S.C.U.M. Le premier manifeste de la libération des femmes

First edition of the French translation established by Emmanuelle de Lesseps.
Handsome and very rare copy.
With a presentation by Christiane Rochefort.

Gender discrimination, hate speech and calls for genocide, violent action with a furious, premeditated and unrepentant murder attempt on one of the most famous artists of the 20th century, promotion of violent anarchy with great scatological laughter, programmed elimination or humiliation of half the human race...
 
In her misandrist pamphlet, Scum manifesto ("Society for Cutting Up Men"), Valerie Solanas shows no empathy, leaves no room for moderation or reconciliation, and grants no exception to her project of eliminating all men except for "men who methodically work toward their own elimination [...] [such as] drag queens who, by their magnificent example, encourage other men to demasculinize themselves and thus render themselves relatively harmless." The first manifesto of radical feminism addresses not only women but also encompasses in its struggle the sexual identities rejected by the phallocratic society that Solanas wants to bring down with unprecedented rage for such a battle.
 
"Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex."
An introduction that in 1971, Emmanuelle de Lesseps, undertaking a French version, would translate as:
"Vivre dans cette société, c'est au mieux y mourir d'ennui. Rien dans cette société ne concerne les femmes. Alors, à toutes celles qui ont un brin de civisme, le sens des responsabilités et celui de la rigolade, il ne reste qu'à renverser le gouvernement, en finir avec l'argent, instaurer l'automation à tous les niveaux et supprimer le sexe masculin." ["Living in this society means, at best, dying of boredom. Nothing in this society concerns women. So, to all those who have a bit of civic-mindedness, a sense of responsibility and of fun, there remains only to overthrow the government, finish with money, establish automation at all levels and eliminate the male sex."]
 
At once an insurrectional political program, paranoid delirium, and poetic text, Solanas's manifesto disturbs through its refusal to be confined within a genre—serious, utopian, or satirical. For the question posed by such a work may not be that of its morality, but of its author's right to claim excess. Published after her murder attempt on Andy Warhol, Solanas's terrible manifesto is the literary and literal assertion that man does not have a monopoly on violence.
 
Although it presents itself as a cry of anger written in urgency, SCUM is in reality the fruit of two years of reflection and writing before being, for lack of a publisher, mimeographed by Solanas in 1967 and sold in the street ($1 for women and $2 for men), without meeting any success.
 
Seeking recognition, Valerie Solanas then moves in the New York underground milieu and befriends the pope of counterculture, Andy Warhol, whose Factory she frequents. Unable to get her manifesto published, "the best text in all of history, which will only be surpassed by my next book," Solanas tackles her first literary work: Up your Ass, a play she wants her mentor to produce. Unfortunately, Warhol refuses the play and loses the unique manuscript. In compensation, he offers his friend a role in two of his films. Solanas is not satisfied with this small artistic success and, on June 3, 1968, fires three times at Andy Warhol, seriously wounding the artist and achieving fame at the same time. The young woman does not hide that her murderous gesture, more than revenge against the artist, is above all a political act and an artistic necessity to allow her to disseminate her work. Thus, questioned about the motivations of her criminal attempt, she submits to justice and the media this laconic response: "Read my manifesto, you will know who I am."
Maurice Girodias, the sulfurous publisher of Olympia Press, condemned several times notably after the publication of Lolita and Naked Lunch, had already noticed Solanas the previous year. He had then rejected her manifesto but had offered her a contract for her future works. After the attack, he finally decides to also publish the feminist pamphlet of this atypical criminal who declares the omnipotence of women and the harmfulness of the male sex. The height of provocation, Girodias reproduces on the back cover the front page of the New York Post, relating Warhol's tragic hospitalization.
 
Is Solanas's book the work of this sick woman, a violated child, a prostituted high school and university student, an adult diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, escaped from several asylums, and who would end her days in extreme solitude and poverty? Or is this interpretation precisely the demonstration of the prohibition for a woman to claim all the extremities of anarchist delirium and utopia that are granted to men?
 
In 1968, at the heart of the interminable Vietnam War, violence is no longer the preserve of oppressors and the rising anger of minorities against the endemic discrimination of the United States manifests itself through violent confrontations and the birth of radical groups such as the Black Panthers. But women remain excluded from demands and their rights are denied by both camps, as Angela Davis and Ella Baker would also denounce.
 
