Thinking With an Accent: Françoise Collin, Les cahiers du Grif, and French Feminism

Abstract

This essay explores the life and work of Françoise Collin (1928–2012), the feminist philosopher, writer, and activist who in 1973 founded the first French-language feminist journal—Les cahiers du Grif—and kept it going, between Brussels and Paris, until 1997. The main argument is that this journal is a monument of French and European feminism and Collin was the force behind it. The article also explores the historical and intellectual context that helped define Françoise Collin’s political moment and her original theoretical stance. It looks into the phenomenon that became known as French feminism and analyzes the politics of location and translation that marked that era. The author, who worked with Collin for several years, positions herself as an eyewitness to those events and assesses their longer-term impact on American as well as European feminisms. The personal tone, however, is theoretically driven. The article discusses the philosophical underpinnings of the feminism of difference, which in Collin’s case was influenced by the work of Maurice Blanchot, Hannah Arendt, and Emmanuel Levinas. The emphasis falls on notions such as the sexual differend, plurality, and openness to others, which are the building blocks both of Collin’s feminist ethics and of her political praxis.