[In the following essay, Goux explores the reversal of earthly values in the utopian society on the moon depicted in L'Autre Monde.]

The belligerent narrator of Cyrano de Bergerac's L'Autre Monde, ou voyage sur la lune, describing a voyage to an “Other World” made possible by the invention of a fantastic machine of springs and rockets, reports to us in minute detail the customs and institutions of language, money, paternity, and the phallus in lunar society.¹ At first glance, these institutions and customs seem as strange and absurd as this impossible country where men walk on all fours, build moveable homes, deny the existence of God, believe that matter is made of atoms and that cabbages are intelligent. Even the wildest fantasies, however, have their coherence; there is no fiction, just as there is no delirium, that does not have in a certain sense its own formality. Cyrano's utopian writing, set in a remote Elsewhere that is, he says, “this world upside down” (125), betrays a desire for reversal too unrealistic to be hoped for in the here and now, but one that possesses its own logic. Between theology, which places the sovereign good in heaven, and revolution, which brings it by force to earth, lies utopia, neither vertical nor horizontal, neither in heaven nor on earth but between the two, on the moon. Technology makes such a voyage possible: the artificial wings and flying rockets of an erectile automatism allow new Icaruses to defy paternal injunctions and to mount an assault on a universe of which little earth is no longer the center. Cyrano exemplifies this new technician; his scientific imagination promises an escape from that which is—and an encounter with the Other World. It becomes possible to hope for an inverted universe—but what does such an inversion mean?

For a better understanding, let us travel through these “states and empires of the moon” as enlightened voyagers who, at each discovery of unknown customs and manners, realize the extent of their prejudices.

Of the series of symbolic elements we have just discussed, our imaginary anthropology first encounters language. But here the notion of language, or rather the two idioms that coexist in this world of linguistic inequality, takes no account of what we too often assume to be its essence: phonetic articulation. The idiom of the elite “is simply different tones not articulated, very much like our music when no words have been added to it” (81), while the idiom of the people “is carried out by movements of the limbs”; “Certain parts of the body mean a whole speech” (81-82).

The elite, certainly, communicate by means of the voice, but it is a singing voice, which can be replaced by a musical instrument. When the nobles are tired of using their throats to produce sounds, “they take a lute or some other instrument, with whose aid they communicate their thought as easily as by the voice” (81). Hence the utopian vision of an orchestral gathering where the beauty of combined sounds replaces the severe rigor of argument: “Sometimes fifteen or twenty of them may be met with debating a point of theology or the difficulties of a law case in the most harmonious concert that could tickle one's ears” (81).

The lower classes, condemned to silence, move their bodies. They “gesticulate their ideas” (82) according to a code that is no less precise than our language: “The movement of a finger, of a hand, of an ear, of a lip, of an arm, of a cheek, will make singly a discourse or a sentence; others are only used to designate words, such as a wrinkle in the forehead, different shiverings of the muscles, turnings of the hands, stampings of the foot, contortions of the arm” (82). In both cases, verbal language, the differentiated succession of vowels and consonants, is foreign to the inhabitants of the moon.

It appears that Cyrano's linguistic utopia aims at directly challenging phonocentric prejudices. In his libertarian desire to imagine a world freed from constraints and inhibitions, Cyrano significantly attacks the assumption that every idiom ought to be speech and obey a hidden principle of double phonetic articulation. He then raises corporeal gestures, as well as musical vibrations, to the stature of a means of communication as rich and efficacious as speech. Thus, in the lunar utopia speech loses its privileged position as a universal equivalent of signs or as a standard of signification. Cyrano criticizes the phonetic not in the name of writing but in the name of nonlinguistic signifiers that on our earth remain subordinate to a phonetic universal equivalent.

It is worth noting that the desire to identify the musical idiom of the lunar citizens leads Cyrano to a typographical innovation that anticipates contemporary writers. Alphabetical writing breaks off suddenly at several places in the text to be replaced by notes of music on a stave, which represent a proper name impossible to translate by our vowels and consonants. Cyrano thus shatters the privilege of the alphabetic chain by interrupting it with a nonlinguistic idiom.

If speech thus loses its value in the lunar utopia as a standard of signs, similarly gold is no longer the universal equivalent of economic exchange. The monetary principle remains, but the standard of measurement for mercantile value is no longer fixed. The voyager discovers this when, after eating roasted larks fallen fully cooked from the sky, he watches the demon of Socrates, who accompanies him, settle the bill for the meal with the tavern keeper by giving him a poem:

“Verses!” I answered, “Are the tavern-keepers here so fond of rhymes?”

