FRATERNITY

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Notes

1 Scheherazade opposes her imagination, her mind and her heart to the law of the Sultan; she also acts with the assistance of her sister Dunyazade. Hester of Nathaniel Hawthorne submits to the social law of conjugality, which earns her the stockade and the “scarlet letter.” The Russian anarchists, especially the women (Vera Zassoulitch, Olga Loubatovitch, etc.), conceived of their action from the outset as being less political than human – or even “metaphysical” – in the broadest sense (this conforms to the very idea of “anarchism”). Vera Figner writes: “The teaching which promised equality, fraternity, and universal happiness, could not help but dazzle me” (Memoirs of a Revolutionist (International Publishers, 1927) 164). In The Bacchae, the women of Thebes leave the village for the wild forest upon hearing the announcement of Dionysus’ return. It goes without saying that the list could be extended … from Sarah who laughs at God to Simone Weil who, in 1940, knew enough to write that “[e]very new development for the last three centuries has brought men closer to a state of affairs in which absolutely nothing would be recognized in the whole world as possessing a claim to obedience except the authority of the State,” or else to those sisters, the daughters of General Hammerstein whose history Hans-Magnus Enzensberger has recounted so superbly.