SCUM MANIFESTO contexts 48

ond” (“The second stage of Humanity”). Unlike Solanas’s subversive use of provocation (as weapon to overthrow normative discours-es), Houellebecq’s ironic misappropriation is in no way subversive for it simply functions to reaffirm the established order. By draw-ing a distinction between Solanas (“an incomplete, tortured, con-tradictory, fascinating and exasperating person, like prophets al-ways are”) 27 and feminists, whom he describes as “likable fools, unthreatening in principle, but unfortunately made dangerous by their disarming lack of lucidity”, and by endowing the Solanian project with “a progressive and well-reasoned attitude, in line with the western project’s most noble aspirations: establishing Man’s total technical control over nature, including over its biology and its evolution” 28, Houellebecq re-appropriates Solanas’s paradoxi-cal prose, transforming it into “reactionary doxa”. 29 Solanas’s voice is thus colonised by a “white male”, who is given the last word.

It is precisely because Solanas’s voice is the expression of mar-ginalised, queer individualism, detached from any political move-ment, that it is important to take care of it, to ensuring its contex-tualisation and circulation. There is no question here of speaking for (or on behalf of) Solanas — the author would have hated that, she actually wanted to send all the translators of SCUM Manifesto to a desert island 30 —, but of supporting her voice, and expanding its power.