“'Tis the money of the country,” replied he, “and our expenses at this place came to a sixain, which I have just given him. I was not afraid of being short of money, for even though we feasted here for eight days we should not spend a sonnet, and I have four on me, with nine epigrams, two odes and an eclogue.”

(86-87)

The poem is the universal equivalent of goods and services. Here the metaphor of poetic talent is reversed. A talent was originally a Greek coin (talentos) that through resemblance comes to designate all value—and eventually even the quality that enables the production of value itself, including aesthetic value. However, here it is the figurative, as poetic talent, that becomes the origin of mercantile value. On the moon the principal of universal equivalence is maintained (this is not a return to bartering as in many utopias), but a radical substitution of the standard of measurement takes place. It is not the economic value of gold but the poetic value of verse (we are not told if this is expressed in the idiom of music) that regulates the system of prices. Each, in proportion to his talent, can create his own money; official standards, however, are not lacking, as the demon of Socrates explains when the narrator questions him on his “coined verses”:

“When an author has composed some verses he carries them to the [Court of Currency], where the sworn poets of the kingdom hold their sessions. There the verifying officers test the pieces and if they are judged to be of a good alloy they are estimated, not according to their weight, but according to their wit.”

(87)

Thus the impetus to compose begins with individuals, but this created money is given value after the event by a Court of Currency. Appreciation of the poem replaces evaluation of the purity and weight of precious metal. The measure is aesthetic; value itself, that which serves as a standard of exchange, is not subject to a mercantile economy.

Now, following our line of inquiry, we encounter a third master signifier. The lawyer (who is none other than Socrates' demon) gives a long, pitiless indictment of fathers. In the lunar utopia, the subordination of sons to fathers is reversed, and “the old render every deference and honour to the young” (109). As soon as sons are capable of using their reason, fathers must obey them. Neither physical force nor intellectual strength nor competence can legitimate patriarchy. “When a warm young fellow is most apt to imagine, to judge and to execute, is he not more capable of governing a family than an infirm man of sixty?” (109). How can “the poor dullard, whose imagination is frozen by the snow of sixty winters” (109) claim better to rule his conduct, when his prudence is only fear? “Why then should you submit to him, when idleness has melted his muscles, weakened his arteries, evaporated his spirits and sucked the marrow from his bones?” (110). The conclusion is inevitable: young men, not the aged—the sons, not the fathers—should govern. Cyrano refuses any symbolic value that would transcend material reality. The father is not raised to the stature of an office or symbol whose authority and strength are essentially moral.

This principle is certainly not self-evident; it strikes against all conventional law—but this is because, in all times and places, fathers have decreed the laws. This indeed becomes the lunar lawyer's immediate objection in his argument: “But all who introduced these laws were old men and they were afraid the young men would dispossess them of the authority they had usurped; and so, like the legislators of false religions, they made a mystery of what they could not prove” (111). Because old men are the fathers of the law under all circumstances, the law is always and everywhere patriarchal. The lunar lawyer does nothing but take apart the mechanism of an ideology. He maintains that only the patriarchs' interests are at stake in the content they have given to the law. These rules do not have the universal and eternal value that patriarchs ascribe to them; they express only the interests of the class of powerful old men who mean to keep their position. Religion (as we find in a well-known later denunciation) is the model for this mechanism. Unfathomable mystery appears in the place of what can not be acknowledged. The sanctity of the duty that commands respect for the father is based only on, and thus replaces, what can not be represented: the self-interest of the fathers themselves.

It is significant that Cyrano (or rather the lunar lawyer), in his effort to strip paternity of all sanctity and to take apart the mechanism of the patriarchal self-legitimation that keeps the son in his theological illusion, reduces the role of the father exclusively to that of begetter. Freed from the illusory prestige of authority, no longer seen as an intangible and transcendent symbol of the law but in his perishable body, the father is restored without pity to his ephemeral biological function of engenderer (before becoming, with age, the imbecilic “doting old fool” with “outworn organs”; 111). Hence, in the lunar lawyer's harshly anti-patriarchal speech for the defense, a direct reference to the copulatory father follows immediately after the denunciation of paternal power, radically undermining the rest of his symbolic authority: “When he imagines you are greatly obliged to him for his having made you by tickling himself, he actually has only given you what an ordinary bull gives his calves ten times every day for his amusement” (116). It is impossible to overturn more effectively the cult of ancestors. There is nothing praiseworthy or honorable in the act of copulation. In disowning the veneration of pater, all that is left for the father is the limited and irresponsible role of a genitor who cannot legitimize his power. Reduced to the natural function of “carnal propagation” of the species, the father is no more than an animal of the male sex who serves his mate.

