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DROP
EVERYTHING
by
Annie LeBrun
[This piece first appeared in English in the book, Surrealist
Women: An International Anthology, edited by Penelope Rosemont. It is a
translation of the introduction of Annie LeBrun’s book, Lachez Tout (Drop
Everything), a merciless critique of what she calls “neo-feminism”—what most of
us here know simply as feminism—written in 1977. Annie LeBrun was born in
Rennes, France in 1942. She was involved with the surrealist movement—which is
more a revolutionary movement than an art movement—between 1963 and 1969, and
has continued to be involved in creative projects of revolt since.]
I have a horror of not being misunderstood.
—Oscar Wilde
At
sixteen, I decided my life would not be as others intended it to be. This
determination—and perhaps luck—allowed me to escape most of the misfortune
inherent in the feminine condition. Rejoicing that young women today
increasingly manifest their desire to reject the models heretofore offered
them, I, nonetheless, deplore their seeming readiness to identify with the
purely formal negation of these old-fashioned models, that is, when they do not
settle for simply bringing them back into fashion. At a time when everyone complacently
intones that one is not born a woman but one becomes a woman, hardly anyone
seems to trouble herself about not becoming one. Indeed, it’s just the
opposite. Contrary to the efforts of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
feminists who endeavored to eliminate the illusory difference that gave men
real power over women, the neofeminists of recent years have made it their
business to establish the reality of that difference in order to claim an
illusory power that women are said to have been denied. So thoroughly do they
work at establishing the reality of this illusive difference that in the end,
the revolt against impossibility of being tends to vanish under the blows of
militant stupidity, thus introducing the obligation to be. Do we forever need
to remind ourselves that in matters of revolt, we need no ancestors? And
definitely, no technical advisers eager to exchange their recipes for feminine
insubordination from A to Z.
In view of
the extent of the crimes more or less legally perpetrated, not only against
women but also against all those who refuse the social codification of sexual
roles (homosexuals in particular), this revolt can only be regarded as
urgent—so urgent that I cannot refrain from disrupting the chorus of those,
male or female, who claim they are abstracting it from the private obscurity
where it violently takes shape, and from whence it draws its overwhelming
strength. I insist: this rebellion is always directed against the collective
morale, no matter upon what bases the collectivity was founded. How, then, can
we fail to see that today every woman will be dispossessed of the recovery of
her self if she does not notice that every one of her tirades might be
redirected and used to build an ideology as contradictory in its proposals as it
is totalitarian in its intentions? We even find her tacitly encouraged on all
sides to reveal the claims of her sex, ever since the so-called “women’s cause”
was presented as the image of a rebellion tamed inside the net of the negative
normalization that our epoch is so proficient at casting over the most remote
spaces on the horizon.
Having
always disdained masters who act like slaves as well as slaves eager to slip
into the skins of masters, I confess that the ordinary conflicts between men
and women have been of very little concern to me. My sympathy goes rather to
those who desert the roles that society assigns them. Such people never claim
to be constructing a new world, and therein lies their fundamental honesty:
they never impose their notion of well being on others. With a powerful
determination that can often overturn the established order, they are just
happy to be the exceptions that negate the rule.
Oscar
Wilde interests me more than any bourgeoise woman who agreed to marry and have
children, and then, one fine day, suddenly feels that her oh so hypothetical
creativity is being frustrated.
And that’s
how it is.
I shall
not list my preferences in this regard: it would be useless to do so, and
extremely discouraging for the cause of women.
The fact
that I have done my best as far as possible, to avoid biological destiny’s
psychic, social and intellectual hold upon me is my own business, but I shall
never give in to society’s attempt to make me feel guilty in the name of all
women and to force me back into the limitation’s of that destiny. Such sudden
and inexorable promiscuity in search of each woman’s identity indeed threatens
women at the very heart of their freedom when the gender difference is asserted
at the expense of all other specific differences. Let us just consider calmly
what we have all had to endure in the name of God, Nature, Man and History. It
seems, however, that all of that was not enough, for it is all starting up
again under the banner of Woman. Specialists in coercion make no mistake when
with sudden zeal they increase the numbers of national and international
organizations dealing with “la condition feminine” without actually effecting
any legislative change. And they can hardly go very far astray, since the
moment when Louis Aragon, that choirboy for repression for almost half a
century, announced that woman is “Man’s Future”. I have the gravest doubts
about a future that might look anything like Elsa Triolet.*
In all
that is said and written in the name of woman, I see the return—under the
pretext of liberation—of everything that has traditionally diminished women.
They denounce the family but extol motherhood as the foundation of the family.
They attack the notion of woman-as-object but promote the revival of “feminine
mystery”. And the exposure of the relationships between men and women as power
relations initiates theories about the most sickening and inane conjugal
squabbles. For me these are just so many more reasons to be glad that I have
turned my back on the dead-ends of so-called “feminine sensibility”. Moreover,
nothing could make me alter my natural aversion to majorities, especially when
they are composed of part-time martyrs—largely a phenomenon of the western
world.
The more
deafening the noise of our time, the more I feel certain that my life is
elsewhere, gliding along my love whose shapes entomb the passing of time. I
look at you. We shall meet on the bridge of transparency before diving into the
night of our differences. We shall swim near to one another at a distance,
tense or distracted, going against the stream of our enigma to find ourselves
in the uncertain embrace of our fleeting shadows. We are not the only ones to
have encountered a point of transparency before plunging into the night of our
differences and who have come up not caring whether we are male or female. And
if very few men find it easy to recognize themselves in Francis Picabia’s
avowal, “Women are the agent of my freedom,” it is perhaps because that comes
only with the triumph of a Marvelous that men and women have yet to discover.
That is why I object to being enrolled in an army of women engaged in struggle
simply because of a biological accident. My frantic individuality is exactly in
proportion to all that strives toward the interchangeability of all beings.
This book
is a call for desertion.
*Louis
Aragon was involved with the original surrealist group until he converted to
Stalinism. Elsa Triolet was his wife. (editor’s note)