SCUM MANIFESTO contexts 46

clubs; that’s for the nice, ‘privileged, educated’, middle-class ladies with a high regard for the touching faith in the essential goodness of Daddy and policemen. If SCUM ever marches, it will be over the President’s stupid, sickening face; if SCUM ever strikes, it will be in the dark with a six-inch blade”.

Solanas did not consider SCUM as the manifesto of a politi-cal organisation (which was implied by the acronym S.C.U.M. and the subheading “Society for Cutting Up Men”, added by Girodi-as in the 1968 edition) but rather as a “literary device”, “a state of mind”. 21 As the manifesto of the scum condition, the text is an in-vitation to reinvent the situation of social abjection experienced by the undesirable. SCUM results from the sublimation of a so-cial rage, from a feminist instinct for survival. It is a political and poetic space — “the dream of the women who do not dream, the fantasy of those who had been denied a right to fantasise […]” 22 —, where “humans, the true kind, begin to envision life”. 23 SCUM is a tool for the awakening of the latent anger of SCUM-to-be-women. SCUM is contagious.

Beyond the outrageous project of male destruction, the text is ambiguous in many regards. This may explain why Delphine Se-yrig and Carole Roussopoulos had decided to reproduce only cer-tain parts of the book. Essentalist, differentialist, misandristic, mi-sogynistic ideas are imbedded within the text 24, which constitues a virulent critique of humanity in is entirety. Solanas attacks not only