What matters here is the coherence of the strategy by which the desanctification or denial of the father as principle of authority leads to his naturalistic reduction to genitor—the comical erectile animal in the empire of Mother Nature. If the concept of pater is situated in the symbolic or archetypal register, we see in its irreducibility to the status of genitor qualities that prohibit the reinstatement of the domains of nature and of Matter; the concept of pater evokes, as a metaphor, the transcendent domain of ideas. In its opposition to materialism, idealism not only proclaims and maintains the difference between pater and genitor, the split between spiritual and symbolic engendering on one hand and simple biological reproduction on the other hand, but tends to make the latter secondary, thus repressing it. It is a “pater-ialism.”² But, inversely, the collapse of the meaning of pater as a transcendent site for the law immediately reaffirms the naturalist vision that here determines all conceptions. The father, without any genital participation (as in the Christian dogma of the virgin birth), is the very figure that promulgates religious idealism as “pater-ialism.” In the reversed vision of extreme naturalism, the father is strictly reduced to the role of genitor.

We should remember that Cyrano de Bergerac is struggling against a religion in which sexual continence is one of the foundations of fatherhood. Abstention from carnal propagation while calling oneself “father” or “Pope” displays the rift between pater and genitor. This underlines the metaphorical nature of the father. The lunar lawyer, as we might expect, mocks this practise as being against nature. Why, if the father is by definition metaphorical, should God have provided him with the attributes of a genitor?

Since in the world whence you come chastity is considered so preferable to carnal propagation I marvel that God did not cause you to be born like mushrooms from the dew of May. … Yet it is only by accident that He sends eunuchs among you and He does not tear the genitals from your monks, your priests or your cardinals. You will say these were bestowed on them by Nature. Yes, but He is Nature's Master and if He had recognized that this piece was harmful to their salvation He would have ordered them to cut it off.

(115)

And, he asks again, has “far-seeing Nature” inclined the noble and eloquent toward Love “for them to reap this organ of pleasure with a blow from a sickle?” (116).

Certainly not. Mother Nature means nothing of the sort, nor does she desire universal castration. In the dispute that opposes “far-seeing Nature” and the hypothetical God of earthlings who has made this “piece” detrimental to salvation, the necessity of copulation (in the absence of spontaneous generation) weighs in favor of a Nature where no God is master. The very existence of the virile member is thus almost equal to a proof of the nonexistence of God. Castration would serve as a proof of God, just as the existence of the penis would be an irrefutable argument for atheism.

This evidence prepares us to understand better a strange custom of the lunar world. After the discussion of language, money, and the father (and before the final declaration of atheism), the reader is informed of a special custom concerning the phallus. But can we, once again, speak of a reversal? Is there a critique of the phallus here just as there is a disavowal of the gold standard, the signification of speech, and the law of the father? This time the case is not so simple.

In the lunar world, men go completely naked. A medal, however, attracts the attention of the astronaut.

I asked the young host: “I beg you will tell me what is meant by that bronze, shaped like our parts of shame, which hung from that man's belt?” […]

“Here the females no more than the males would be so ungrateful as to blush at the sight of that which made them; the virgins are not ashamed to respect upon us, in memory of their mother Nature, the one thing which bears her name. Know then that the scarf with which this man is honoured and upon which hangs like a medal the shape of a virile member, is the symbol of a gentleman and the mark which distinguishes a noble from a commoner.”

I protest this paradox seemed to me so extravagant that I could not keep from laughing.

“This seems to me a most extraordinary custom,” said I to my young host, “since in our world to wear a sword is the mark of nobility.”

(140-41)

To say that this text needs only psychoanalysis to be comprehensible is not enough. In the coherence of its vision, it points to the very source of the process of symbolization. It is itself analytic. It expresses something of the significance of the concept of nature, in its relation to the signifier and to the sexuality that philosophical discourse leaves in the unconscious but that becomes manifest in writing, with an almost structural precision, through Cyrano's fantasy.