However, unlike them, Solanas adheres to no emancipation struggle and refuses all fashionable utopias which, according to her, only liberate man; woman remaining, at best, a reward:
"Le hippie [...] est follement excité à l'idée d'avoir tout un tas de femmes à sa disposition. [...] L'activité la plus importante de la vie communautaire, celle sur laquelle elle se fonde, c'est le baisage à la chaîne. Ce qui alléche le plus le hippie, dans l'idée de vivre en communauté, c'est tout le con qu'il va y trouver. Du con en libre circulation : le bien collectif par excellence ; il suffit de demander." ["The hippie [...] is wildly excited at the idea of having a whole bunch of women at his disposal. [...] The most important activity of community life, the one on which it is based, is chain fucking. What attracts the hippie most in the idea of living in community is all the cunt he's going to find there. Freely circulating cunt: the collective good par excellence; you just have to ask."]
 
"Laisser tout tomber et vivre en marge n'est plus la solution. Baiser le système, oui. La plupart des femmes vivent déjà en marge, elles n'ont jamais été intégrées. Vivre en marge, c'est laisser le champ libre à ceux qui restent ; c'est exactement ce que veulent les dirigeants ; c'est faire le jeu de l'ennemi ; c'est renforcer le système au lieu de le saper car il mise sur l'inaction, la passivité, l'apathie et le retrait de la masse des femmes." ["Dropping out and living on the margins is no longer the solution. Fucking the system, yes. Most women already live on the margins, they have never been integrated. Living on the margins means leaving the field free to those who remain; it's exactly what the leaders want; it's playing into the enemy's hands; it's strengthening the system instead of undermining it because it relies on the inaction, passivity, apathy and withdrawal of the mass of women."]
 
A true explosion in protest circles, S.C.U.M. divides emerging feminist movements like NOW or Women's Lib and gives birth to radical feminism. Yet, Solanas refuses any affiliation and even rejects the help of militant lawyer Florynce Kennedy by pleading guilty at her trial while Warhol did not want to press charges against her: "I cannot press charges against someone who acts according to their nature. It's in Valerie's nature, so how could I hold it against her." (A fascinating testimony to the mutual psychological hold these two contrary beings had on each other).
 
In a great fireworks display of obscenity and laughing extremism, Solanas's work nevertheless methodically deconstructs the propositions of progressive intellectuals as much as it reveals the irremediably machistic structure of a falsely modern society. "S.C.U.M. stands against the entire system, against the very idea of laws and government. What S.C.U.M. wants is to demolish the system and not obtain certain rights within the system."
 
Fifty years later, Solanas's manifesto remains bitingly acute, and the sometimes delirious verve of its author cannot justify the progressive erasure of her memory in social history, like her own mother destroying all her manuscripts upon her death.
 
Outraged, convinced, or stunned by the cathartic violence of the text, no one claims to emerge unscathed from the S.C.U.M. experience. This is undoubtedly linked to the almost Célinean literary force of Solanas's pen but perhaps also to the undeniable relevance of her revolt:
"Celles qui, selon les critères de notre « culture », sont la lie de la terre, les S.C.U.M. ... sont des filles à l'aise, plutôt cérébrales et tout près d'être asexuées. Débarrassées des convenances, de la gentillesse, de la discrétion, de l'opinion publique, de la « morale », du « respect » des trous-du-cul, toujours surchauffées, pétant le feu, sales et abjectes, les S.C.U.M. déferlent... elles ont tout vu - tout le machin, baise et compagnie, suce-bite et suce-con - elles ont été à voile et à vapeur, elles ont fait tous les ports et se sont fait tous les porcs... Il faut avoir pas mal baisé pour devenir anti-baise, et les S.C.U.M. sont passées par tout ça, maintenant elles veulent du nouveau ; elles veulent sortir de la fange, bouger, décoller, sombrer dans les hauteurs. Mais l'heure de S.C.U.M. n'est pas encore arrivée. La société nous confine encore dans ses égouts. Mais si rien ne change et si la Bombe ne tombe pas sur tout ça, notre société crèvera d'elle-même." ["Those who, according to the criteria of our 'culture,' are the scum of the earth, the S.C.U.M. ... are comfortable girls, rather cerebral and quite close to being asexual. Rid of conventions, kindness, discretion, public opinion, 'morality,' 'respect' for assholes, always overheated, bursting with fire, dirty and abject, the S.C.U.M. surge forth... they have seen everything - the whole thing, fucking and company, cock-sucking and cunt-sucking - they have been both ways, they have done all the ports and have done all the pigs... You have to have fucked quite a bit to become anti-fuck, and the S.C.U.M. have been through all that, now they want something new; they want to get out of the mire, move, take off, sink into the heights. But S.C.U.M.'s time has not yet come. Society still confines us in its sewers. But if nothing changes and if the Bomb doesn't fall on all this, our society will die of itself."]