Republicanism as Feminine Terror

Abstract

This essay reads Wild Materialism by Jacques Lezra following the ethics of terror that the author proposes in his thought of republicanism. Specifically, it traces the terror of the encounter with woman in the text. According to Lezra, the concept of Woman is pivotal to understand how the (weak) concepts emerge. Once and again in his work, the encounter with woman corrodes the fantasy of the strong concept and the sovereign and another logic arises, republican, non-scatological, non-heroic, and non-sacrificial. We will focus on the failure of the Sadean community and the emergence of another possible community in María Zambrano. Thus, this article proposes a feminist re-reading of Lezra’s work, tracing the (un)work of woman in the construction of the concept and concludes that the structure of the republican event as thought by Lezra is feminine in terms of Jacques Lacan’s sexuation formulas.