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Abstract
The present paper is the second of three, constituting a whole project of translation and commentary composed of translated extracts from the “Catalogo n. 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 provide 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 political use of literature. After forty 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. The projects is composed like follows: Paper No1, In search of a feminine symbolic, by Angela Condello, already published on Law & Litterature and Paper No2, From Novels to the Figures, themes and strategies for a political practice. Paper No 2 is structured in two parts. Part One is the article here presented (Part One. “Interest in Reality.” For every woman’s autobiography) written by Silvia Niccolai; Part Two is the article Sexual difference: an occasion for being, coauthored by Angela Condello and Silvia Niccolai, which will be published in a forthcoming issue of this Journal.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Non credere di avere dei diritti, Rosemberg&Sellier (1987), p. 16 (In the following, all translation from Italian are mine.).
2 Non credere, p. 85.
3 Non credere, p. 9 e p. 10: «In linguistics, the ‘gen–’ root of words such as gender, genealogy, generation characterizes words traditionally associated with birth as a social fact, and specifically with the legitimate birth of free male individuals. In our culture, as Luce Irigaray underlined, there is no representation of the mother-daughter relationship, the mother always has her son in her arms». Hitherto unnamed, this is «the suffering of being brought into the world in this way, without a symbolic collocation. A living person is body and mind, she is born and finds herself by chance in a given time. At that moment the work of placing herself, of looking for references, begins for the mind. The body is physically located, but the mind must determine its whereabouts by itself, with the help of those who came before. But if you are born a woman, what help do you get? Society understands the female mind to be situated within the body and like the body. […] Otherwise, it’s nowhere». On the use of the term “generative” in the language of the Thought of the Symbolic see I. Boiano e A. Condello, Lia Cigarini and the Freedom of the Legislative Void, in Legal Feminism. Italian Theories and Perspectives, ed. by A. Simone, I. Boiano, a. Condello, Routledge (2013). See also L.Muraro, Female Genealogies, in C. Burke, N. Schor, M. Withford (eds.), Engaging with Irigaray, Columbia U. P. (1994), pp. 317-333.
4 See on these points also P. Bono, S. Kemp (eds.), Italian Feminist Thought. A Reader, Basil Blackwell (1991).
5 Especially worthy of mention are L. Muraro’s research on the heretical “feminist” sect of the Williamites (centered on Wilhelmine of Milan, d. 1282, and her follower Maifreda), and her studies on female mysticism, particularly about Margherita Porete (see respectively L. Muraro, Guglielma e Maifreda. Storia di una eresia femminista, 1a ed. La Tartaruga (1985), repr. 2003; Le amiche di Dio. Scritti di mistica femminile, ed. by C. Jourdan, D’Auria (2001), repr. Orthodes (2014).
6 Published in 1987, five years after the Yellow Catalogue, Non credere di avere dei diritti was written by the feminist collective that created the Milan Women’s Bookstore, reference point for the Thought of Difference/Feminism of the Symbolic (see on this Angela Condello, Paper I). The title is a quotation from Simone Weil: «Don’t believe you have rights (Non credere di avere dei diritti, in Italian). Do not cloud or distort justice». The volume recounts «the generation of female freedom in the idea and the events of a group of women», dealing with the issues of abortion, violence and gender equality policies. Many women who had been part of the group of readers of the Yellow Catalogue also participated in the writing of Non credere: for this reason, in the following, I took Non credere as sort of authentic interpretation of the Catalogue. Reprinted in 2016, the book was translated into French in 2017 (Ne crois pas avoir des droits, La Tempête, 2017). In English: The Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, Sexual Difference. A Theory of Social-Symbolic Practice, With An Introductory Essay by T. De Lauretis, transl. by P. Cicogna and T.De Lauretis, Indiana University Press (1990).
7 Non credere, pp. 14-23. H.D. is Hilda Dootlittle, 1886-1961.
8 Non credere, p. 17.
9 Non credere, p. 17.
10 Non credere, p. 15.
11 L. Muraro, L’ordine simbolico della madre, p. 127 of the 2nd It. ed., Editori Riuniti (2006), emphasis added. To the non-Italian reader, the following translations of this foundational book are available: Die symbolische Ordnung der Mutter, transl. by G.Schröder, G. Campus Verlag (1993); El orden simbólico de la madre, transl. by B. Albertini, horas y HORAS (1994); L’ordre symbolique de la mère, transl. by F. Solari and L. Cornaz, L’Harmattan (2003). A Critical English Translation of Luisa Muraro’s L’Ordine Simbolico della Madre (The Symbolic Order of the Mother), by F. Novello, University of Oklahoma (1994), «was said unreliable by the author» (according to what is reported in Luisa Muraro bibliografia degli anni 1963-2016, ed. by C. Jourdan with the collaboration of F. Cleis, readable on the web site of the Libreria delle donne di Milano).
