Entretien avec Françoise Héritier

Françoise Héritier finds, in the concern about AIDS, connections with the limits of thoughts : the relationship with others, the rules which establish the trust between people like oneself, the idea of contamina- tion by another person responsible, the constraint with regard to the contagions agent (or its alternative posed in ethical terms, the neces¬ sity for convincing). She underlines the successive reversals and shifts in meaning which imply, in certain systems of thought, that the wo¬ man, responsible for life, may also be held responsible for death and that her death is natural, whereeas a man's is not. Women are on the side of matter, constitute an undifferentiated collective and are therefore in¬ terchangeable, whereas man is considered as an individual. While AIDS allows the recognition of individual status of women, it may also participate in the swinging movement of the hierarchical or¬ ganization of values attributed to the elements of these dualist opposi¬ tions. In order to last, the signs of emancipation should be accompanied by the sharing by men and women of procreation control, with a free feminine choice of contraception and even of abortion. Finally, as an anthropologist, she shows the danger of the «deviation of relativist theories » and «pleads for bringing out laws and invariants »

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