Femininity

féminité

Worked through in 2 videos · 5 passages.

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani approaches femininity through Hegel's phrase "this femininity, the eternal irony of the community". He notes the word "eternal", which is rare in Hegel and suggests something transhistorical1. For him, femininity is the community's internal enemy, but an enemy that is essential to it2. He distinguishes femininity from woman: the book under study speaks of femininity and not of woman, since woman refers to substance and femininity to the historical subject3. In a 2022 session on Molière, Clouscard and Wagner, he sets femininity against the "feminism of the privileged", which the session's title presents as a puritanical censorship. In his view, femininity is lost in the mists of time: belonging to the female gender is as old as the human species, and much older than feminism4. Thousands of years of assigned roles have produced billions of women who embody it, and feminism would like to strike it out with a stroke of the pen5.

Summary produced automatically from 5 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.

Series · 6 Feb 2022The feminism of the privileged, puritanical censorship of femininity - Molière, Clouscard, Wagner

12:27Femininity is lost in the mists of time: belonging to the female gender is as old as the human species, much older than feminism.
22:28Thousands of years of assigned roles have produced billions of women who embody femininity, which feminism would like to erase with a stroke of the pen.

Season 10 · 22 Sept 202110#1 The eternal irony of the community

8:24"This femininity, eternal irony of the community": the word "eternal," rare in Hegel, suggests something transhistorical.
54:04Femininity is the inner enemy of the community, which is nevertheless essential to it.
1:21:39The book speaks of femininity and not of woman: woman refers to substance, femininity to the historical subject.