Contemporary Italian Women Philosophers

Stretching the Art of Thinking

Silvia Benso, Elvira Roncalli, Silvia Benso, Elvira Roncalli

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781438484921
  9781438484914
• eBook ISBN:
  9781438484938
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Italian History

A unique portrayal of the theoretical positions of eleven Italian women thinkers who share the practice of philosophy and extend philosophical work and interests beyond the realm of the discipline strictly defined.

Gathering the contributions of eleven contemporary Italian women thinkers who share a philosophical practice, Contemporary Italian Women Philosophers embraces a general interrelationality, fluidity, and overlapping of concepts for a border-crossing that affects what it means to be subjects that are embodied and participants in the life of their communities, thereby shaping a sense of belonging. Common threads are revealed through the exploration of radically diverse themes (the body, subjectivity, power, freedom, equality, liberation, the emotions, symbolism and metaphors, maternity, reproduction, responsibility, the political, the economic) and approaches (autobiographical styles, personal narratives, rootedness in the everyday, advancement of relationality, empathic responsibility, passions, and commitment to the flourishing of the polis). In their differences, these previously unpublished essays give the reader a glimpse of the fecund and articulated philosophical work of women in the Italian context-a context which has not been and still is not always benign toward women's distinctive originality and creativity.

Part One

Women, Mothers, Bodies

One

The Inner Passage

Luisa Muraro

If I go ahead with my fragmentary visions, the whole world will have to be transformed in order for me to fit in it.

—Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to GH

Those who wish to devote themselves to the study of philosophy should know that they must give up defining philosophy ahead of time. Philosophy will provide its own definition. Indeed, there exists such a thing as the philosophical vocation, and it is personal. In my case, it started with my feminist awakening, when I realized: “But I am a woman.” At that point, I began to reflect critically on the meaning of my realization and its truth effects, which impacted my own thought as it became aware that sexual difference may have a free meaning.

In my philosophical practice, I find it impossible to separate the aspect that involves research from my commitment to the women’s movement. I am reminded of what Simone Weil writes in 1943, in her Carnet de Londres, namely that philosophy is “exclusively an affair of action and practice”; and this, she says, is why it is so difficult to write about it, “difficult in the same way as a treatise on tennis or running, but much more so.”¹ I share this idea, while allowing that the philosophical pursuit may also be conceived and practiced in other ways, even by feminist thinkers. The only condition is that pluralism be excluded. I do not reject the plural form, “feminisms”; but I do not use it in my own work because it tends to turn plurality (which I accept) into pluralism (which I do not accept). I prefer the use of the singular form, “feminism,” and when confronted with conflicts, I maintain that feminism is a battleground where one fights without hate.

One day, my philosophy teacher asked me: “Why do you side with the feminists? You are homo.” Homo: a free, thinking human being—one’s admission to philosophy required nothing more. … Yet this was both too much and too little. “But I am a woman!” I proclaimed, and I began to try to understand the meaning of such “but.” What I found was an argument concerning the relation that reasoning thought establishes with our being living, sensitive bodies. There is a symbolic debt that thought has toward matter and life. Yet to me as a woman, things did not seem right, and maybe my professor understood this even before I spoke.

Some feminists would hesitate to say “I am a woman” because they think that the meaning of the word “woman” has been irremediably corrupted by the patriarchal culture. To these feminists, I would say that the meaning of words is an important part of the feminist challenge, and their position is like surrendering to the enemy even before the battle begins.

I have heard that, according to one feminist scholar, “woman” as it was presented in the 1960s and 1970s is a concept that no theoretically equipped feminist can find acceptable. I find this statement perplexing for two reasons. First of all, there is here a sense of ownership over the meaning of words that I do not approve. I have learned from the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure that the meaning of words belongs first and foremost to the speakers. As far as the concept of “woman” is concerned, feminist scholars are called to engage in thinking within a field that opened up precisely thanks to the feminist revolt of the period. Therefore, while it is right to criticize and analyze, it may be somewhat reckless to depart from this field for reasons that are accessible only to those who are theoretically equipped.

