by Manon Soavi

We offer here to the reader the text of a talk given by Manon Soavi at the High-Alsace University’s Research Institute in European Language and Literature¹ as part of the European Ecofeminisms seminar held on 14 and 15 November 2024.

One afternoon of the conference was devoted to author Françoise d’Eaubonne. Her son Vincent first presented a paper entitled The Place of the Body in the Life and Work of Françoise d’Eaubonne. This was followed by Manon Soavi’s speech drawing a link between the urgent need expressed by d’Eaubonne to reconnect with our bodies in order to overcome the dualistic patriarchal ideology and the proposition of an emancipatory self-practice coming from Tsuda Itsuo‘s philosophy of Non-Doing.

The afternoon continued with a screening of Manon Aubel‘s film Françoise d’Eaubonne, an Ecofeminist Epic¹ and a round-table discussion with the participants.

Speech by Manon Soavi

Tsuda Itsuo was a Japanese writer born in 1914. He studied sinology with Marcel Granet and sociology with Marcel Mauss at the Sorbonne University in the 1930s. He strove tirelessly for freedom and took an interest in his Japanese culture, the relationship with the body and ancient Chinese thought. He is the author of ten books in French, published by Le Courrier du Livre (Paris), [all of which have been translated into English]. His philosophy of Non-Doing combines anarchist thinking with a subtle understanding of the Tao.

We are going to see how this philosophy resonates with ecofeminism, not by its label, but by its very nature.

D’Eaubonne‘s programmatic phrase ‘We have to lose our heads so as to inhabit our bodies’⁴ will serve as my starting point. What Françoise d’Eaubonne and Tsuda Itsuo had in common was their belief that emancipation required the integration of other patterns⁵ of thought in order to break out of dualism, and that the body was essential to this process.

Criticising and proposing other possibilities

As Vincent d’Eaubonne has shown, the body was a central subject in the life and thought of Françoise d’Eaubonne. Ahead of the feminism of her time and without yielding to any essentialism, she pointed to the primary role of the body in the mechanisms of domination and the urgent need to reappropriate it as a condition for liberation.

Critical of dualist thinking, like all ecofeminist women, Françoise d’Eaubonne emphasises that the materiality of the body, mired in the living, brings us back to our nature. It prevents us from looking at nature as an object. The body is a source of freedom and allows us to take hold of reality. Françoise d’Eaubonne warns of the worsening taming of the body, which can even disappear with virtualisation.

To tear oneself away from the body, to deny the living within us, is the appalling development against which she challenged us back in 1998 in Virtual and Domination⁶. As the paroxysm of the culture of distancing, the reign of the virtual is going to overturn man’s relationship with the world and perhaps cause an internal collapse by affecting the perceptible difference between the real and the virtual.

For her, this difference ‘can only be re-established by the old formula, the proof of the pudding is that you eat it, for the day when the first drug addict in the cybernetic labyrinth is found dead of hunger in his cabin, wearing the smile of the satiated of the imaginary.’⁷

For d’Eaubonne it is clear that the mind cannot survive healthily in the face of the annihilation of its senses, with the absence of touch⁸ and de-realisation. The loss of the locomotor, sensitive body, replaced by ‘a body hybridised with micro-processors and medical nano-machines, will lead to a significant decline in vitality’. While every innovation is frightening, none has ever had such a profound effect on human beings, and the enslavement of the virtual is of an unprecedented nature.

On the one hand, Françoise d’Eaubonne is sounding the alarm, but on the other she is also shaking up the socio-political framework that structures and determines what can and cannot be said to be a subject, what is perceived as sensitive, vital and intelligent and what is not. Frameworks of experience inscribed in our institutions, our perceptions, our bodies and our narratives. Through her writing, d’Eaubonne brings to light another, reunified world where dualisms and exploitation no longer apply.

In The Satellite of the Almond⁹, the first volume of her Losange Trilogy¹⁰, she shifts the centre of subject and object using the story of the exploration of an uninhabited planet that turns out to literally BE a body. Blurring the boundary between explorer and planet¹¹. It is through their bodies that a fusion of carnal, rhythmic sensibility will take place between them.

In the next volume – The Shepherdesses of the Apocalypse¹² – d’Eaubonne describes the beginnings of Anima, the civilisation of women. In the text, she weaves together nature and humanity, using plant vocabulary to describe women’s societies: ‘Everything sprouted, grew, leafed through in the women’s groups, communities and communes. Everything was rustling, speeches, quarrels, murmurs, comments and songs, and the Revolution was working with little noise and great clatter, sounding like a tree full of creaks and birds’. Further on, the sequence of bagpipes, seagulls and heather underlines the continuity between the human and non-human worlds¹³.

