steamroller of their triumphant flesh: "Because there is room in you for them. The more they are loved, the more they grow and expand, the more they come closer, the more they show themselves as never before, the more they sow and raise femininity. (...) Close your eyes and love them: you are at home in their lands, they visit and visit, their genitals lavish their secrets.

What you didn't know, they learn and teach them what you learn from them. If you love them, each woman is added to you, and you become more of a woman. (Hélène Cixous, p. 60.) It is so beautiful, it is so great, it is so generous, this promiscuity of the blind, that I hardly dare to express a slight doubt here: why then should this "plufemme," "woman among all women," if I have understood correctly, be the same being as the Virgin Mary, superwoman of sinister memory, be a miracle, while the slightest superman of barriers is an abomination?

Only, as soon as I don't doubt it, I scream, are women really geese to let themselves be subjected any longer to this force-feeding of stupidities passed through the mill of debility, and floating in a syrup of banalities in liquefaction? And why do they take good care never to see swimming in this repulsive mixture, the pink poison of the most degrading dependence, the odious sugar of parental dependence on numbers? What incurable disease are they afflicted with that they allow themselves to be so easily convinced that it is enough for them to exist in order to be? The "plufemmes" of the feathers may command us to close our eyes and open our mouths, but I don't eat that bread.

All the more so since, opening one's eyes to this space engorged with viscous satisfaction, one must resign oneself to never seeing "wandering in the distance the golden eyes of the lionesses" with which Renée Vivien illuminated the splendid night of the Amazons:

"The shadow is heavy with echoes, luke-warmness and [rales... Brightness draws nearer, and their eyes rattle 27.)

They seem to be waiting for a shiver of awakening.

The brightness draws nearer, and their pale eyes Victoriously reflect the sun" (Ashes and Dust. p. 27.)

What has happened to make this "air free from the dawn", which a few women at the beginning of this century had been able to bring to life from their sumptuous wanderings on the borders of themselves, now polluted with all the miasma of totalitarianism and the formidable thickness of its perceptible fallout, risking to weigh down the horizons of femininity for a long time? What has happened, then, if not an appalling normalization of the strangeness of a femininity that was just beginning to recognize itself in the surprise of its movements and in the impudence of its relictions? Was not the insipid feminine mystery beginning to make her soul cretinizing so that woman would bare in the arms of her lovers the multiplicity of pretences and in the feelings that haunt her? And freed from the obscure threat of this mystery, wouldn't man finally be able to remove his cuirass of prosaic scars to regain his polymorphous nakedness under the caresses of those who were ready to love him?

Wasn't the great hallucinatory tide of love really taking shape because, thanks to a few – among whom neo-feminism is now striving to recognize its worst enemies, from romanticism to surrealism to psychoanalysis – it became difficult to believe any longer that men were "well-defined men" and women were "well-defined women" (René Nelli, Erotica and Civilization, p. 192). And if some would have made us access this fundamental doubt by contenting themselves with shaking, and not necessarily pulverizing, the prison of genres, the only thing that matters is the movement that makes this turmoil arise in the heart of ourselves to slowly or abruptly unveil other landscapes. This is why it seems to me of no importance that Benoîte Groult stubbornly pursues his Poujadist rearguard action by sorting out the good from the bad men in Le féminisme when it is a matter of a shaking of sensibility along which women but also men could begin to see, possibly to love, as far away as possible from the misery that now takes the place of their identity: "The duration of a spark, the individual and the non-individual have become interchangeable and the terror of the mortal limitation of the self in space seems to be cancelled. Nothingness has ceased to be: when all that man is not, is added to man, it is then that he seems to be himself. It seems to exist, with its most singularly individual data, and independently of itself, in the Universe. It is in these moments of "solution" that fear without terror can be transformed into that feeling of existence elevated to power: to appear to participate - even beyond birth and death - in the tree, in the "you" and in the destiny of necessary chances, to remain almost "oneself" on the other side. (Hans Bellmer, Anatomy of the Image.)

