The philosopher and essayist Sylviane Agacinski was elected today to the French Academy, in 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 therefore took a 4th ballot, after three blank elections, for the "illustrious company" to welcome a new member to its ranks, fifteen months after the election of Antoine Compagnon. It's about time. Three blank elections, since May 12, 2022, where the candidacies of Franz-Olivier Giesbert, Olivier Barrot, Benoît Duteurtre, Frédéric Beigbeder, Eric Neuhoff and Alain Borer, among others, were successively rejected. For once, the Academy has even decided to accelerate 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, who died in June 2020, which was set for Thursday, June 22. Among the candidates: the novelist and poet Hédi Kaddour (born in 1945), who has been the favorite until then. Three other seats are vacant, those of René de Obaldia, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and Jean-Denis Bredin. Unless a new white election delays the upcoming polls once again.
See alsoSylviane Agacinski, sentinel of bioethics
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 had a child) and Jean-Luc Nancy. A few years later, she was appointed program director at the Collège international de philosophie before teaching at the EHESS until 2010. Meanwhile, in 1994, this feminist intellectual figure married Lionel Jospin, future Prime Minister, and then simple General Councillor of Haute-Garonne. This was the year she published Critique de l'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). He also wrote studies on Kierkegaard, and on the playwrights Ibsen and Strindberg.
Her best-known and most controversial book is Corps en miettes, published in 2009, and in which she wrote, while engaging in the debate on the revision of the bioethics laws of 2004: "The baby business is everywhere looking for bellies to rent. Propaganda in favor of surrogacy cannot hide the violence of such a practice. In the name of the dignity of the human person, this book calls for resistance."