First, the text uncovers the phallic signification of the sword. To wear the figure of a penis and not a sword reveals as phallic a value that is disguised in nonsexual display. At the same time, Cyrano, unlike Freud, does not simply create a homology between the sword and the phallus but opposes them. The sword is the instrument of death; the phallus is the organ of life. One can not replace the other except through a strange perversion. Hence the astonishment of the lunar man:

The nobles in your world are mad to parade an instrument which is the mark of a hangman, which is only forged for our destruction and is indeed the sworn enemy of everything that lives! And just as mad on the contrary to hide a member without which we should be in the category of things that are not. … Woe to the country where the marks of generation are ignominious and where those of destruction are honourable!

(141)

By returning to the penis, from which the power of procreation arises, Cyrano discovers the latent unconscious of noble prestige; at the same time, he denounces its dissimulation, its falsified re-presentation, its displacement of life toward death. The phallic effigy carried by the lunar men is indeed a symbol (it is “the mark which distinguishes a noble from a commoner”), but it is a symbol that desymbolizes: it reintroduces chains of substitution that are unequal to their origin. By denouncing sword bearing and by replacing it with the bearing of a penis, lunar men do not enter into the processes of substitution, idealization, and repression by which sexual reproduction is devalorized. The phallic effigy does not transcend the penis but manifests it. There is thus an origin that is by definition natural.

This is why, paradoxically, we must see a critique of phallocentrism in Cyrano's fantasy. The exhibited penis of the lunar utopia can not play its initiatory role in the symbolic economy. It is too visible and theatrical. The penis belongs to Nature, to the Mother; it has not been torn from her domain (precisely by symbolic castration) in order to become a veiled signifier. This penis without mystery does not lead to the metaphorical father, to the pater and his law. If it is indeed a symbol, a badge, the thing symbolized is only the generative power of Nature, the brute triumph of the genitor. Far from unconsciously producing the metaphysical connotations that unite the phallus and the logos, this doubling of the penis stubbornly refers to the profane and physical organ, just as we saw in the previous denunciation of the mysteries of religion. It prevents the transformation of the penis into the phallus. What indirectly evokes the sword, the scepter, the sacerdotal staff (a transcendent principle of authority and of strength) ceases to be signified if we no longer exclude the brutal sexual equation that makes of these objects substitutes for the natural organ—or better, if we represent what they dissemble. This is how Cyrano, the master of suspicion, again undermines those forms of authority—namely of the clergy and of the nobility—that rely on the signs of power. He disowns the universe of “cryptophoric” symbols charged with conflicted energies. He moves from the symbol to the fact, from idealized substitutes to nature.

This ennoblement of the penis among the moon dwellers thus reinforces the disavowal of the fathers as pater and their reduction to the role of genitor. On this last point, it is Mother Nature who is glorified in the prestige attributed to generation. Cyrano's imputation could not be more clear: “The virgins are not ashamed to respect upon us, in memory of their mother Nature, the one thing which bears her name” (140). Here it is not the Name of the Father but indeed the Name of the Mother that is evoked by the penis. The implication is unmistakable: the appellation “natural parts” applied to that region of the body clearly attests to its place in the realm of nature. This link between nature and sexuality is familiar. That an expression testifies to the link demonstrates its firm anchoring in the unconscious of language. But what is new are the distinctions the period drew from the irreducible power of this metaphor. Cyrano pushes the metaphor all the way to paradox by making the penis into an organ of the Mother. He thus reveals the imaginary correlative of his philosophical position. Bernard de Fontenelle, another utopian, who published in 1682 a République des philosophes whose citizens “regard only Nature as their mother” and set her “in the place of what we call God,” was equally intrigued by the expression “natural parts.” In his Lettre à la Marquise de *** sur la nudité des sauvages, Fontenelle sees in the expression an almost involuntary but significant glorification of the strength of Nature in reproduction. We want, remarks Fontenelle, to commit the sexual act only in secret, and consequently we hide the parts involved in the act. “In spite of this, we can not keep from giving to these parts an excellent and very beautiful name; we have called them natural parts, by which Nature operates the most noble of her works, the most useful of her operations, which is the conservation of the species, the multiplication of humans.”

