1999 : Le Sexocide des sorcières

Paris, L’Esprit Frappeur, 156 pages.

In this book, Françoise retraces the masculine obsession, since the destruction of matricentric cultures, with making the feminine disappear. “It is indeed in the Christian West, future creator of the ‘state of law’, that this dream of sexocide by the stake of witches manifested the earliest and most spectacularly. (…) It was in 1484 that the bull of Innocent VIII launched the initiative for an extermination which was to depopulate Europe from part of the ‘second sex’ for two hundred years. And the Church, for which every woman is a potential witch, will soon hand over “to the executioner’s torch the thousands of women whose guilt it invents.” (Alain)

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1997 : La Liseuse et la Lyre

Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 192 pages.

In this intimate essay, Françoise returns to her passion for words. Not by navel-gazing, as René de Ceccatty rightly said in a literary review of Le Monde in 1997, but to remind us of Danièlle Sallenave’s saying: “The book does not replace anything, but nothing replaces the book”.

La Liseuse et la Lyre is a magnificent essay in which Françoise, again, touches on the universal. But in a detached and almost serene tone that we knew little about her, reminding us how wide her palette was. (Vincent)

The analogy of this too abstract passion with drug addiction inspired an author of the interwar period to denounce under this title: “This unpunished vice, reading”. How could he give this warning? With a text.

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1997 : Féminin et philosophie

Paris, l’Harmattan, 105 pages.

In July 1994, in a letter to Alain Lezongar, Françoise wrote these few lines about the work she had just begun, which would be published three years later under the title Féminin et philosophie.

“I’ve taken “Woman and Philosophy” seriously, thanks to the book you sent me [Haine de la philosophie, Denys Mascolo]. My purpose, which is gradually becoming clearer, is in line with the observation made by Levinas, one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century: philosophy has been “afflicted since childhood by a horror of the Other”, which has led it to the discourse of the Same; while all forms of racism are unfolding, “the Other, par excellence, is the feminine”. This confirms my point of view! Nature had to implant in the male an insatiable desire to enjoy and prolong himself to keep the male species from an exclusive homosexuality, reinforced by sexocide – the massacre of women that reappears century after century: witch-hunts, fundamentalist stonings, not to mention “serial killers”. I’m following in the footsteps of the Bergères de l’Apocalypse. Unable to kill women, patriarchy has denied, repressed, obscured “the” woman and destroyed as far as possible the trace of her works (“the sexual conflict”). It has hunted down the feminine to its very core, persecuting homosexuality as the oldest and most deeply-rooted of its desires – which, from patriarchy, would make a sterile ‘Männerbund’, itself an ever-reborn danger.”

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