The 78-year-old French philosopher Sylviane Agacinski, tutelary deity of feminism beyond the Alps, at the center of numerous controversies for her battle against surrogacy and all forms of assisted fertilization, was elected on Thursday 1 June at the Académie Française, in place of the writer Jean-Loup Dabadie, who died three years ago, with 13 votes out of 23 (of which 7 crosses, synonymous with refusal). Now the Parisian institution that welcomes the “Immortals of France”, as its members are called, has seven women and twenty-nine men out of a total of forty seats (four are currently vacant).
Born in 1945, Sylviane Agacinski participated, at the age of 30, in the creation of the Groupe de recherche sur l’enseignement philosophique, together with the philosopher Jacques Derrida (with whom she had a son) and Jean-Luc Nancy. A few years later she was appointed program director at the Collège international de philosophie, before teaching at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris until 2010. In the meantime, in 1994, she had married Lionel Jospin, the future prime minister and at the he was a simple councilor of the Haute-Garonne department. In that year he published “Critique de l’égocentrisme, la question de l’Autre”, followed in 1998 by “Politique des sexes. Mixité et parité”, reaffirming that sexual difference is a natural fact that societies interpret differently , while criticizing the thought of Simone de Beauvoir. Her best known and most controversial work is “Corps en miettes”, published in 2009, in which she wrote, participating in the debate on the revision of the laws on bioethics in 2004: «The baby business is looking everywhere for wombs to rent. The propaganda in favor of surrogacy cannot hide the violence of this practice. In the name of human dignity, this book calls for resistance.”
In Italy in 2020 Neri Pozza published the pamphlet “The disembodied man. From the carnal body to the manufactured body”. According to Sylviane Agacinski “the assault on the carnal body to conquer the sky of the manufactured body began some time ago, and has as its object two of the supreme faculties of the human species: procreation and motherhood”. Assisted fertilization, no longer conceived as a remedy for the couple’s infertility, but as a mere technical reproduction of life, paved the way for the “commercial use of the procreative power of women and its fruit, children”. Waiting for the machine called “Artificial Womb”, in the era of the “total market” in which each individual is free to subject everything to bargaining, even the human body, “without the laws interfering”, it is the women’s womb that is , with “surrogate motherhood”, “object of sale, and it is the right to the child, and no longer the right of the child not to be treated as alienable property, the Law”. Beyond the illusory beliefs that accompany it – the idea, for example, that a free sexuality, freed from all carnality, can overcome the difference between the sexes – this “Law in which nothing is taken from the market represents”, for Sylviane Agacinski, “an unparalleled danger to the dignity of the living, a danger that must be contrasted with the force of laws that guarantee respect for the moral and physical integrity of every human being”.
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