Elisabeth Roudinesco: “Human Break, Become a Human: Passages and Borders”

Contribution. In 1930, in a famous work (malaise in civilization), Freud launches a sentence that will have a strong impact: “The man who first glanced at the head of his enemy, not a spear, that man. was the true founder of civilization. “By these words, he intended to define what, in his eyes, founded the human future of man: give up, if not to the death drive, at least to act by the murder, at the price of elsewhere to have the right to insult his neighbor. And that’s why he remained all his life an unconditional supporter of the abolition of the death penalty: no human being can accept the legalization of the death drive. And, in the same text, he added that the first man to give up the pleasure of urinating on a flame was also the hero of a conquest of civilization – the control of the fire -, since he gave the woman the ways to maintain a home. Certainly, today, the Gender Division is no longer based on such role assignments.

And that’s why, instead of declining the infinite the famous phrase of Simone de Beauvoir – we do not bother this or that, it becomes – I prefer to emphasize that we are born human and that It is becoming, whether one is a woman or man, or that we are, then, by choice, homosexual, bisexual, transgender or all at once. Sex (innate) should not be opposed (built), neither gender gender. The universal is nothing without the difference, and vice versa. And the same, the “breed” does not exist in the human world, but only differences in pigmentation. Nobody should be racialized or struck. Being human is determined by both a biological anchor, by a life in society and a psychic structure. Human born, it also means that we are not born non-human and we do not become it. We are not animals, even if we belong to the animal kingdom, contrary to what some animalists believe that we could cross the species barrier by creating legal marriages between humans and non-human.

The law is not always enough

In reality, it is because we are part of the vast universe of the living, with gains, borders and passages, which we must, as human beings, to worry about the sufferings endured by the non-humans. Everything different from us from animality: language, culture, scientific thought. But everything brings us closer to us, as evidenced by the cultures that include animality in their representations of the world.

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/Media reports.