THIS is really weird. French philosopher Sylviane Agacinski (known to most Americans only via the Derrida biography as wife of Lional Jospin and mother of one of Derrida's children) is one of the public intellectuals who has spoken out forcefully against legalizing gay marriage.
The weirdness from an American perspective is that such a secular country (with less than 10% church attendance) would produce majority opinion against homosexual adoption and such a strong minority against gay marriage. David Bell, the author of the piece, says that certain views about sexual difference put forward by academics, including prominent French feminists, have filtered into a toxicly zenophobic cultural narrative. If wikipedia is right about Agacinski, it does not seem implausible with respect to her work. Consider:
As a feminist philosopher, Agacinski is associated with "differentialism", an important strain of French feminism, which argues that the human condition cannot be understood in any universal way without reference to both sexes.She's cited as writing, "We want to keep the freedom to seduce and be seduced. There will never be a war of the sexes in France," in her 1998 book, Sexual Politics
Unfortunately, the citations in the wikipedia article are to popular press articles on the same level as Foreign Affairs.
Is there any plausibility to Bell's hypothesis? The author of the piece is too quick and doesn't provide enough citation for a non-specialist to even guess at whether his hypothesis is correct. The very fact that the law did pass renders some of the analysis a little bit suspect.
I'd be really interested to hear from anyone who specializes in French feminist philosophy if they see a problematic, essentializing, account of sexual difference at play in very much of the work. Or if the "differentialist" strain of French feminism really has had the cultural impact that Bell alleges.
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