It is indeed the prevalence, even if recognized unconsciously, of genitor over pater in reproduction that betrays the parts called “natural.” Nudity evokes only the single link genitor/genetrix, which is entirely subordinated to the domain of nature. This nature is all powerful, whether we see her as a good mother or, like Hegel on the contrary, as a stepmother capable of producing monstrosity, sickness, and death in transgressing the eternal patron. What the concealment of sex (in which Kant saw the very origin of reason) makes easier to forget is the materialist horror of irreducibly natural human reproduction. This single region of the body is hidden because it alone resists the work of spiritualizing (denaturing) that transfigures the human body, even when stripped. Without the concealment of sex the father, the pater, can not accede to power. The dissimulation of “natural” parts is the first sign of the symbolic and cultural reproduction in which pater dominates both mater (its direct correlative) and genetrix, the powerful correlative of genitor. In the state of nature man is first the son of the Mother (Mother Nature); it is only with the concealment of sex that man first becomes the son of the Father. Thus arises the first metaphor, the replacement of the thing itself by a sign that reveals and conceals it. Here is the origin, as well, of the phallus, which can only play its role when veiled and displaced.

Elsewhere, I have claimed, in turn, that: the Father is the universal equivalent of subjects, language is the universal equivalent of signs, and the phallus is the universal equivalent of the objects of drives in a manner structurally and genetically homologous to the gradual accession of a unique element, gold, to the stature of the universal equivalent of goods. This is the mono form (monocentric, monovalent) of exchange that occurs among the links, substitutions, and relations that have been analysed. These structural conformities lead us to question the coherence or the unity of a symbolic mode that is necessarily and simultaneously centered on money, logos, father, and phallus, raising the question of an historical transcendence of this structural principle.³

Thus one can discover in Cyrano's utopia not only a fantasy concerning each of these privileged terms but a clearly intended interrogation of each of them that follows a surprisingly coherent pattern. The lunar society is a world in which each of these master signifiers is systematically contested. The lunar citizens regulate their social life by an economic exchange that rejects the tyranny of the gold standard, by a process of communication not dominated by spoken language, by a play of intersubjective relations violently opposed to the rule of the father, and, finally, by a libidinal valorization that, in asserting the penis, does not raise the phallus to the stature of a transcendent and veiled symbol—not to mention by the declaration of atheism that completes the series. Here is a systematic illustration of the subversion of the monocentric principle of universal equivalents, one that not only corroborates our homologies (it can not be by chance that each is denounced, in turn, according to strictly parallel criteria) but also poses the question of the historical status of the utopian genre in these terms as well.

It is as if, in the unfolding of his fiction, Cyrano had uncovered correlations and consequences that previously had gone unnoticed in thought and had brought forth his quadruple configuration (monetaro-logo-patro-phallo-centrism) in order to reject it, at the same time linking his repudiation to a defense of atheism and further seeking in Mother Nature and matter the basis that the other homologies no longer provide. Cyrano's fiction is not only a satirical utopia but also an anticipation: it sketches a conflict that, in various forms, continues to influence thought right up to the present. It questions the consistency of the hierarchical and monocentric system's founding principles and the validity of its numismatic chain, bearer of the nomos, the law of value and exchange. Already, it indicates a reversal.

The universal equivalent has three functions. It can be a standard of measurement, the instrument of circulation, and a means of reserve; it is, in brief, both archetype, token, and treasury. The impliction of Cyrano's questioning bears above all on the first function. Through a process of idealization, an object is raised to the stature of a transcendent standard of measurement that in turn enables a critique. Whether the idealization occurs in relation to language, money, father, or penis, Cyrano refuses to let it make spoken language, the gold standard, the venerated father, and the veiled and metaphorized penis into master signifiers that are erected as standards of value, central archetypes that regulate the system of exchange and symbolic substitution. This descending dialectic leads back to a corporeal and natural foundation that existed before the separation of the symbolic: language becomes simply music and gesture, the father simply the genitor, the phallus simply a penis that dares not name itself.

The critical function of utopia can already be discerned in the writings of Thomas More. In the society founded by Utopus there is neither money nor concept. However, More's utopia remains patriarchal. Cyrano's fantastic and satirical bent propagates other dreams, the unexpected appearance of even more radical imaginings. It promises us the moon. And this other world reflects and subverts that which offers itself as a substitute for the Other. It takes up standards of measurement in order to reverse them, without attempting to construct a plausible human universe, nonetheless anticipating a process whose importance has only become clear with the passage of time.

