Patriarchy organises rivalry between women by making scarce the very things on which it makes their worth depend. I propose the concept of non-rival emancipation, to name struggles whose object, like knowledge or the gaze, grows when it is shared, and five questions to recognise them.
One single place for women
In the article The Mimetic Struggle, I proposed this name for struggles which, by fixating on the most despicable figure of the domination they fight, end up embracing its logic. I was drawing on René Girard, for whom rivalry is born not of difference but of convergence: when two people desire the same object, they become rivals, then “doubles” who resemble each other all the more as the struggle intensifies (Violence and the Sacred, 1972). Girard adds, as early as Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1961), that we rarely desire an object for itself: we desire it because someone else desires it. I would like to take this reasoning from the other end, that of the object of the struggle.
Patriarchy is, among other things, a machine for manufacturing scarce objects. It does not merely dominate women; it organises their rivalry by making scarce the things on which it makes their worth depend, male validation, the single place of the exception who has succeeded. John Berger observed in 1972, in Ways of Seeing, that women learn very early to watch themselves being looked at, so that comparison settles within, in each woman’s relationship to her own image. The psychologist Phyllis Chesler documented what follows (Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman, 2002): a very real female aggression, indirect, made of judging, excluding and gossiping, exercised first of all between women, which she traces back to internalised sexism and to competition for resources held by men. Mona Chollet described the industrial side of the same mechanism (Beauté fatale, 2012, untranslated): a whole market lives off aesthetic competition between women, and keeps it going.
Non-sisterhood is therefore not a female nature, it is an economy. The scarcity of the object is nowhere to be found in nature; it is maintained, in the education of girls as in the beauty market. And I described in Patriarchal feminism how solidarity between women can itself turn into an instance of normalisation: feminist conformity then becomes the new scarce object, and rivalry carries on in different clothes.
A good that grows when it is shared
Economists have distinguished, since a paper by Paul Samuelson (“The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure”, 1954), between rival and non-rival goods. A rival good diminishes as it is consumed, like the bread I eat, which no one else will eat after me. A non-rival good, on the contrary, loses nothing by being shared, like the light of a lighthouse, which shines on the thousandth boat as much as on the first, or like a proven theorem, which serves everyone without wearing out.
I propose to transpose this distinction to political struggles, and to call non-rival emancipation a struggle whose object, if we obtain it, is lost by no one. In the mimetic struggle, emancipation is treated as a rival good: the position of legitimate victim, the place of universal subject, media recognition are scarce places there, occupied by the adversary, to be taken back from them. Yet emancipation, taken in itself, has the structure of the theorem rather than that of the bread: one woman’s freedom takes nothing away from another’s, and each additionally emancipated person makes emancipation more visible and more practicable for everyone else. bell hooks already distinguished, in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), power as domination and control over others from power as creative force, and I extended this distinction in the article Power, potency, domination. Power-as-domination is rival by construction, since it is measured by what it takes away from others; creative potency is non-rival, since it is measured by what it makes possible.
Not every demand can be reformulated in this way, and I would not want the concept to serve to deny real conflicts. A budget, a position, a seat remain rival objects, and Chantal Mouffe rightly reminds us that conflict is constitutive of the political (Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically, 2013). But in her distinction between the enemy, whom one wants to destroy, and the adversary, with whom disagreement remains possible, I see the political regime of a non-rival struggle: one can fight over a budget without fighting over the right to exist.
My photograph grows under the gaze of others
The gaze may be the purest non-rival good there is. When a person looks at an image, they take nothing away from what others will see in it; when they say what they see, they add to the image a dimension that no one will ever be able to take away from it again.
This is what I verify in the photographic creation workshops I lead, where I invite the participants to enrich each other with their gazes. The rule there is strict: the person, or the small group, who made the photograph is not allowed to speak, and only the others speak, to say what they see in the image. This imposed silence protects first of all against self-censorship. The person who has just shown their image would like to apologise, explain, minimise, ward off criticism before it arrives; self-censorship is in my eyes an even more powerful brake than mutual censorship, and the silence simply makes it impossible. One person’s photograph then grows from the gaze of the others, and no one is impoverished by giving theirs, since there is nothing to be gained that someone else would lose.
