From Novels to Figures, Themes and Strategies of a Political Practice PART II: Sexual Difference: An Occasion for Being

Abstract

The present paper is the last of a series of three papers, constituting a whole project of translation and commentary composed of translated extracts from the “Catalogo no. 2 – Le madri di tutte noi”, published by the Milan Women’s Bookstore in 1982. The idea for the project was conceived by Silvia Niccolai and Angela Condello, who selected the extracts and provided the written commentaries on the original texts. The Yellow Catalogue, in which we find collective discussions, pages of personal diaries and, overall, the enterprise of a group of women debating over their literary symbolic mothers (who to read? And why?), is an interesting example of a political use of literature. After four decades from its publication, it still proposes inspiring and fresh suggestions for feminist political action and critique, while representing an interesting occasion for researching the philosophical roots of feminism. In particular, the debate on the literary “mothers,” i.e. on the female authors that can contribute to the formation of a feminine symbolic, shows the kind of concerns of difference feminism in Italy (especially during the Seventies). The text offers, in other words, the opportunity to enter a world that nowadays – with the new, varied streams of feminism and the battles over the neutralization of sexual identity – is less frequent, and nevertheless we find it important in order to understand the social, political and cultural power of feminism. The project is composed like follows: Paper No. 1, In search of a feminine symbolic, by Angela Condello, already published on Law& Literature and Paper No. 2, From Novels to the Figures, themes and strategies for a political practice. Paper No 2 is structured in two parts. Part One, entitled “Interest in Reality.” For every woman’s autobiography, by Silvia Niccolai, is already published in Law & Literature; Part Two is the present paper: coauthored by Angela Condello and Silvia Niccolai, it addresses issues of sexual difference, identity and ambiguity, and the theories behind the idea of body and life at the core of the Catalogue.

Keywords:

• sexual difference
• identity
• ambiguity
• symbolic
• materialism/idealism
• language

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Please note that this paper has been co-written by Silvia Niccolai and Angela Condello and all sections have been discussed together. We have specified for each § the author who wrote it. Like for the other two papers of this collection of translations and comments of the Yellow Catalogue “The Mothers of Us All” of the Milan Women’s Bookstore, quotes from the Catalogue are specifically indicated in italics while the remaining text is a commentary by Silvia Niccolai and Angela Condello. Translations from Italian into English by Edward Fortes and Angela Condello.

2 Non credere di avere dei diritti, AA.VV, p. 127.

3 The expression by Agamben criticized by Luisa Muraro, Maglia e uncinetto. Racconto linguistico-politico sulla inimicizia fra metafora e metonimia (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1981), 109.

4 As we can read in a passage extracted on p.68 of Catalogue and commented in Paper n. 1.

5 It is sufficient to mention the “androgynous couple”, understood as «the real human subject», an all-inclusive unique organism, played by J. Proudhon against the emancipatory feminism of his time, and particularly against the work of Jenny d’Herincourt (J. Proudhon, Pornocratie ou les femmes dans les temps modernes, Paris, s.d., Oeuvres postumes de P.-J. Proudhon, p. 45–46).

6 The ambiguous is moreover “emotional economy”, as we have seen it defined in a passage by Ivy Compton-Burnett presented in Paper n. II, extracted from p. 60 of the Catalogue: absence of passion, emotional rest, knowing how not to engage and not consume oneself in struggles between sides that ignore the difference, that leave it in the unthought and amorphous, while bending it instrumentally to pre-established definitions.

7 All underlinings are in text of the Catalogue.

8 One of the main reasons of the difference they focus on; cf. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1985).