Never before has the wind of possibility suffered, women no longer deplore to see themselves emerge others on the shore of their pleasure: ir and run to join their unobstructed but still superbly dripping silhouette with the multiple reflections of the amorous gaze. One even came to suppose that the feminine, freed from its ancestral fetters, would blossom elsewhere and enrich with its wanderings the voluptuous curve of passionate attraction playing with itself and playing endlessly with sexual polarities to open up between beings, whether male or female, whether they are similar or dissimilar, the unexplored fork of the "passionate metamorphoses" of which René Nelli speaks very aptly (Erotic and Civilization, 185). One could even hope even more, to "slip from one order to one (Guy Hocquengheim, L'après-mai des faunes, p. 193) and to hear them assure us that "luxury can be free because it is priceless" (p. 203), if neo-feminism had not transformed neo-feminism from the very dilapidated small and medium-sized enterprises of the feminine mystery into a distribution chain for supermarkets. No more touching misdeeds and dangerous derailments, everything would be able to return to the order of number, exchange and value.

Undeniably, the business of the feminine mystery was collapsing alarmingly for the reasons I have just mentioned, obscurely exacerbated by a disturbing overlap of roles in a society caught in its own spectacular trap. No matter how much traditional femininity was stirred up, reduced to being nothing more than the kaleidoscope of a shattered present, it could not give what was demanded of it: it was impossible for it to organize at every moment and in a coherent way, the contradictory images (mother, lover, worker, whore, sister, accomplice) of a feminine reality in crisis. In this case, the abundance of images reflected only an image of deficiency: women slipped a little more each day beside themselves, ready to discover beneath the almost deserted rags of their misery - whether intimate or noisy, luxurious or infamous, banal or sophisticated - the transparency of their freedom. Then, moving gashes on the bark of the men, it would have been up to each of them and to her alone - to face the night that had hitherto served only to enhance the sparkle of their image under the eyelids of men, most of them not being able, unwilling, to know what some had been able to discern in the depths of amorous nakedness: that this night is also a forest of lightning.

Of these flashes, have not some women always dared to bear the luminous scar, baring them beyond themselves? A scar that calls for adornment but which fascinates by always being more precious than adornment. A living scar of travel and its nomadic splendour, the temptation of which has undoubtedly always been inscribed in the heart of each of us, but which allowed itself to be perceived more and more precisely as the ideological machines got carried away by not being able to control the growing multiplicity of unpredictable sensitive desertions. Slowly, between the shadows cast by opposites, an adventure took shape, the risk of which was as great for women as for men. And I am particularly grateful to André Breton, despite his very personal option to deprive the feminine, but also the masculine, of their masculine shimmers through male homosexuality, for having been able to assess this risk in the hallucinatory light of the marvellous: "(...) the boat launched in pursuit of the new Eve had never returned. (...) Elijah was beyond our desires, like flames, and she was, as it were, the first day of the feminine season of the flame, a single March 21 of snow and (Soluble Fish, p. 74.) The feminine principle then had every chance of escaping its commonplaces, since its impatient roots began to be lost in the "imaginary without myths" (René Nelli, Erotique et Civilisation, p. 185), where the same desire, homosexual in heterosexuality or heterosexual in homosexuality, would irrigate according to its polymorphous whims the lost lands of a body occulted by two thousand years of Christianity. Suddenly deprived of its foundations, the great genital division was perhaps even on the verge of fading away to give way to the luxury of the eventual.

Somewhere deep, voluptuous necessity was fighting the tradition of erotic performance, and so radically that the reaction was not long in coming: it was a question of bringing order, separating and preserving what was in danger of being confused and ignited by escaping the usual distribution circuits. It was as much a political affair as it was an economic one. If the body came to disturb ideology, people were quick to create an ideology of the body, but of a body irreconcilable with itself, depending on whether it was experienced in the masculine or feminine sense. That was all it took to re-establish the boundaries between the masculine and the feminine, but this time under the guise of freedom. The principles were not changed, but the methods: as usual, it was only a question of selling to women what was taken from them in order to sell to men what they were deprived of, and so on. But to achieve this, it was also a question of presenting everything in the modernist packaging of the "enjoying body", cut into pieces for a male clientele devoted to DIY because they were never satisfied with its fictitious autonomy, or delivered turnkey to a female clientele eager to possess an equally fictitious autonomy. So, just as the brothel was traditionally the complementary industry of the convent, so the sexist racket of the explosion gave rise to the appearance of neo-feminist multivaginals, to allow the sale of the most diverse substitute products, even though they were derived from the same and very helpful raw material in times of significant scarcity: elsewhere and its false perspectives rising to deceive the boredom, the immobility and the meaninglessness of a life that is dis-exciting because it is dispassionate.