Very lucid, d’Eaubonne also describes the failure of the avant-garde‘s revolutionary action. In The Shepherdesses she writes of this failure that, in any case, ‘their liberation could only be intimate’¹⁴. It could not be achieved from the outside, by force or revolutionary theory. Only life experiences can change the intimate dimension of our bodies and our actions.

Remedying distance: I feel, therefore I am

How can we touch this dimension? This was also a crucial question for Tsuda Itsuo. For him, as for d’Eaubonne, we need to unlock the internal structures that have underpinned our ways of being and acting for centuries. By relying on other thought patterns and on the body.

According to researcher Barbara Glowczewski, myths and rituals are not symbolic. People act with these patterns. For the aborigines, the dream is a rhizomatic becoming, a ‘concept to think about’¹⁵. This is what d’Eaubonne does through her writing.

She points to us an essential key in the passage from The Shepherdesses where we witness the rebirth of a unified, cyclical world: ‘animal cries were born with the same timidity, far away, isolated, coming closer: “I’m here!”’¹⁶

This is a key. This ‘I am here’ neutralises the ‘I think, therefore I am’. This historically dated conception of man surrounded by objects, reified animals and an exploitable landscape.

But there are other conceptions of the world. Diverse cultures with common modes of existence that escape utilitarianism, the abstract universal and the human/environment divide. They are organic and unique. Action finds its reasons and purposes in the interiority of situations. Anthropologist Rodolpho Kush, who studied the indigenous cultures of South America, calls them the Cultures of Estar Siendo, Being There¹⁷.

On the other side of the Pacific, Japanese ecologist Imanishi Kinji identifies a similar notion with Ba 場, There or Being there¹⁸. It is a founding concept of Japanese culture that can be found in many aspects, including the word baai 場合¹⁹, to be somewhere, in the flesh, on a particular occasion. Geographer Augustin Berque¹⁸, Imanishi‘s translator, calls this situational ontology being-thereness²¹.

Imanishi also insists on the fact that living beings link what they are and where they are. And that it is through sensation, through intuition, that we can grasp the commonality of the human and non-human worlds. This is also reflected in Chinese writing. The ideogram Sei生, life, is not a concept, it is a trace that evokes perception. The sensation you get when you see a bud and feel that you yourself are alive within life on earth. Imanishi used to say: ‘I feel, therefore I am’.

This pattern reintegrates us into the earthly world, living among the living. Now, how can we act without falling back into the dualistic pattern? Ancient China provides us with another very interesting pattern: the 無爲 Wu-wei, Non-Doing. We shall see that this has nothing to do with withdrawal from collective action or any individualistic meditative stance.

Sabotaging Cartesian thinking: Non-Doing

Ursula Le Guin wrote: ‘All I’m trying to do is figure out how to put an obstacle in the way’²². Our mental structure, deformed by Cartesianism and dualism, cannot free itself from its straitjacket. That is why we have to put obstacles in the way. This is the aim of Tsuda Itsuo when he declares ‘Even if I do not think, I AM’²³ Following the example of Tchouang-tseu, to provoke a collapse of logic in order to allow another understanding to emerge.

In Chinese and Japanese culture, there are techniques for hacking your brain. Short-circuiting the will to make way for a deeper, more connected intelligence. Practices such as Zen, calligraphy, martial arts, etc., aim to use bodily techniques to encourage the abandonment of calculating thought in order to allow Wu-wei (Non-doing) to emerge.

This is the meaning of the calligraphy Naka, the target. It represents bow, arrow, target and archer all in the same unit. Here thought and action are one. Non-doing is therefore a mode of activity²⁴ in which action and speech are highly effective, precisely because of the absence of intentionality.

The ancient tales of Europe also used symbols to teach us how to find the right way to act. Whether it is kissing a frog, listening to the words of a fox, or waiting for the night to bring advice. It is all about letting go, clearing the air to listen and enter into the flow.

In the same way, Japanese craftsmen co-produce objects with living materials: iron, earth, water and fire. The craftsman is grateful for the unexpected turn his creation takes. So the act is no longer the result of ONE will, ONE subject. It is a multiplicity that expresses itself.

This pattern takes us away from colonial action, from DOING, from the engineer advocating abstract and external solutions to situations. The Kogi people suggested this situational Non-action by proposing the reintroduction of the tapir in Brazil rather than spending millions of dollars restoring primeval forests. Tapirs eat the fruit and make their droppings where there are no fruit trees, thus ‘planting’ the forest. Acting in/with the web of the world.

