ABSTRACT
Certainly women exist in male dreams and nightmares: the narratives warn that women seduce, dispossessed of a penis they cannot know pleasure except through male energy, hence they constantly wish to seduce the male from his reasoned pursuit of sensibility, from the progressive tasks of modernity. In Politics and the Arts, Rousseau warns that ‘never has a people perished from an excess of wine; all perish from the disorder of women’. While wine just render men stupid the ‘disorder of women’ contains a host of vices which can bring all government to an end (1968:109). In Civilisation and its Discontents, Freud warns that women are hostile to and stand in opposition to civilisation (1961: Ch 4). Woman cannot achieve the sublimation of the passions which the task of civilisation requires. In the 18th century, Hegel criticised the actions of Antigione in the classical Greek drama for opposing the right of the state with her own subjectivity; Hegel warned that the community created an enemy for itself within its own gates with women.