Thus philosophy presented itself to me as a political orientation (that is, to stand on the side of women) and as a commitment to find words to express something that I am deeply certain is true, namely that sexual difference is not an addition to who I am, it does not stand between me and who knows whom or what, nor is it caused by who knows whom or what. The difference that I consciously assume when I say “I am a woman” is not an I; rather, it is there within me independently from me. It keeps my I from coinciding with my “I,” thereby giving rise to a never-ending negotiation between being body and being word. This negotiation makes me be what we all are, namely, symbolic animals. In other words, feminism is a challenge regarding the free meaning of sexual difference.

This challenge extends from the present back into the past, producing new narratives. Even when it concerns the past, the “battle of the narrative” (as it has been called) is fought in the present and the benefits are reaped in the present. One can win a challenge even after it has been lost as long as one raises the stakes. This may seem absurd but it is not insofar as facts act on us through the meaning that they take on.

Since 2001, I have felt a growing sense of anticipation and urgency within the world, and an awareness that changes are taking place. The signs are both increasingly numerous and self-contradictory. We cannot see the future straight ahead of us because we are at a turning point. Our predictions, like our natural vision, are rectilinear. This is the direction of progress, which is increasingly a false progress and brings us to be suspicious of those who want progress at all cost. Traveling in a vehicle that is only open at the front is dangerous. Yet we can feel the curve—we perceive a centrifugal force that tells us we are turning. Are we entering a new, unknown gravitational field?

In Europe, the passage to modernity has been a long and complex process marked by some salient features. Some of these traits run throughout its history and have brought modernity to its end.

Modern Europe came to an abrupt and disastrous end with World War I, which was a massacre the likes of which had never been seen before. People called it the Great War. The name was later changed because World War I was followed by a second World War that was worse than the first, not to mention the events that took place in the interval between the two. Subsequently, the task of paving the way for a better future for Western civilization fell to the United States. I too was there during this latter stage. As a child, I had never seen a movie or even been to the cinema, but I used to collect the cards of the great Hollywood actors, I chewed gum, and I listened to my older sister tell us about the life of American women, who were so free that they did not even have to wear a petticoat.

There are two main paths in the passage to modernity. The first of these, which is predominant within English-speaking philosophy, concerns the birth of modern law, narrated in the figurative form of an originary social contract.

This path was critically retraced by the feminist Carole Pateman in a book written more than thirty years ago, The Sexual Contract (1988), which has taken on increasing importance over the years. This is how she briefly sums up the passage to modernity that extends, with pejorative effects, into postmodernity: “That is to say, in the movement from the old world of status to the new world of contract, the freedom of the individual consists in emancipation from the old bonds and constraints, whether those of absolutism, the patria potestas, the state—or sexual difference.”² Contemporary individualism is the outcome of this generalized “unboundedness” with which the very concept of freedom tends to be confused, and in which it tends to be lost. This is not without its contradictions where it comes to concern women, who are assimilated to men even against their own interests and in contrast with their own experience.

The second path, which is prevalent in continental philosophy, is related to the conception of knowledge. The salient, and pejorative, trait here regards, to my mind, the unsettled debt I referred to earlier, that is, the debt owed by thinkers to matter and life. This trait is not as obvious as the one described in The Sexual Contract; rather, it resembles a “bracketing,” an “overlooking,” a “leaving out,” as when we leave something “out of consideration.” Let us examine this more closely.

I take as the inaugural text of modernity René Descartes’ Discours sur la méthode, which appeared in 1637. The Discours begins with a story related in the first person.

Centuries later, the personal accounts exchanged among themselves by the members of Alcoholics Anonymous or the women of feminist self-consciousness or consciousness-raising groups will also be in the first person. This is a significant coincidence because it better highlights the fracture and the polemic. The ones to which I am referring, in fact, are small groups of individuals who come together voluntarily in the name of something they have in common—in the first case, addiction to alcohol; in the second, gender—and help each other talk about themselves and listen without the censorship of the “leaving it out.”

In his choice of autobiographical language, Descartes is said to have drawn inspiration from Michel de Montaigne, the author of Les Essais. In several aspects, in fact, the two men are close yet distant. What separates them is precisely the matter we are discussing here.

