ABSTRACT
I will not speculate here on its table of contents, I think it is safe to assume that though most likely equally ethnocentric, it would be less gynocentric, because as historians of French Feminisms have often pointed out, in France recent feminist thought has always functioned in dialogue with the reigning male maîtres à penser, notably Lacan and Derrida. One figure is almost never mentioned in this context and that is Roland Barthes. And yet, I will want to argue here that it is perhaps in Barthes, who was in his own words a sort of “echo chamber”4 of contemporary French thought, that we can most easily grasp the dominant male discourse on sexuality in poststructuralist France, what I will call the discourse of in-difference or of pure difference, for they are in fact one and the same.