The fact that this misery, regardless of the contradictory forms it takes, is equally shared between the masculine and the feminine, allows us to refer to its atavistic indigence the central idea of traditional misogyny according to which, as eternal weavers of lies, only women possess the art of illusion. The puritanical denunciation of make-up and adornment that usually follows, once again denying women freedom the right to invent their body image as well as to play with the movement of erotic centres of gravity around which it is organized, is enough to reveal the concern for enslavement and the politics of performance that are at work under this moralistic bad faith. Finally, it is not for those who think only of confining women to their organic sedentary lifestyle and keeping them prisoners in the illusion of their capricious sovereignty, to reproach them with this: traffickers in appearances to the point of no longer knowing how to recognize the form of their love, they see only the women they deserve or see women only what they deserve.

However, when the ideology of femininity avails itself of the same organic sedentary lifestyle and the same capricious sovereignty to found, as we have seen, the idea of a feminine specificity, it works for nothing less than to consecrate "Doubtless as natural this abject alliance of femininity and simulacrum, thereby depriving women of the imprescriptible privilege they may have over men: that of knowing within them the vertigo of emptiness and of constantly having to defy this inner abyss. In my eyes, this is where the difference between the feminine and the masculine emerges as a living force, a difference that it would be as foolish not to recognize as not to recognize as to freeze in a radical rupture, when it is the difference of the movement and the movement of the difference. Moreover, do not women have this strange intimacy with nothingness in common with all those who, under the fog of appearances, silently ascend to the delta where life shines with nakedness in the anonymity of its tempites and the peculiarity of its foam? Finally, just like them, to have seen life beat under the arrest of forms such as the energy of dissolution and coagulation, of absorption and expenditure, of attraction and repulsion, do they not accede to a vibrant consciousness of incompleteness that would paradoxically give credence to the existence of a real and symbolic bisexuality, or at least of an essentially unstable bipolarity outside of which any difference between the feminine and the masculine is inconceivable? That this bisexuality is fiercely denied by the neo-feminists, fat and full of the sad achievements of an imperialist genitalization of which we have spoken, is not surprising, but I would be remiss if I did not mention, after Suzanne Lilar, the splendid hypothesis of Bataille according to which: "Doubtless the female state of a being is less labile than the state of a body: it is only a difference of degree. This woman who attracts me is no less a man than water is ice. (Critique, April 1947, p. 372.)

And it is to letting us see this movement in the heart of themselves that some women owe their overwhelming beauty: the distant swell that comes back to disturb us at each triumphant and trembling appearance of Marilyn Monroe or the light mist of blood snowing with pink heat the wings of the vulture that hovers over the ice castle where Erzbeth Bathory continues to retreat every night.... Doesn't every being choose "his" wives, disturbingly transparent about the night of his secret? So, with all due respect to the sensitive pettiness of all the Stalinist women in petticoats who today populate the neo-feminist ranks to hunt down the enemy of sex, especially when it exalts women, the poets' fascination for femininity never ceases to testify to the extent to which femininity, in its initial innocence as well as in its irrepressible revolts, tends to be confused with a desire to be carried as far as possible from the shelters of having: it's Imalie deflecting the storm with her young creeper movements, it's Juliette defying nature in her lightning adornment, it's Michelet's Witch still advancing in the no man's land of our history, it's Sophie von Kuhn smiling at the edge of life in the deadly embroideries of her fifteen-year-old, it's hysteria and; "her procession of naked women gliding on the rooftops", but it is still very recently this young Greek woman who, after having coldly killed the Parisian police commissioner who had raped her, has left, slowly sneaking through the undergrowth of misfortune, to join the man she loves, and it is above all the fragile, vagabond, amorous figure beyond madness of Nadezhda Mandelstam, overturning "against all hope" the despair of a generation, of an era, of our time... Dizzying advances on the edge of nothingness, the inexhaustible luxury of "convulsive beauty" to erase the boundaries of ordinary femininity.

