Le blog mignon (de Paris)

Maria. Sweet Maria.

Any woman setting out to take on the "continent" formed by Western culture, to analyse its causes and effects in religion, mythology, philosophy and ideology, has a titanic task on their hands.

For this continent is not only H-U-G-E, it also goes a long way of back in time and any attempt to explore it can be successful only if it deals with the way things were at the beginning. The task is immense, too, because it involves critique as well as observation. Critique most of all.

In ancient Greece, which defined the majority of the mental structures inherited by the centuries, nay, millennia that followed, the activity of classification, conceptualization and theorization began very early : a body is this, a soul that, matter this, spitit that, a man this, a woman that, sex this, sexual difference that. Etc., etc.

And waht if, rather than this, it had been that ?

Instead of thinking the feminine as a subcategory of the masculine, as a notion by default (to think in terms of the contrast with the masculine is merely a non-dialectical and unproductive inversion of termes), we envisaged it as a category in and of itself.


Well... it's time to eat.