One of Montaigne’s merits was his consideration and condemnation of witch hunting. He was a man endowed with a courageous intellectual honesty. He devoted to witch hunting one of his last Essais, written in a characteristically allusive language suggested by the title itself: Les boiteux (Of Cripples). At the beginning of the essay, he writes that men “more willingly study to find out reasons than to ascertain truth: they slip over presuppositions, but are curious in examination of consequences; they leave the things, and fly to the causes (…).” Whereas they should say, “Is such a thing done?,” our reason, continues Montaigne, is “able to create a hundred other worlds (…); it needs neither matter nor foundation: let it but run on.” And he concludes that “both the body and the soul interrupt and weaken the right they have of the use of the world (le droit qu’ils ont de l’usage du monde),” where things are felt and endured.³

Descartes passes over this “right” to a kind of knowledge that is based on the sensible and passionate partaking or “use” of the world and focuses instead on its rational construction. His Discours, as revealed by the subtitle, has the purpose of “rightly conducting one’s reason and of seeking truth in the sciences.”

How did it turn out? It turned out well, if one judges from the extraordinary development of techno-scientific knowledge. That it turned out well was also the prevalent evaluation until the beginning of the twentieth century. But then, Europe and the areas within the radius of European influence (which was worldwide) were struck by a succession of wars and upheavals, aggravated enormously by the destructive potential that had developed alongside science itself. And it is far from being over, as we know. We have lost, as Montaigne would say, the “right” to the form of knowledge resulting from the practical and sensitive partaking (frequentazione) of the world. Montaigne’s choice of the word usage to name such a partaking refers to a French term that in his day had a connotation closer to what today we refer to as “practice.”

The Discours sur la Methode begins with a narration in which the philosopher looks back at his own education, of which he speaks well. Yet the purpose of his account is to stress the ensuing profound dissatisfaction he experienced at finding himself with no criteria for distinguishing true from false. He tells how he then began to travel to study “the great book of the world” but, failing to find what he sought, eventually decided to concentrate his studies within himself, relying on his own human capacity for reason. It was only then, in fact, that he found his way. It happened at some insignificant place in Germany, toward the end of 1619, in comfortable lodgings during the winter break from the easy military service that, as a young nobleman, he had opted for himself. Concentrating on putting order among his thoughts, he found within himself, namely in his natural ability to reason, the starting point he needed.

The narration with which Descartes introduces his Discours sur la Methode is essential to understanding the spirit of Western modernity.

What happened, he tells us, was that in his consciousness—the consciousness of a man who, though gifted with intelligence, lacked the authority of a teacher like Aristotle or the magistri of the Sorbonne, and who lived in circumstances that, while undoubtedly privileged, were nonetheless ordinary—a spark was ignited that shed light on something that had so far remained unseen (and those who did see it, as there were some who could, had failed to express it in comprehensible and acceptable terms).

What was this “something”? Paraphrased in my own words, Descartes’ narration shows us that for something that is true to exist, there must be someone who consciously and freely seeks it out and recognizes it. In other words, it shows us that truth, if and when it reveals itself, is subjective truth.

Following and as a result of this discovery, everything appeared and began to move in a different direction, toward establishing an indissoluble relation between personal freedom and true knowledge. I refer here not to rights, which were to come later, but to constitutive, originary relations.

In Descartes’ day, the word “subject” and its derivatives did not have the same meaning we give it today. The word still took the originally medieval Latin meaning of subjectum. It was Descartes himself, in fact, who made the decisive move to give a new meaning to the word, a meaning that has made the greatest imprint on the civilization of European origin.

Some scholars have attempted to justify Descartes’ use of such a markedly subjective language, which appears to be in contrast with the philosophical themes he developed, such as rationalism and the ideal of scientific objectivity. In my view, however, this subjective language needs no justification. The turn Descartes brought about in history consists precisely in the realizat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Contemporary Italian Women Thinkers: Attending to Thinking, Extending the Art
• Part One: Women, Mothers, Bodies
• Part Two: Subjectivity, Power, and the Political
• Part Three: Responsibility, Emotions, Time
• Part Four: Everyday Life, Action, Transcendence
• Coda
• Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover