THIERRY DE DUVEbypassed, releasing the most subversive virtualities of Christianity in relation to the reli-
gious. Christianity is probably closer than any other mythology to recognizing what I
think is the essential source of both the oppression of women by men and the repression
of the feminine by the social order. This is the uncertainty of paternity, the anxiety and
denial of men when it comes to admitting it, and the crazy inventiveness with which they
have devised systems of kinship and apparatuses of power designed at once to conceal
this truth from themselves and to deny women their freedom. Joseph does more than
merely put his finger on what Lacan has called the paternal metaphor. He removes from
paternity in general the fantasy of any father’s certainty of his biological fatherhood. Ac-
cordingly, belief in God the creator—the progenitor—of the world takes a step backward.
Such belief is essential to the dogma of incarnation only insofar as the twofold nature of
Christ links up with the God of Abraham. But once incarnated in his Son, God the creator
can withdraw from the world He has created much more radically than can the God of
Abraham. He is pure Word, the simple name of the uncertainty in which humans are
immersed when it comes to the origin of the world. By becoming Father, God admits to
his purely symbolic existence. It is the same God, of course—the new alliance could only
emerge from the virtualities of the old one—this God who created the world in seven
days and produced out of the transgression of a woman the awareness of sin in men’s
hearts. Whence the equation that identifies Mary with the new Eve redeeming the old
one. Isn’t it time we changed our point of view? For twenty centuries, Christianity has
been obsessed by Mary’s virginity-maternity, in order not to have to deal with the conse-
quences of Joseph’s much more liberating virginity-paternity. It is not for nothing that
the Marian cult has been reawakened, and the theology of the Virgin revamped every
time the patriarchal order has had to cope with an upsurge of women’s power on the
historical stage, as occurred in the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries. From Joseph’s
viewpoint, God the Father is the name of his recognition of the uncertainty of paternity.
And his act of faith in Mary’s faithfulness—faith in faith, given by love—thereby becomes
the nonreligious launchpad of the doctrine of incarnation.
The rest of the doctrine follows. Incarnation-birth yields incarnation-death. Once
cast among mortals, the Son had no option but to be mortal himself. The Gospels have
him dying an ignominious death, and I would not want to minimize either the dramatur-
gical effect and its effectiveness in Christian propaganda, or the revolutionary (Pasolinian)
political novelty that makes the Son of God the weakest among the weak. But I would
emphasize that if Christ’s Passion led him to his death, it was for two unconnected rea-
sons: because death is the logical consequence of incarnation, and because the humiliation
of Christ, which is more essential than his physical suffering, is the sign of the Father’s
loss of power. The God of Abraham intervened in order to interrupt the sacrifice of Isaac,
thus demonstrating both his omnipotence and his goodness. The God of the Christians
does not intervene. His powerlessness is more than the patriarchate can bear, and it is
quite understandable that, over the two thousand years of its existence, within a society
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