I know of no other interpretation of the sentence of Rimbaud, now too famous to have been censored for the profundity of his clairvoyance: "When the infinite serfdom of woman is broken, when she lives for her and through her, the man - hitherto abominable - having given her his dismissal, she too will be pokéd! The woman will find the unknown! Will his worlds of ideas differ from ours? - She will find things strange, unfathomable, repulsive, delicious; We'll take them, we'll take them, we'll understand. (Letter to Paul Demeny, May 15, 1871.) For the time being, it is preferred, with all the pettiness of rigour, to bet on foresight against clairvoyance, how could women not think it advantageous to let themselves be buried under a mass of psychic and rhetorical snacks, instead of plunging into themselves, where the madness of the wind comes to exasperate their enigma? Only at this price of abandoning everything that gives them a value in the eyes of men but also in their own eyes, at this price of nakedness, they will perhaps then discover at the bottom of their enigma that "the enigma is dangerous beauty" (Radovan Ivsic).

If this is so, and it is so as soon as femininity deserts the reserves of its "nature," then how is it that so many women have always consented to take refuge behind the wiles of a dialectic of emptiness and fullness, thanks to which they are convinced that their entire existence is entirely dependent on a fullness? indifferently organic, ideological or sensitive, of which motherhood is the cretinizing model? What, then, do they have to gain by allowing themselves to be so easily persuaded to erase through procreation and its obturating substitutes a physiological specificity which opens them to the world, which binds them, from the depths of themselves, to the movements of beings and things, which sketches in them the waves of all departures? Let me be clear, it is not motherhood that I am attacking here - I leave this ridiculousness to Oriana Fallaci and a few others - but the use that has been made of it and continues to be made of it to create, codify, celebrate a stupidity, this time, specifically feminine, namely that everything that women pay attention to, interest or feeling, must and ultimately serves as an ontological placeholder.

Hence this maternal stupidity where the umbilical cord becomes a rope to hang oneself, hence this amorous stupidity where the moving fabric that is woven between two beings ends up closing in on them for the most tragic sack race, hence this militant stupidity where the violence of revolt is wasted boiling a mini-pot of witches... An inexhaustible stupidity that always rises from its ashes to tirelessly pay its tribute to the obscene cliché of the woman who is fulfilled, or, for the sake of accuracy, the woman who must be filled. For its charm, its cunning, its mystery, its ignominy, its misery, as you will, is never to be so. And how could she do so when her femininity (the one we recognize her) commands her to let us believe in the unfathomable depth of her sex in order to accumulate the greatest quantity of pretences destined to become the emergency masks of an intermittent identity, since it merges with a plenitude constantly worried by the threat of emptiness? Could this be the essence of femininity to conform to this obvious phallocratic requirement? Everything leads us to believe this when the ideology of femininity seems to find its raison d'être in the same terrorism of plenitude, putting women on notice to produce - children or words, it doesn't matter - to prove that they exist and, at the same time, to frantically appropriate beings and things as so many reflections of themselves for the sole purpose of never being caught out of existence. These are the most deceptive reflections whose compulsive collection distances her ever further from what she is, preventing her from finding herself in the questioning in muffled, distant, insistent echoes of an anonymous life that asserts within her her power to undo what remains.

So, how can we fail to see that, taking up the baton of feminine repression, neo-feminism seeks to definitively deprive women of the inestimable wealth they have of being able to perceive, between the resonances of the organic vault that carries them, that nothing belongs to them and that they do not belong to themselves? Don't they know the derision of the periodicity that punctuates their biological life? Like emptiness that haunts their form, do they not know the wanderings of being? Is not all their greatness derived from drifting between the nothing outside and the nothing within? Remember Nadja, remember Undine, remember Monelle! But I can already hear you quoting André Breton's disturbing confession as a terrible argument against what I am saying: "One can love more than any other foolish woman." Perhaps, surely, but remember, remember, remember your childhood whirling on the worn roads in the snowflakes of its impatience, remember that you knew, one day, one moment, like Leonora Carrington, "(...) by divination that the world was frozen and it was up to me (...) to set it in motion again." Isn't it time to ask ourselves why femininity is recognizable by indefinitely disguising the vertigo that animates it, by compulsively furnishing the emptiness that sketches it?

