The Thought of Experience

I do not intend to separate myself from that way of thinking whereby things happen, women evidently exist and I am one of them”. This is a political position, not a philosophical one. There are historical contingencies in which the making of politics precedes: confirm it and accept it, I consider that good philosophy. There is a battle pending in defence of the language of a realist kind against the sense of unreality that threatens our experience. The symbolic cancellation of women also shows itself in day-today language. The phenomenon is not of little importance, because what is thought and language form a circle with the real, since they are its interpretation. The problem is, then, that of finding the stopping point that prevents the criticism from being a futile thought and the field from being wholly occupied by the real destruction. I will sustain now that this stopping point has been found by women’s political practice of recounting their experience, and is to be found in referring oneself to the experience and the confidence of being able to be able to interpret it oneself, making of it thus the common world of a personal experience. The question is asked of texts by W. R. Bion and Joan W. Scout whether to reclaim an impregnable knowledge in the name of experience is a vain pretension or founded and valid. It is a valid pretension, and the argument is philosophical, scientific and political at the same time. In the light of the notion of experience of Joan W. Scott, the thought of experience is the thought that connects what is already interpreted and what is still to be interpreted, in an interval that is inexhaustible.