Women were able to challenge the socio-historical conditions of their identity and to that extent they were "feminine geniuses", Prof Julia Kristeva of Sorbonne University, Paris, said at a lecture in Trinity College Dublin last night.
Prof Kristeva was talking about her just-completed 1,300-page triptych, entitled Female Genius, at a fully booked Royal Irish Academy public lecture.
The three women she wrote about are historian Hannah Arendt; Melanie Klein, the woman who pioneered child psychiatry; and the French writer, Colette.
Today Prof Kristeva will give a lecture in UCD, also fully booked, in which she will discuss "French theory", the name devised by US academics for modern French thought.
Last week in an Irish Times interview, Prof Kristeva said she was outraged by an article in Elle magazine that praised Private Lynndie England, the US soldier photographed taunting naked Iraqi prisoners, which said she was a feminist because it showed women could be wicked too.
Prof Kristeva said if women rivalled men in sadistic abjection, it meant the idea of equality was a dead end.
Last night she said that at this moment in European history, as the enlargement of Europe allowed the old continent to gradually reunite with the geographical limits which coincided with its cultural and historical memory, she would speak about an inheritance of which our European culture could be proud.
She would call it "the discovery and the respect of feminine genius".
Women's struggle for their
emancipation had been through three stages in modern times: first, the demand for political rights led by the suffragettes; second, the affirmation of an ontological equality with men and finally, in the wake of May 1968 and of psychoanalysis, the search for the difference between men and women.
At each of these stages, the liberation of all womankind had been the objective. In this respect feminists had not departed from the ambitions of the various liberation movements which sprang from the Enlightenment.