It is here that I will pay homage to the astonishing spectacle that Rita Renoir gave a few years ago - that of her sex open to the public. And if she succeeds in disconcerting men and women equally, it is because she had the audacity to show them the inanity of their reciprocal strategy, since the secret, as always, is that there is no secret. In this sense, is not the almost general intolerance of women to any pornographic representation due, more than to the phallocratic orientation of this or that show, to the inability to be confronted brutally, crudely or even trivially, with the nothingness on which they weave their mystery? Would women be so afraid to lean into this void that constitutes themselves?

I come to think so when those who today claim to be at the forefront of feminist consciousness are essentially preoccupied, as good little housewives of feminine interiority, with piling up all the ideological kitsch of this century in order to homologate the simulacrum of a generic productivity that allows them to advantageously replace desire with jouissance. Journeys by getting bogged down. And that's enough to see that with other knick-knacks of scientific workmanship, with other make-ups of textual mixture, they nevertheless replay the unbearable comedy of an elusive feminine nature. Elusive to already be caught in her own trap and to run away by stumbling around herself. It is also elusive to be protected not only by the organic camouflage that we know, but also behind all those ramparts of elsewhere behind which women have always been able to hide themselves so well. I'm talking about those interchangeable substitute panels tirelessly put in place so that a headless femininity comes to give them all its sensitivity.

Thus, would not love, maternity, marriage, religion, eroticism, or simply fashion, have entered as constitutive elements of femininity for having electively served as false perspectives for a woman rendered incapable of venturing outside of herself and into herself? Of a woman laughing in the "green paradise of childish love", of a woman adorned to the point of the unmentionable, of a woman "as serious as pleasure", what distorting images have they not sent back! Moreover, walls of appearance chosen because of their changing reflections so that they can be "naturally" implanted in an essentially shifting feminine reality, have these false perspectives not always allowed for an inappreciable retention of femininity? It is easy to imagine what it might be like to be a femininity that is now legless: the colour, the texture, the shape of these panels are less and less important when it is the speed at which they will follow one another that alone can convince women of the happiness of languishing in this prison. Everything can and must contribute to masking this unbearable emptiness provided to help the merry-go-round of female enslavement to turn faster and faster. For having renounced travel, it is the whole world that neo-feminism dreams of employing in this trompe-l'oeil, screen and mirror, refuge and prison of a femininity full of its lies.

After virtue, modesty, and sentimentality, which are offensive devices - defensive devices to force femininity to offer itself and to deny itself within the walls of its misery - let us agree that Scripture constitutes a weapon in this strategy of fear that is hardly more sophisticated. Because, in the end, isn't it always the same seduction through absence that determines the sad arsenal of this eternally beleaguered femininity? Desperate to run away from herself and anything that could bring her back to herself. You believe me to be there, but I am already no longer there, too eager to find other parades, others elsewhere, too happy to entertain myself with what I do not want to see, too impatient to deceive myself and to deceive you about my reality: this nothingness coated in flesh, this nothingness which, by being denied, threatens this flesh, dig it out until it is no more than an appearance and nothing but an appearance. In the absence of being, one must appear well, and in order to appear to be, one must have. Hence no doubt this fatal need to attract the gaze that we have come to confuse with the essence of femininity, hence this compulsive need to seduce in order to take one's own reflection wherever possible, in order to be on the way to becoming the fulfilled woman one will never be. So, if there is a neo-feminist revolution, it is to have accelerated this process to the point of clogging femininity with all the images that until then had only served to delimit it. Yes, femininity is overflowing today, but it is overflowing with having frantically stored all the simulacra of itself and sold them on the market after having stamped them verbatim as bodily products. But what is the origin, when there are only passages? What body, when there are only metaphors? Thus, the only merit of feminine Scripture would be to represent as never before, through its theorization of redundancy, the prison organization of this diversionary exhibitionism and the mechanisms of primitive accumulation that feed it. Finally, this exhibitionism, which is now internalized to impose the fashion of a textual and natural make-up capable of rehydrating a somewhat decayed feminine mystery from all the flows, moods, and flows that are attributed to it, we can wonder if the dominant femininity, of which the ideology of femininity is the latest manifestation, has not always used this mystery to exert itself, Whatever may be said about it, the most ruthless censorship of amorous nudity.

