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sentence you have quoted, it had to do with the following: very
often in France a certain sort of feminism has posed itself solely as
a movement of sociological protest, which consists in making of
women a sort of social force or motor which would ultimately take
on the role played in Marxist theory by the proletariat. Here is a
class or social group which is oppressed, which is not paid well
enough, which does not have its proper place in production and in
political representation, and this oppressed class, this oppressed
social stratum, should fight, essentially, to obtain recognition–
economic, political, and ideological.
I, on the other hand - and I am not alone in this - think
that women's protest is situated at an altogether different level. It
is not first of all a social protest, although it is also that.
It
is a pro–
test which consists in demanding that attention be paid to the sub–
jective particularity which an individual represents in the social
order, of course, but also and above all in relation to what essen–
tially differentiates that individual, which is the individual's sex–
ual difference . How can one define this sexual difference?
It
is
not solely biological; it is, above all, given in the representations
which we ourselves make of this difference. We have no other
means of constructing this representation than through language,
through tools for symbolizing . Now these tools are common to the
two sexes. You speak English if you're English; you speak French
if you're French, whether you are a man or a woman. So how do
we situate ourselves in relation to these universal tools in order to
try to mark our difference?
Here the position of some feminists has seemed to me rather
strange and regressive. Certain feminists, in France particularly,
say that whatever is in language is of the order of strict designa–
tion, of understanding, oflogic, and it is male. Ultimately, theory
or science is phallic, is male . On the other hand that which is
feminine in language is whatever has to do with the imprecise,
with the whisper, with impulses, perhaps with primary processes,
with rhetoric-in other words, speaking roughly, the domain of
literary expression, the region of the tacit, the vague, to which one
would escape from the too-tight tailoring of the linguistic sign and
of logic . This is, so to speak, a Manichean position which consists
in designating as feminine a phase or a modality in the function–
ing of language. And if one assigns to women that phase alone,
this in fact amounts to maintaining women in a position of in-
