When women get bogged down in their search for freedom, for liberation, there seem to be many themes: the absence of a God of their own and inadequate management of the symbolic. The two things are linked and necessary to the constitution of an identity and a community. Many women have made or are making great efforts to fall back under the thrall of the phallocratic and patriarchal monopoly on values. They lack, we still lack, the affirmation and definition of values of our own, values often condemned by women themselves, even in dealings with other women. This leaves us in our infancy, in our bondage, slaves to male paradigms and to the archaic powers and fears of elementary struggles for life that are divided between submission to a technical imperialism alien to us and regression to magical thinking.
According to this world, these worlds, female identity always comes down to empirical parameters that prevent a woman, and the world of women, from getting themselves together as a unit. The sexual-familial dimension remains one of these parameters. ‘Are you a virgin?’ ’ Are you married?’ ‘Who is your husband?’ ‘Do you have any children?’ these are the questions always asked which allow us to place a woman. She is constituted from outside in relation to a social function, instead of to a female identity and autonomy. Fenced in by these functions, how can a woman maintain a margin of singleness for herself, a non-determinism that would allow her to become and remain herself? This margin of freedom and potency (puissance) that gives us the authority yet to grow, to affirm and fulfill ourselves as individuals and members of a community, can be ours only if a God in the feminine gender can define it and keep it for us. As an other that we have yet to make actual, as a region of life, strength, imagination, creation, which exists for us both within and beyond, as our possibility of a present and a future.
Is not God the name and the place that holds the promise of a new chapter in history and that also denies this can happen? Still invisible? Still to be discovered? To be incarnated? Archi-ancient future and forever.