Not seeking to conclude, it is around this question that I would like to see converge all the questions I have posed in this book, if it is not in the exercise of this censorship of amorous nudity that we should look for the cause of the most serious accusations made against women, not by the tiny and infirm guardians of traditional misogyny, But by all those who, at one time or another in their career, have come to come up against this labyrinth of one-way mirrors in the shelter of which the swindle of the feminine mystery is manufactured? I am thinking here of Baudelaire, Sade, Lautréamont, Jarry, Vache, Duchamp and those famous "a thousand others" that neo-feminism stupidly delights in caricaturing instead of coldly considering what femininity looks like "laid bare by its very celibates", that is to say, by those whom it has forced into the lightest or darkest of solitudes. the one that opens up like the space inside every movement, every thought, every desire. They have the terrible look of love.

It goes without saying that I am not speaking here of that short-sightedness - the result of a combined weakness of the mind and the heart - which ordinarily compels women and men to come together and to lead them to believe that they are alike, we say today iridescence, very rightly complicit, complicit in an unforgivable sensible error. This androgyny of consumption did not wait for the society of the same name to populate our cities and countryside with the results we know. It goes without saying, too, that I do not speak any more of that tearful ecumenism, that outpouring of rigor, to which the most talkative of the armed writers found themselves that they were not looking in the women who are now obliged to sacrifice, the discourse of hatred being always a little short.

That is why, no doubt, I shall not follow here anything but this luminosity. more than anywhere else, Annie Leclerc, who seems to recognize this gaze only to diminish its formidable scope. For I am far from believing, as she does, that in all those who have won this gaze by refusing with equal passion the agreed limits of femininity and virility, we must seek "the call of a woman's voice, of a woman's person, the obstinate will to pierce a secret which we alone could discover to them, and that we never cease to keep hidden, or worse, forgotten in indifference and contempt for ourselves" (Woman's Word, p. 53). I am all the more far from believing that to reduce the implacable rigour of these rebels to an appeal to a woman, or to a woman, is to retroactively demonstrate that feminine fatuity from which Donjuanism has drawn all its glory. No, Annie Leclerc, these men's thirst for the absolute would not have been extinguished with the presence of a companion because it would have been to root in women, as you do, the lie that each of them risked his life to hunt down, knowing that "meaning is not in, but between; in iridescence, the reciprocal effect; in its interrelationships; at intersections, at crossroads" (N. O. Brown, The Body of Love, p. 303). Thus, to have wanted to reinvent love, to have wanted to give love its meaning as an iridescent incarnation of meaning, "a continuous creation, coming from nothing and returning to nothingness" (N. O. Brown, p. 303), they could no more find than they sought in woman the strange luminosity that a being acquires only through contact with the other, even if he be a woman, a man, tree or stone. I have pane with the terrible gaze of love: it only accommodates itself to that luminosity.

A gaze that has been distorted for having escaped the hypnosis of the rails of everyday life, for having resisted the drowsiness of use, use and wear and tear, and whose intensity furiously attacks the distance that separates us from beings and things, not in order to abolish it but to reveal to us, as after the storm, its astonishing transparency. A gaze that always fades to reveal "the sea in the sun", a gaze too passionate not to reveal, a gaze too amorous to ever represent.

Under this gaze, the woman loses all of her very dubious generic strangeness, but she gains or does not - and this depends on her and her alone - the freedom to desert the prison circle of representations which she usually tries to provoke and which are therefore pointless. Objectless, for such is the naked faculty of this gaze to erase what is separated and to efface itself in what it considers. It does not undo any more than it orders representation, but cancels it, providing beings and things, never identical to themselves, beginning to exist as so many challenges to the void, as so many passages towards what will be.