How is such a critique possible? Does it not assume the adoption of a decentered point of view in relation to masculine discourse? But what type of masculinity? And what is the place of the feminine here?

First, Cyrano situates the other world on the moon, which is at once a natural phenomenon and a symbol. This is the moon of astronomy that became an other world to be explored by Galileo's telescope from 1610 onward, later to be mapped in Paris by Pierre Gassendi, Cyrano's friend. But it is also the mythical and astrological moon, the force that regulates the feminine temperament, and the source of lunacy. Cyrano presents a feminine fable to demonstrate the complicity of these qualities. Noah's daughter tries to land on the moon and bring all women with her, in spite of male objections: “They called to her, said she was a hundred times lunatic, vowed that through her every woman would one day be reproached for having a quarter of the Moon in her head—she did but flout them” (64). A tidal wave sabotages this enterprise of sexual separation, and Noah's daughter finds herself alone on the moon.

No less significant than the decentering of the masculine in this text is the fact that the narrator himself, although male, is taken for female by lunar citizens unfamiliar with earthly styles of dress. He is assigned a male in order to make a couple.

These features are undeniably consistent with the ensemble of reversals performed by Cyrano—as if the feminine point of view alone could contradict the monetaro-logo-patro-phallocentric configuration.

However, it would be audacious and anachronistic to attribute the motive for utopia solely to feminist protest. What, then, is the status of this violently anti-patriarchal conflict? How should we think about this violent critique of master standards? What part does it play in the historical period of rising rationalism, only fifteen years after the Discours de la méthode and twenty years before Fontenelle's République des philosophes? These questions should provide a means to understand better the imaginary of rationalism, as well as the importance of the critique of the father in the strategy of materialism.

It is clear that what comes into existence in this antipatriarchal critique is not the revindication of women against the power and ideology of men but the revindication of sons against fathers. As a son, Cyrano wishes to break paternal authority and undo the genealogical link that ties offspring not only to their fathers but to the ancestral line. For this reason it is necessary to refute the notion of an ontological gift made by the father to the son as from the creator to his creature, a gift of life that legitimates debt, founds culpability, and justifies dependence and obedience. There arises no debt from filiation, the lunar lawyer argues:

You will retort that without him you would not be at all. It is true, but he himself would never have been without your grandfather, nor your grandfather without your great-grandfather, and without you your father could not have a grandson. When Nature brought him forth it was on condition that he should return that which she lent him; so when he begot you he gave you nothing, he merely paid a debt!

(112)

This maneuver brings us once more back to Nature. Engenderment is not a gift of the father that must be repaid with infinite gratitude. Rather, it is the gift of existence itself, a restitution made on Nature's account. It is “in the womb of ideas of nature” that each is to be found before birth.

Doubtless this is the chief significance of this work: in brief, Cyrano's disavowal of the patrimonial debt that links a man to his ancestors (and, in fact, his rejection of the Name of the Father in Lacan's sense) denounces the machinery of tradition. The pater is the agent of tradition, of the always already existing law that orders and measures all value and that controls the conduct of sons with unquestionable authority. The pater must be overthrown.

Given this, it is easier to situate Cyrano's work in a better known philosophical configuration and to read the fantasmatic simplicity of his position in another manner. In Descartes as well—in a step previous to the enunciation of the cogito—there is a radical disavowal of fathers in the form of an instruction given to them. In the Discours de la méthode, Descartes repudiates received knowledge and refuses patrimony. Only thus can the thinker arrive at the truth. No teacher precedes him; every antecedent, every precedent and prior judgment is rejected. “I think therefore I am” is the first certainty of the son after he has broken with all tradition, dismissing in a heroic and profane gesture the accumulated knowledge of the fathers. The cogito is the thought of the son.

This is to become the configuration of an entire period. It delineates a new and triumphant form of subjectivity in which Cyrano, undeniably, is situated. It is as if Cyrano, not by rigor but by imagination, had taken over Descartes's gesture by imagining a world where man is first a son and where the conscience of the son prevails over the law of the father. Cyrano explicitly postulates this when he has his lawyer say, after his harsh indictment: “I know my apology will have shocked all old men, but let them remember that they were sons before they were fathers and that I must have spoken to their advantage too, since they were not found under a gooseberry bush” (114). Not only temporally but structurally everyone is a son. The old lunar citizen does not know how to conceal that he is only a son who has aged. The father's acquired attributes can never replace those of the son—they can never efface the law of natural generation that commands that a father be progeny himself. The conscious or unconscious theological meaning of this lunar axiom is inescapable: the monotheistic idea of an eternal Father creator who has never been a son himself is rejected.