Risk, in this arrangement, is shared equally: I make a photograph myself, and I submit it to the same silence. Everyone, the facilitator included, goes through the same position of vulnerability, receiving the gaze of others without being able to defend themselves. This is why I never need to ask people not to judge each other: when everyone is at risk, judgment is no longer a playable move, it no longer has a place in the situation. Erving Goffman showed (Interaction Ritual, 1967) that conduct depends less on persons than on the situations in which they meet, and that everyone spontaneously works to protect the face of others as much as their own. There is therefore no point in psychologising, in looking for the wicked who would judge and the kind who would not: what is possible between people depends mainly on the arrangement of interaction in which they are brought together, and it is by building the arrangement, not by moralising the people, that one obtains what instructions never obtain.
This way of working has a methodological history. In the mid-1960s, in Lyon, Claire Bélisle and Alain Baptiste developed the Photolangage method, in which photographs support speech in groups: the photo acts as a third party, one speaks about an image and about oneself through it, and one person’s choice feeds the associations of the others. Jacques Rancière gave this kind of arrangement its philosophical foundation in The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987): the equality of intelligences is not a goal to be reached there, it is the starting presupposition, and any facilitator who started distributing the legitimacy of gazes would destroy what they claim to build. John Dewey, as early as Art as Experience (1934), held aesthetic experience to be an experience that circulates between people and connects them, rather than the private property of a creator.
When emancipation does not look like the plan
When a process of emancipation unfolds exactly as planned, it is likely that no one was emancipated in it: what was carried out there was the programme of the person doing the emancipating. When people take up their power to act, decisions cease to resemble those that would have been taken in their place, and this gap is disturbing. I believe we must learn to read it as a good sign.
Yann Le Bossé, who translated the English empowerment as “développement du pouvoir d’agir”, the development of the power to act (Sortir de l’impuissance, 2012, untranslated), makes this the central criterion of his method, in which the people concerned define for themselves what matters to them, and the person accompanying them supports without prescribing. Marie-Hélène Bacqué and Carole Biewener show what the notion becomes when the question of power is evacuated (L’empowerment, une pratique émancipatrice, 2013, untranslated): a management of motivation, in which people are invited to participate in decisions already taken. The criterion of disturbance makes it possible to tell the two apart. If an arrangement has never surprised the people who designed it, then power has not changed hands within it.
The world of work is living through the same test with liberated companies, which I discussed in Authorization Regime and Freedom Regime and in The beginning of a future for the Left. Isaac Getz and Brian Carney (Freedom, Inc., 2009) as well as Frédéric Laloux (Reinventing Organizations, 2014) report the same vertigo among leaders who share decision-making: the teams do not decide what management would have decided, they sometimes decide better, often differently, and the whole challenge consists in holding this vertigo without taking back control. Emancipation through shared governance begins there, in the capacity to welcome decisions one would not have taken.
Commenting on the destabilisation while it is happening
Emancipating oneself destabilises first of all those who emancipate themselves. When the reference points fall away, one no longer knows how to function, quite simply, and this loss is frightening: many people resist their own emancipation for this reason, with no ill will whatsoever, because one’s anchoring in oneself is a very fragile thing. The familiar then returns, quite simply, because it is what each person knows how to do. A destabilised group opposes, rejects, stigmatises; and since its members have good intentions and feel responsible for the collective, they fall back on the most worn-out and most violent forms of the collective, which at least have the merit of holding together. This is how one reproduces what one criticises, not by intention, even unconscious, but by the return of the familiar in the loss of reference points. The mimetic struggle does not need bad faith, habit is enough for it.
