« Nous, femmes »: que voulons-nous ?

Abstract

“We, women”, what do we want? In this article the expression designates two things. The Lacanian “not-all” of feminine “jouissance”, which answers to the old Freudian question “what does woman want?” and “We, women” as one of the instances of universal equality conceptualised by Rancière. The question pursued here is the following: How does feminine “jouissance” alter the concept of the miscounting of equality, how does it bring to the fore the problem of the numeric element itself? Thus, what is at stake is not only the non-relation of equality to the inequality that does it wrong, its miscount. What is at stake is a non-relation within equality itself, which designates the equality between men and women (a two without one) that can never enter into any count at all. This equality is thematised through an analysis of the feminist dimension of the Algerian civil war.