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Women and Sacrifice
From Antigone to the Woman Next Door
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Women have been sacrificed in the name of religion, politics, love, and motherhood. But how did sacrifice become so deeply bound to femininity in the Western imagination, and why does that bond persist?
In Women and Sacrifice, philosopher and psychoanalyst Anne Dufourmantelle brings the great sacrificial heroines of myth, religion, and literature into conversation with women whose struggles pass unnoticed. Antigone, Iphigenia, Medea, Iseult, and Joan of Arc appear alongside sisters, lovers, mothers, exiles, and the woman next door. Rather than treating tragic heroines as exceptional figures, Dufourmantelle shows how their stories illuminate the violence, silence, and impossible demands woven into ordinary women’s lives.
Moving between psychoanalysis, tragedy, literature, current events, and case histories, Dufourmantelle develops what she calls a “quotidian mythology.” She traces the sacrificial woman through the figures of the young girl, the lover, the mother, and the creator, examining the ideals of virginity and maternity, the pull of renunciation, and the costs of love, family obligation, and artistic creation. Sacrifice, in her account, is not simply oppression or heroic self-denial. It can also be an act of disobedience that brings buried trauma into view and opens a break in what had seemed like an inescapable fate.
Written in Dufourmantelle’s evocative, essayistic style, Women and Sacrifice asks what ancient heroines still reveal about contemporary women and the pressures placed upon their bodies, desires, and choices. It offers a provocative account of the myths that continue to shape private suffering and collective life.
“In an age that knows only enjoyment, optimization, and endless accumulation, sacrifice has become almost impossible to think. We mistake it for victimhood, self-denial, or fanaticism. Anne Dufourmantelle recovers a stranger truth: sacrifice is the act that interrupts fate and acknowledges the debt we owe simply for having lived. Moving between myth, literature, psychoanalysis, and the lives of ordinary women, Women and Sacrifice reveals what has been written onto femininity as the unsettling force of creation. At once philosophical, psychoanalytic, and incandescently literary, Dufourmantelle’s book restores to sacrifice its forgotten dignity.”—Jamieson Webster, author of On Breathing
Anne Dufourmantelle (1964–2017) was an influential French philosopher and psychoanalyst and the author of more than twenty books. Her works in English include In Praise of Risk, Power of Gentleness, In Defense of Secrets, Blind Date, and, with Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality.
Steven Miller (Translator)
Steven Miller is Associate Professor of English and Executive Director of the Center for Psychoanalysis and Culture at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. He is the author of War After Death: On Violence and Its Limits and has translated works by Étienne Balibar, Catherine Malabou, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Anne Dufourmantelle.