12 The relationship between Olivia and Verena in Henry James’ The Bostonians, Non credere (p. 15) exemplifies that, in a regime of symbolical weakness, «women themselves may threaten the female genealogy» (Non credere, p. 15).
13 Non credere, p. 15. On Madame du Deffand see Benedetta Craveri’s research (Madame du Deffand e il suo mondo, Adelphi, 1982), to which Non credere refers in the terms that I repeat in the text.
14 Non credere, p. 15.
15 Non credere, p. 30, quoting these words from the Manifesto di rivolta femminista: «Woman should not be defined in relation to Man. Our struggle and our freedom are based on this awareness. Man is not the model to which a woman’s process of self-discovery should be adapted. A woman is the other with respect to a man. A man is the other with respect to a woman».
16 For this reason, it seems to me that these figures should be distinct from that of the victim, a figure this latter not favored by the Thought of the Symbolic, because it only speaks of “feminine misery”. The victim is a figure to whom a sort of “programmatic” refusal is addressed (Angela Condello dwelt on this in Paper I) and encompasses a large number of «female writers who seemed to be unhappy, failing, suffering, suicides, and that appeared as victims». In these the Yellow Catalogue readers see «the risk to create specters which allow us to forget ourselves as we are in the present». As Angela Condello points out, the victims are victims, and the losers are losers, because they remain subordinate to the dominant symbolic order, and replicate it. Devoid of “symbolical independence”, they lack «their own authority» and the ability to «chose freely what to consider relevant». The symptom of this is the preference for a full, redundant language that replicates illusions of unity and fullness (and thus is inevitably destined to remain frustrated).
17 Meditations on the experience of setbacks, of pain, of irrelevance, of lack, often appear in the Thought of the Symbolic: «In all our relationships, the lack is strongly felt» (Non credere, p. 133). Reflections on the reasons for that lack are profound: «The devaluing of the female sex is the brutal experience that makes a woman forget what she knew in her naivety. Namely, that to grow up she needed a woman greater than her» (ibid., playing on the double meaning of the word “greater” in Italian, where it means “older” but also better, stronger, more capable).
18 Non credere, p. 19.
19 Ibid.
20 Non credere, p. 15.
21 «The politics of revendication, however just and heartfelt it is, is a subordinated politics and a policy of subordination, because it leverages what is right according to a reality designed and maintained by others, and because it logically adopts their political forms»: Non credere, p. 19.
22 Non credere, p. 54.
23 In understanding the transition from the personal to the political, which occurs by bringing the former to a social level through language (through «the exchange of words»), I take inspiration from Stefania Ferrando. In her study on Saint-Simonian French women of the late XIX Century, this young feminist philosopher and historian brilliantly highlighted the constants of female political action, in which the “being together” becomes in women’s groups the object of reflection, an occasion for a re-naming of experience, the spring for a social circulation of renewed meanings. (S. Ferrando, La liberté comme pratique de la différence. Rousseau, Olympe de Gouges et les Saint-simoniennes, PHD thesis, Paris-Padova, 2015. In all the following I am profoundly indebted with this exemplary work, unfortunately not yet published).
24 As Angela Condello recalled in Paper I, Luisa Muraro, in Maglia e uncinetto, Feltrinelli (1981, repr. Manifestolibri 2004), a work conceived during her participation in the Yellow Catalogue group, argued that the Symbolic is built on two axes: the metaphorical one (which unites, generalizes, and renders abstract), and the metonymic one, anchored to the facts of reality. Indeed, The Yellow Catalogue is full of attention for the metonymic operation that flashes up in the works of female writers where the reality of female existence is presented as a rupture in the logical and “systematic” coherence of the narration. Above all, The Yellow Catalogue is driven by a metonymic practice: choosing to read women authors because they are women means deciding to break the «metaphorical closure of language» (which the writer herself may hypothetically have wanted to accept) such that it becomes possible to «know that the speaker has a body, generated by a woman and a man, with a detectable biographical story, and a sexual peculiarity that cannot be transcended» (L. Muraro, Maglia, p. 80). The readers therefore “get in the way” with their bodies, their experiences, their knowledge, and are oriented towards seeking what another woman knows about reality and about herself, in order to be able to use that knowledge in turn.
