The Feminine and the Sacred, Catherine Clément, Julia Kristeva

In a personal and professional journey, there comes a time when one wishes to pursue what is essential, sheltered from loneliness and without the constraint of the group. It also happens that what is essential, for a woman, appears as something to be shared with other women. Thus, at a precise moment, the idea for this reflection emerged. These could only be our perpetual concerns, evident in our intellectual and literary trajectories, which the approaching end of the second millennium seems to imbue with burning relevance: the sacred. Not religion, but that experience which beliefs shelter and exploit, at the crossroads of sexuality and thought, of body and meaning, which women intensely realize without necessarily being concerned with it. Is there or is there not a sacred proper to women? What place do women have in this history, dated from the birth of Jesus? And the feminine in monotheisms – Judaism, Christianity, Islam – but also Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, animistic religions of Africa and elsewhere? If it is true that women are awakening in the coming millennium, what can be the profound meaning of this awakening? A vast program, as attractive as it is impossible to accomplish. Unless we content ourselves with raising questions rather than providing answers, sketching out fields without confining them in definitions. Because we lived thousands of miles apart, it was out of the question to proceed other than by correspondence. A book was born, but a book with two voices, on a theme calling for singular echoes from each and every one. We would like it to be read with the spirit of trust and debate that animated us throughout.