Faced with this, I practise a tool: commenting out loud, while it is happening, on the destabilisation itself. In my workshops, I go on playing my role as facilitator, but a facilitator who does not dominate, who comments on what is happening to us. I say that I feel destabilised, and I ask the others how they are experiencing it. I tell the person whose photograph we have just commented on that they must be thinking they did not put into their image everything we saw in it, and that this feeling is legitimate. By naming in this way what is happening to us, with my personal experience addressed to the others, I recognise the value and the legitimacy of feeling lost; and when someone names out loud what is running through the group, they institute it collectively, so that the collective reconstitutes itself where each destabilised person had been left alone. Together, we thus weave a fabric of recognition, a matrix in which it becomes possible to feel a little reassured. And if one does not feel a little reassured, one cannot emancipate oneself.
The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott gave this intuition its most solid foundation (Playing and Reality, 1971): play, by which he means all creative experience, only becomes possible in a sufficiently reliable environment, and the child only learns to play alone in the presence of a figure who holds the frame without intervening. The facilitator who comments holds exactly this place, present, reliable, without directing. I believe that any collective process of emancipation, in a feminist movement as in a company that shares governance, needs someone to occupy this function of recognition, failing which the destabilised group returns, with the best intentions in the world, to the old forms of order.
A polycentric feminism
Elinor Ostrom received the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009 for her work on the governance of the commons, and she devoted her acceptance lecture (“Beyond Markets and States”, 2009) to a concept directly useful for thinking about the future of feminisms: polycentricity, that is, a plurality of autonomous decision-making centres, which coordinate with one another without any of them being sovereign over the others. Kimberlé Crenshaw had shown a few years earlier (“Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex”, 1989) that dominations articulate differently according to gender, class and racialisation, so that no single experience can serve as a norm for all. The plurality of feminisms, materialist, Black, decolonial, queer, ecological, is therefore not a dispersion to be corrected, it is the just form of a non-rival emancipation: multiple centres, and no central counter of legitimacy. I propose to call poly-feminism this polycentric organisation of feminist struggles.
Ecology belongs to this plural in its own right. Françoise d’Eaubonne coined the word ecofeminism in Le féminisme ou la mort (Feminism or Death, 1974), and Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva showed (Ecofeminism, 1993) that the exploitation of women and that of nature stem from the same extractive logic, for which the entire world is a stock of scarce objects. A non-rival emancipation is ecological by construction, because those who carry it out stop desiring what runs out.
This plurality is also more solid. Olivier Hamant, whose concepts I discussed in Robustness, antifragility, resilience, writes that “robustness is built first of all on heterogeneity, redundancy, contingencies” (Antidote au culte de la performance, 2023, untranslated, my translation). A unified feminism, chasing media performance and the position of sole spokesperson, would have the fragility of a monoculture; plural, redundant, heterogeneous feminisms have the solidity that Hamant describes in living beings.
Five questions for recognising a non-rival struggle
These reflections translate into a method. I propose five questions, which anyone can put to the struggle they are engaged in, whether in a feminist collective, an association or a company:
- The question of the object. If we obtain what we are asking for, must someone lose it? When the answer is yes, mimetic rivalry lies in wait, and it is worth looking for the non-rival formulation of the same demand.
- The question of the mirror. Are our words those of the adversary, turned around? When we speak the language of what we are fighting, we have already entered the regime of doubles.
- The question of coexistence. Do we require our claim to be the only legitimate one? A demand capable of coexisting with other neighbouring struggles, without hierarchy, is already polycentric.
- The question of disturbance. When what we have made possible does not resemble us, do we know how to rejoice in it? This is the most reliable sign that power has really changed hands.
- The question of anchoring. When destabilisation arrives, does someone among us name it out loud? A group in which the loss of reference points is recognised together can go through it without returning to the old forms of order.
These questions do not require giving up either anger or conflict. They require checking regularly that the object of our desire has not become that of the adversary, and that we take care of those whom emancipation destabilises, starting with ourselves. Genuinely scarce objects, budgets, positions, places, will not disappear, and neither will conflict; but those who have checked the nature of their object can fight over a budget while remaining adversaries, never enemies.
