WHEN WILL EURIDICE SPEAK AT LAST?

Abstract

For the author of the essay When Euridice will speak at last feminism is the eternally negative approach towards patriarchate, which was born with it. It is characteristic that problems mentioned in “Lysistrata” or “As- semblywomen” by Aristophanes in the 5th century BC are identical with the demands of contemporary feminism. Its successes in the 19th and 20th centuries concerning the formal emancipation of women’s rights, in the long run are both meaningful and illusory: the culture of patriarchate while granting women the voting and other rights did not change its pa- triarchal principle, it just alleviated its repressive character on a small fragment of the Western culture, though in this zone of the biggest wom- en’s freedom the forgotten disputes about the rigours of the patriarchate all the time come back to life. The paradigm of the fundamental way of thinking about the world remains unchanged, while the approach to women is just its embodiment. Patriarchate is the means of treating the world as a collection of objects to be used, it is not only an approach towards women. The contemporary culmination of the Western culture as a technological civilisation reaches its limit, whose crossing threatens with a total disaster even in the most optimistic scenarios. In this context the author of the essay perceives feminism as a huge possibility, as one of more important movements in civilisation and culture, which not only will fight for formal rights, but rather for a change of the thinking paradigm from object-oriented to sub- ject-oriented. Euridice – the silent-for-centuries subject of lost love – has to start speaking.