In this essay, Thierry de Duve leaves the aesthetics and history of the art to approach, under the religious prism, two anthropological questions that the mutation of the symbolic order in progress makes pressing: the difference of the sexes and the future of the politics of emancipation.
Thierry de Duve outlines the main features of a critical theory of male, all-too-male sexuation and cross-gender emancipation, drawing on Marcel Gauchet's theses on Christianity as an exit from religion, Jacques Lacan's algebra of desire, and Geneviève Morel's analysis of the "law of the mother."
Wouldn't it have required more than the translation of the three Christian maxims "faith, hope, love" into the revolutionary maxims "liberté, egalité, fraternité"? Is there more to the knot of incarnation, fatherhood, and the cult of Mary than just Christian mysticism? Can the uncertainty of fatherhood become an act of faith that acknowledges a fundamental uncertainty?
Come On, Men, One More Effort … explores ways out of the dead end of political concepts adopted by the Enlightenment and their continued impact today, since the only possibility seems to be to embrace the religious and reject it at the same time.
Thierry de Duve (born 1944 in Saint-Trond, Belgium) is an art historian, philosopher and curator. He has taught art history and aesthetics at the University of Lille III, and has been a visiting professor at the Sorbonne, MIT and Johns Hopkins University.
