The philosopher Sylviane Agacinski elected to the French Academy

The philosopher and essayist Sylviane Agacinski was elected today to the French Academy, to the chair of Jean-Loup Dabadie, who died three years ago, by 13 votes out of 23 voters (including 7 crosses, synonymous with refusal). La Coupole now has seven women and twenty-nine men.

It will therefore have taken a 4th ballot, after three blank elections, for the “illustrious company” to welcome a new member within it, fifteen months after the election of Antoine Compagnon. It was time. Three white elections, since May 12, 2022, where the candidacies of Franz-Olivier Giesbert, Olivier Barrot, Benoît Duteurtre, Frédéric Beigbeder, Éric Neuhoff and Alain Borer, among others, had been successively rejected. Once is not custom, the Academy has even decided to speed up the procedure, contrary to its protocol habits, having already announced, a few weeks ago, the date of the next election to the chair of Marc Fumaroli, disappeared in June 2020, which has been set for Thursday, June 22. Among the candidates: the novelist and poet Hédi Kaddour (born in 1945), who has been the favorite so far. Three other chairs are vacant, those of René de Obaldia, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and Jean-Denis Bredin. Unless a new white election once again delays the upcoming polls.

Born in 1945, Sylviane Agacinski participated, at the age of 30, in the creation of the Research Group on Philosophical Education, alongside Jacques Derrida (with whom she would have a child) and Jean-Luc Nancy. A few years later, she was appointed program director at the International College of Philosophy before teaching at the EHESS, until 2010. Meanwhile, in 1994, this feminist intellectual figure married Lionel Jospin, future Prime Minister, and then simple general councilor of Haute-Garonne. This is the year in which she publishes Critique of egocentrism, followed, in 1998, by Politique des sexes. Diversity and parity.

In Politique des sexes (1998), she reaffirmed that sexual difference is a natural fact that societies interpret differently, while criticizing the thought of Simone de Beauvoir. In 2002, she had kept a diary, covering the period of the presidential campaign, from January to May (Journal interrupted). We also owe him studies on Kierkegaard, and on the playwrights Ibsen and Strindberg.

Her best-known and most controversial work is Corps en crumbs, published in 2009, in which she wrote, while engaging in the debate on the revision of the 2004 bioethics laws: "Baby business is everywhere looking for bellies to hire. Propaganda in favor of surrogacy cannot mask the violence of such a practice. In the name of the dignity of the human person, this book calls for resistance.