9 Nicole-Claude Mathieu, Christine Delphy, Colette Guillaumin, Monique Wittig (it is hard to classify Wittig within the differentialist or within the queer groups of feminists), Paola Tabet, as well as the Collective working on the journal Questions féministes (1977-1980). The idea of a materialist feminism as a structured stream with very specific margins has been defined retrospectively in comparison to streams of “postmodern feminism”. The journal Questions féministes would define its methodology as “radically feminist” rather than materialist. For recent perspectives also outside of France see: Susan Ferguson, Feminism, Labour and Social Reproduction, (London: Pluto Press, 2019); Lisa Adkins, “Social Reproduction in the Neoliberal Era: Payments, Leverage and the Minskian Household,” Polygraph 27 (2019): 19–33; Isabella Bakker, Social Reproduction and the Constitution of a Gendered Political Economy, New Political Economy 12 (2007): 541–56; Tithi Bhattacharya, ed., Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (London: Pluto Press, 2017); Silvia Federici “Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation,” Autonomedia, 2014; Eadem, “From Commoning To Debt: Financialization, Microcredit, And The Changing Architecture Of Capital Accumulation,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 113 (2014): 231–44. For a general overview see the entry in the Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology: https://www.anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/social-reproduction#h2ref-2

10 Silvia Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Cosa, Alisa Dal Re.

11 Italic font is my choice.

12 On the relationship between literary critique and literary theory, see Raffaella Baccolini, et al., eds. Critiche femministe e teorie letterarie (Bologna: Clueb 1997).

13 These are the words used by Muraro in her work on metaphor and metonimy, Maglia o uncinetto.

14 Though Irigaray in France (a disciple of Lacan), and figures like Muraro, Lonzi in Italy difference feminism developed various themes of the psychoanlytical discourse, among which self-consciousness, consciousness raising, the function of the symbolic order structuring our thought and our language, etc.

15 Francesco Orlando, Towards a Freudian Theory of Literature. With an analysis of Racine’s Phèdre, trans. Charmaine Lee (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press 1978). See also Angela Condello, Tiziano Toracca, A Theory of Law and Literature. Across two Arts of Compromising (Leiden: Brill, 2020).

16 Muraro, Maglia e uncinetto. Also in Tre lezioni, a work already mentioned in the other two papers, Muraro underlines how our symbolic existence stems from our life into a human and deadly body, a desiring and vulnerable body.

17 Lacan valued Jakobson’s work because he identified both metaphor and metonymy as typical mechanisms of dreams (condensation and displacement). From his perspective, as is known, the unconscious is structured as a language and desired is translated into various signifying forms.

18 This is an attitude that we find also in Simone Weil and in thinkers and activists for women’s rights like Teresa Labriola (cf. for instance T. Labriola, Del feminismo come visione della vita, Arte della Stampa 1917 – where she underlines the relationship between feminism, our attitude in life, and the unique nature of each singular existence).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Angela Condello

Angela Condello is Tenure-track Assistant Professor of Legal Philosophy (Rtd B) in the Law Department, University of Messina. She held a Jean Monnet Module on human rights and critical legal thinking within the European legal culture (2017-2020) at the University of Torino. Angela sits on the editorial board of Law and Literature, Law Text Culture, International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, Teoria e critica della regolazione sociale (where she also coordinates the editorial team), among other international journals, as well as of book series (such as the Springer series of Law and Visual Studies). She directs, with Anne Wagner, the Springer book series Gender, Justice and Legal Feminism.

She directs Labont Law and is the scientific curator of the Rapporto sullo stato dei diritti in Italia for A Buon Diritto, a non-profit organisation with which Angela has been collaborating since 2011.

Occasionally, she writes a column on La ventisettesima ora - Corriere della sera on gender, law, and politics.

Silvia Niccolai

Silvia Niccolai is Full Professor of Constitutional Law at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Cagliari (Italy). Jean Monnet Chair of European Law 2006-2009, she is a feminist jurist who has dedicated most of her work to developing a critical analysis of anti-discrimination law; on this topic she has authored many articles and essays and she has also edited, with I. Ruggiu, Dignity in Change. Exploring the Constitutional Potential of EU-Gender and Anti-Discrimination Law (Fiesole 2010). In recent years, while continuing this line of research, she has focused on a different topic, the tradition of the regulae iuris in the European legal science, publishing the book “Principi del diritto principi della convivenza”, Ed. Scientifica, Napoli, 2022.

Both lines of research stem from her main study interest, which, developing the topic of the ‘Legal experience’, dear in the past to a part of the Italian legal theory, aims to criticize the reduction of Law to a superstructure (objective, heteronomous and normative) and proposes of reconceiving the Law in subjective terms, as an expression of human freedom.