photographist

"In 1968, I was a student of philosophy at the Sorbonne. For me, knowing and understanding was an existential practice. But the subject of women didn't surface until just after. While the street was calling me to demonstrate, I had to understand why philosophers were not talking about this subject. This is how my first article came about, which concerned feminists from 1848 – a Revolution during which women published a nearly daily newspaper. As I could not find the sex/gender subject in philosophy, this made me want to think – or more accurately, say: feminism thinks. I immediately wanted to demonstrate that thinking could be constructed based on the issue of the plight of women. Avoiding the double trap of the philosophies of identity and the epistemological model of nature/culture, I have worked for forty years on pointing out that the world is gender-dependent, that the sexes belong to and make history.

Equality and liberty are concepts of the democratic era. These concepts allow me to analyse what makes history and how. Equality is not only a principle of democracy, but an operator which allows me to read the political materiality of social matters. Analysing discourses on emancipation refers to the construction of a gender-dependent world and, based on that, the analysis of domination. In reasonings on emancipation there is a complexity which I want to restore by inviting the contradiction of equalities to be identified and understood. Pascal spoke of self-consent to oneself. He told us that inside ourselves there is a space where we can confront our arguments to find the place where we are truest to ourselves. Working on self-consent to oneself is the best way of starting to work on one's liberty and of imagining how equality can be made possible with others."

Geneviève Fraisse,
Philosopher, Director of research at the CNRS

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