COME ON, HUMANS, ONE MORE EFFORT!than the endurance of faith and absolutely not something akin to the daydream of revolu-
tion. Being equal in hope is not the same as being equal de jure and hoping one day to
be equal de facto. The revolutionary maxim of equality has caused this confusion. It has
put the law rather than the event at the ground-breaking moment: the right to liberty
rather than the initial address that ushers in freedom; the right to equality in a future
earthly life rather than victory over death, a one-time event but a decisive one; the right
to fraternity, as if love were something due to men, rather than the ordeal of love that is
proven in the triumph of Eros over Thanatos.
It is one of the ironies of history that as soon as the possible disentanglement of the
political and the religious was envisioned, the two were reentangled once again. It is no
coincidence that the French Revolution was marked by a parricide, and the invention of
Christianity by the Father’s consent to the Son’s sacrifice. Christianity has been distinctly
more anti-Oedipal than the Revolution, for which the social bond is still that ofTotem
and Taboo.The Revolution assigned the fraternity of the sons to the authority not of the
father but of the mother—goddess of reason in the religious order, female figure of the
Republic in the political order. By dint of this dual reference, the Revolution ran the risk
of seeing all thinking about love forever torn between the utopia of its absolute rationality
and its reterritorialization in blood ties, as if the only alternatives were either the old
Platonic identification of love with the love of wisdom (philosophy) or the assimilation
of love to the tribalism, pure and simple, of the only filiation that can be attested—
filiation with the mother. There is a myth of fusional love in both: the hermaphrodite of
theSymposium; the communion of the pure in the impure blood that waters our furrows
(as theMarseillaiseputs it). Fortunately, because the French Revolution was universalist,
it did not give in to the temptations of ethnic tribalism. But it paid a very high price for
its universalism, specifically, a considerable repression of the feminine. It is not just that
the maxim of fraternity crushes sorority—even though there is a whole brand of feminism
that, since Olympe de Gouges,^4 has legitimately attempted to grant sorority its rights. It
is above all the fact that the feminine and maternal representation of the Republic—
ranging from Daumier’s extraordinary picture to the effigies of Marianne in France’s town
halls, once modeled on the features of Brigitte Bardot—inevitably presents it as a phallic
mother (as psychoanalysis would put it), because she has been put in the symbolic place
of a father, substituting for the father or the king beheaded by the Revolution, as if it were
possible to behead a symbol.
At the end of this second turn of the screw, something emerges to back up the conclu-
sions drawn at the end of the first, yet add something to them, as well. On the one hand,
what the translation of the maxims faith, hope, and love by liberty, equality, and fraternity
fails to think through revolves around the definition of paternity. Without lapsing into
either morality or sentiment, it can be said that parricide involves a definition of paternity
insofar as the Revolution was keen to behead a symbol, not just a man. On the other
hand, the repression of the feminine—resulting from the fact that the denied paternal
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