Native sciences in symbiosis have always existed. Just as animals and plants have always acted in ways that we have probably only glimpsed.

Here, with our urbanised and fragmented lifestyles, one way of entering these paradigms in concrete terms is to rediscover our bodies in everyday practices. To listen to our own involuntary resources, to reactivate our senses and to begin to re-establish a relationship between a rehabilitated wild way of thinking and a relativised learned way of thinking.

Emancipating self-practices

Marcel Mauss pointed out that the body is not only an expression of ourselves, but also of a cultural conception, social organisation and systems of representation of the world²⁵. Social training and our alienation are therefore inscribed in our bodies.

In the East, body and mind are not separate, so philosophy and practice are inseparable. For Tsuda Itsuo, Aikido and Katsugen undo are part of the path of the philosophy of the Non-Doing. They are practices of emancipation in which we experience a gap between our habits and their recalibration.

It is through sensitive touch and movement that we experience a different kind of relationship, one which involves neither speech nor vision. We rediscover ‘knowledge about ourselves’ and ‘practices of ourselves’ that involve both the individual and the collective.

Seen in this perspective, Aikido is not about learning to fight and destroy. It is a study, through the body, of the possibilities of relating to others, despite and with conflict. To re-establish balance within ourselves, and within relationships.

Faced with the domestication of women and what Elsa Dorlin calls the ‘factory of disarmed bodies’²⁶, d’Eaubonne emphasised the importance of reclaiming the ability to react. As an Aikido teacher, I join d’Eaubonne‘s call to rediscover ‘the ignored, repressed attitudes that frighten us so, the simplest fighting positions of the body’²⁷.

The generation paradigm

Philosopher Émilie Hache²⁸ underlines a very important point: extractivist industrial societies no longer show any concern for generation, i. e. the reproduction of conditions of existence. Historically replaced by the idea of Providence. A world created once and for all, no longer needing to be perpetuated on a daily basis. Generation is a total social phenomenon, concerning the perpetuation of humans, the clan, relationships with ancestors and the living amongst whom we live.

I would add that our societies no longer show any concern for the vital capacities of human (re)generation. The machine vision of a fragmented body leads us to think that we can wear out our bodies like we wear out a bicycle. From time to time, you have to apply the brakes and change pieces. Except that biological processes and metabolism do not at all respond in the same way as these mechanical processes, to which they have too often been compared.

Vital processes regenerate themselves and return to equilibrium on a daily basis if given the chance. But involuntary movement is repressed. The rigid body has difficulty reacting, keeping its balance and recovering from fatigue. As ecofeminist Ariel Salleh puts it: ‘Sensitivity to the flows of nature is lost when knowledge insists on the precise operations that need to be carried out to transform nature’²⁹.

Conversely, in the paradigm of generation, human life is part of a holistic vision. Vernacular practices take care of internal resources, i. e. the innate ability to balance through the involuntary movement of the body on a daily basis.

The practice of Katsugen Undo, which is a kind of involuntary gymnastics, is part of this paradigm. It is the manifestation of the internal work that humans already possess, but which in our modern world needs a space-time to make room for the expression of the activity of the living within us.

Of course, it is not a question of miracle recipes, but of taking into account practices that balance and emancipate over the long term.

Conclusion

To conclude, when Françoise d’Eaubonne wrote ‘We have to lose our heads so as to inhabit our bodies’, she was expressing her radicalism. Refuse rather than continue. Lose our head if we have to rather than maintain patriarchal dualism. And then build something else, here and now.

I find in her the same integrity and determination that my parents had. In their case, it was because of their refusal to perpetuate the educational formatting that my sisters and I never went to school. Libertarian dojos were born out of their refusal to accept existing social relationships.

Most of them are urban, self-managed, egalitarian and subsidy-free. Where women are in the majority. Dojos made up of resourcefulness and tenacity over the last 40 years. Like the ZADs, they are breaking with neoliberal individualism as much as with the old forms of protest. They are places and practices from which changes affecting the individual and the collective can emerge.

The point is not to ape unhistorical practices, outside their own cultures. As Anna Tsing writes in The Mushroom at the End of the World³⁰, ‘the ruins are closing in and encircling us on all sides, from industrial sites to devastated natural landscapes’. However, ‘the mistake would be to believe that we are content to survive in them, for it is also in these ruins, these margins, that life is sometimes more lively, more intense.’³¹

Indeed, these practices originated in Japan, in the ruins of the Second World War. They are a resurgent rhizome, an update of ancient vernacular wisdom. It is through the power of the use that people make of them to live out other possibilities here and now that they become strategic practices of resistance-creation that are profoundly ecofeminist.

Thank you for your attention.

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