Recently I’ve been thinking more about the maxim Badiou puts forward in the Sarkozy book: that there is only one world. A world for Badiou is an existential situation; it is where we live and move and have our being. It is an order of appearance, a stage on which we (and everything else that appears and acts within our world) are players. It is also a panoply of myriad differences and identities, governed by a “transcendental” that rules over its logical coherence. Even sexual difference, finally, falls under the same transcendental as that which prescribes the differences between elements in the periodic table, insofar as these belong to the same world. Which is not to say that the difference between “masculine” and “feminine” is in any sense analogous to the difference between iron and potassium, but that it is not a different sort of difference, a more (or less) fundamental difference.

There is a consequence of this that I would call proto-feminist, which is simply that male and female persons are inhabitants of the same world. They have a common existential situation, and appear on the same stage together. Let’s include, since there’s no reason not to, persons whose sexual being is not completely specified by the terms “male” and “female” - and that might, to some degree, be all of us, whatever the force or seeming self-evidence of our identifications. This statement is “proto-” feminist inasmuch as it makes way for feminism by forbidding the sexist division of men and women into separate worlds. It asserts the possibility of identification between people of different genders, even at the point where sexual difference seems most irrevocable and absolute. (In fact, the persistence in extremis of this possibility of identification is essential to what Badiou calls “love”, which is founded in the discovery, at the point of severance, of a common world).

Sexism installs a binary gender system, and insists that the coherence of the world depends on a systematic complementarity between the two sides of the division it has introduced. There is a male world, the real world, the domain of action and ideas; and there is the female world, its eternal subordinate, which materially sustains it, passively receiving its stamp. The schismatic feminism of the twentieth century aimed to undo the false totality of this world of two halves. At its extreme, it proposed a separation of the globe into male and female hemispheres, a complete cut along the join that made out of two distorted parts a mutilated whole. But this was only to have been the initial operation in a process of reconfiguration, which aimed in the long run at a creative andro-gyny: cut up and fold in.

I was also struck recently by the quotation from Michelle le Doeuff which appears at the head of Laurie Penny’s blog: “A feminist is a woman who does not allow anyone to think in her place”. This asserts that “a woman’s place”, wherever it might be in the distribution of places in the world, is by rights a place of thought; and that what feminism specifically forbids is the arrogation of this place by another, the dislocation of a woman from her own thinking. To assign to women a demi-monde without thought, a subordinate world that is the object of endless male speculation and enquiry (what do women want? How does one engineer female desire?), is the eternal insult of sexism. Feminism, in le Doeuff’s formulation here, is the repudiation of this insult: the assertion of every woman’s right to think in her own place.