Abstract (EN)

Constructed as a dialogue with Irène Théry’s La Distinction de sexe, this article recalls how Marcel Mauss was a stranger to both an all-encompassing naturalism as to its opposite, the contemporary deconstructionist approach. It shows how Mauss highlighted the social necessity of social division, namely between the sexes, as a condition and primer for gift. The universality of the distinction between the sexes does not mean that issues of power, hierarchy or inequality between the sexes are eluded. Rather, this perspective is an invitation, as Irène Théry proposes, to reformulate these questions in order to avoid the temptation of totalizing explanations such as that of the sole so-called fact of ‘male domination’ which is often referred to without further precisions.