The fact that women in general have freaked off under such a gaze should prompt them to abandon their panoply of fearful self-importance in the "graveyard of liveries and uniforms." And it is far from indifferent that Renée Vivien had the ruthless audacity to say it to a woman:

«... Slave to chance, to things and to time,
To be undulating, in whom nothing true remains,
You never welcome the passion that weeps
Nor the love that languishes under your childish gaze

The balm of the banal and the blush of the fake,
The absurdity of the laws, the vanity of vice
And the lover whose pride satisfies your whim,
Suffice for your dreamless, hopeless heart.

Never fall in love with the grace of a dream
Of a reflection whose expiring charm lingers,
Of an echo in which memory is plunged,
Never to turn pale as evening approaches. »

Ashes and Dust (pp. 59-60).

I don't know if this poem has ever been heard, I don't know if it will be in spite of its antiquated form. But perhaps then, femininity, and with it feminine Scripture, would lose their unbearable defect of being too often nothing more or less successful staging's to blindly seduce, for lack of risking where life shakes the gangue of forms, for lack of love.

However, I cannot claim that love is the only recourse to access this nakedness, which is constantly threatened by the fear of the nothingness on the edge of which it appears. Only, the irrepressible desire to join the other is then so confused with the most vertiginous crossing of appearances, that the beings who have arrived on the trembling shore of their encounter have already lost everything that allowed them to hide from themselves. Intense vibration on the void, here they are able to go, through what is, to meet themselves towards what is not yet but will be according to their journey. In this sense, love would not differ from the adventure run by all those who have one day chosen to become seers: it would even ensure liberation from solitude as the last bulwark against nudity if men and women alike did not cease in general to let their lives weigh down in the dreary space of a two-sex kitchen.

Seeing women today dreaming of the shrinking of this space monitored by the law of gender, and not of its demolition, I prefer to doubt my femininity and leave it to others to define it to others, when it is in my eyes a quest for nudity or the most buried of its passions and refusals, the Unique conquers its space over nothingness. As I have said, woman has the infinite privilege of knowing the haunting presence of this nothingness in the heart of herself. So, wouldn't it be up to you to untie your moorings instead of making them into dog collars? Don't answer yet!

I only ask you to listen to how the simulacra of femininity, the lies of femininity, are torn apart on this nothingness. I only ask you to look at the black, indelible, fascinating gaping hole that Leonora Carrington had the major indecency to reveal:

"... I'm no longer the ravishing young girl who passed through Paris, in love -

"I am an old lady who has lived a lot and I have changed - if my life is worth anything I am the result of time - So I would no longer reproduce the image of before - I would never be petrified in a 'youth' that no longer exists - I accept the current Honorable Decrepid - what I have to say now is revealed as much as possible - Seeing through The Monster - Do you understand that? No? Too bad. In any case, do whatever you want with this ghost –

"... Like an old mole swimming under cemeteries, I realize that I was blind - I try to know the dead man to be less afraid, I try to empty the images that made me blind -

"I still send you a lot of affection and I kiss you through my rack (which I look at next to me at night in a small sky blue plastic box)

I DON'T HAVE A SINGLE TOOTH LEFT

"Leonora."

(Letter to Henri Parisot, published at the urging of Leonora Carrington as a preface to the republication of En Bas.)

Is that clear? There is no longer a menagerie of glass, but there will be no menagerie of flesh. The glass menagerie has been shattered with capricious loneliness. The glass menagerie has been shattered with capricious loneliness. The menagerie of flesh is dying of asphyxiating promiscuity. How long will you allow yourself to be domesticated under the reflections of yourself? Until when will you give up on leaving for your unveiling? Hasn't it been forty years since La Dormeuse de Toyen has been waiting for you, inventing space according to its open silhouette that beats like the heart of emptiness?

Look closely: for the moment there is no landscape, there is no horizon, but there is a woman who rises with the end of the day, who runs on the moor with her improbable movements, who laughs with light breasts in the cruelty of the shadows and tries to find out why: "Alone, she will never be quite naked" (Radovan Ivsic). Look closely, it doesn't look like you because it may already be you.

You don't have an age but the crazy pace of those who never arrive. This is why you will no doubt understand that, not believing in the miracles of having it to cure the deficiencies of the being, I have based my cause on emptiness.

Paris, September
1977.