Thus, in a move more radical than murder (which creates phantoms and gods), Cyrano denies the validity of the very concept of pater, recognizing only the existence of the genitor and seeing only sons where fathers claim their rights. It is not surprising then that the voyage ends with a parody of a theological dispute that is the equivalent of a declaration of atheism.

However, there is indeed a feminine that is promoted by the antipatriarchal revindication of the son. The other of the father is the mother. She is not represented as such. She is not a character in the human family, opposed to the father. The maternal appears in a significant way, but only figuratively, or rather only through the irreducible symbolism associated with the abstract concepts of Nature and of Matter. It is necessary to admit an uncreated “eternal matter”—uncorrupted atoms of every form that congeal to form those beings which we see in the great Universe. Mother Nature is invoked, just as later in Fontenelle's utopia, as the supreme principle of organization and generation—that principle of order which the critique of patriarchal monotheism leaves empty. There is a moment when man, become a son without a father, or an atheist, draws close to Nature and to Matter, returning to her for support. The power of the mother's existence is manifest only in the metaphors that evoke her, especially that of Mother Nature, just as the father only reaches his full stature in the metaphor of God the Father. This reversal, which places Matter and Nature, that is to say genetrix rather than pater, at the level of the supreme principle, doubtless still remains one of the most obscure and poorly understood of Cyrano's reversals. It is still being considered in its analytical and historical dimension. In the writings of Cyrano, Fontenelle, Restif de la Bretonne, and Morelly, it is always Mother Nature who is called the supreme architect, the divinity who fills up the void left over from the questioning of God the Father. Utopia is linked to a new sense of the earth, to the desire to create an earthly equivalent of what seems to be destined only for the heavens, and to the wish to reject the vertical transcendence of heaven for the horizontal transcendence of possibilty. Henceforth, Utopia bears within it the rule of the Mother.

In a powerful reversal of religion's one-sided orientation toward heaven, utopias have been a critique of God the Father and an attempt to found a society that conforms to the laws of nature.

What emerges in this anti-pater-ialist configuration is thus the alliance—if not the secret collusion—between the son and Mother Nature. Once the father is excluded and made secondary, the son seeks to place himself in accord with the order of Nature, from which he draws new support. This does not happen unequivocally: man includes himself in the great Universe and obeys its stipulations (the very desire motivating Fontenelle's, Restif de la Bretonne's, and Morelly's utopias); in Descartes's version, man ambitiously tries to make himself master and possessor in a technological leap that is the active side of this meeting with matter. But in each of these works it is indeed the son, dependent or conquering, who, having excluded (or surpassed) the tyrannical mediation of the fathers, creates himself as subject in a mater-ial world.

Thus, the critique of ideal standards in Cyrano attacks an entire series of transcendental archetypes that are isotopic to the father (speech, gold, phallus), but it is nevertheless powerless to go beyond materialism. Cyrano sees nature or matter as a point of departure that serves as the origin and the site of a previous symbolization and idealization. However, he can not avoid a reduction that would foreshadow positivism, if it were not redeemed by the exuberance of his imagination. This limit is doubtless that of a filial anti-pater-ialism in which woman has no place, is not turned into a metaphor or a concept that would distinguish her from the mother. We must wait for the coming of another moment when the cogito as the son's perspective, in its turn, comes undone. This new process, although already at work, still remains an enigma.

Notes

1. L'Autre Monde, ou voyage sur la lune (1657), was published two years after Cyrano de Bergerac's death. Citations to the text will be given in parentheses from the English translation: Voyages to the Moon and the Sun, trans. Richard Aldington (New York, 1962).

2. On pater, genitor, mater, genetrix, see Jean-Joseph Goux, “Différence des sexes et périple de l'histoire,” in Les Iconoclastes (Paris, 1978); translation forthcoming from Cornell University Press.

3. Jean-Joseph Goux, Economie et symbolique (Paris, 1973); translation forthcoming from Cornell University Press.