25 Non credere, p. 38. The need for feminine transcendence was addressed by the first autocoscienza (self-consciousness) groups of Italian Feminism, and in particular by Carla Lonzi (on this leading figure of Italian Feminism see Angela Condello, Paper I). Non credere, p. 31, recalls that, according to Lonzi, «Culture arises from the human capacity to transcend oneself. It is a capacity exercised by men at the expense of women, both in a material sense, with the division of labor, whereby women have been assigned to the more daily and repetitive work of survival, and as a result of a culture of subordination of women to men. Sexist domination is therefore an integral part of human culture. Even the concept of transcendence bears its mark, Lonzi argues, but it is not to be rejected. It is to be corrected by marking it with sexual difference. Human culture, like women’s freedom, lacks the act of feminine transcendence, the extra existence that we can gain by symbolically overcoming the limits of individual experience and the naturalness of living». As I will say in the final part of this paper, one characteristic of the Thought of the Symbolic is the revival of many components of pre-modern philosophical thinking; better to say, it is a correction of them, achieved by inserting the sexual difference perspective. The revival of “transcendence” is an excellent example of this operation of critical, feminist renewing of a classical concept.
26 The inspirational expression «above the law» has become emblematic of the Thought of the Symbolic also thanks to the writings of prominent feminist and lawyer L. Cigarini, La politica del desiderio e altri saggi (The Politics of Desire and Other Essays), ed. by R. Fanciullacci and S. Ferrando, Orthodes (2022), 149 ff. (already Ead., La politica del desiderio, Pratiche (1995). The «above the law» has been explored profoundly by the Italian Feminist Thought: the figure speaks of «a freedom that comes first, before the established social purposes, and which is in circulation with justice, because otherwise justice will be done and said without a feminine measure», writes S. Ferrando, in the Introductory Note to L. Cigarini, La politica, p. 10.
27 In The Yellow Catalogue there is a paradigmatic rejection of “heroines”, which aligns with the rejection of “victims” (see note 20 above). Angela Condello reflected on this point in Paper I, under this passage from the Yellow Catalogue: «Our need for heroines was exhausted by our reading of [Jane Austen], because the other female writers we like haven’t created any. Here is the first, quite predictable consonance between us and them: like us, they have a fragmented experience». It goes without saying that the rejected heroine is the “model” in the sense that she provides a “way of being” to be imitated, that takes our place and replaces us; the loved heroin, conversely, is the one who authorizes us to be, and to speak, as one wishes. Condello writes: «Metaphor hence shifts into metonymy and creates the space for both the reader and the writer to inhabit the same world, no longer in terms of mimesis or duplication, but as a singular subject, independent and autonomous».
28 The dominant symbolic order could be defined as a patriarchal symbolic order, but the Thought of the Symbolic has long since recorded the “end of patriarchy”: «patriarchy no longer has credit with women», declared the Sottosopra Rosso: È accaduto non per caso, Libreria delle donne (1996). (The “Upside-down papers” (Sottosopra) are kind of political agendas launched periodically by the Milan Women Bookstore). However, «if patriarchy has fallen» its violence, material and symbolic, reappears in other forms, particularly that of a new “fratriarchal”, technological order (a “brotherhood”), «dominated by the idea (only the idea) of equality and expressed by the language of rights that tends to pervade the whole political discourse as a panacea for the problems of the world» (C. Jourdan, La Libreria delle donne di Milano in the change of civilization, in Italian Feminist Thought, 2023, in press). This is what I will call the dominant symbolic order: a set of stipulations and practices which denies the symbolic existence of female difference (today more than ever, to a certain extent), not least by stigmatizing it as the possible subject only of “essentialist” claims. Regarding the peculiar effects of the re-cancellation of female difference, which took place in the transition between the old and the new symbolic order, see L. Muraro, In realtà, in A. Buttarelli and F. Giardini (eds.) Il pensiero dell’esperienza, Baldini Castoldi Dalai (2008): p. 19. Noting the widespread idea that words like “woman” or “women” would be «the consequence and effect of sexist domination» since they are «forged by patriarchal culture», Muraro observes: «it seems to me a new way of erasing women. In order to exist in patriarchy, I had to conform to an image that was acceptable to the society of men, while it now seems that, in order to undo patriarchy, I have to put in brackets the name I give to my humanity, which is woman». (The book was translaled in Catalan as El pensament de la experiència, Edìcìons del Crec, 2013.).
29 The gesture of “creating a void” may have more than one echo in the paradox of the Christian faith known as “kenosis”: to save one’s life one must lose it. The Waldensian and feminist theologian E.E. Green reflects on kenosis in a gender perspective in Dio, il vuoto e il genere (God, Emptiness and Gender), Claudiana (2023).
30 See L. Muraro, Ordine, p. 21-23: We must not limit ourselves to criticizing patriarchy. «This work of criticism, typical of feminism, while vast and accurate, will be wiped out in one or two generations if it does not find its affirmation by restoring to society, and primarily to women, the symbolic power enclosed in the female relationship with the mother, set free from male domination».
31 Non credere, p. 43 («The relationship between a woman and another woman is the unthought of human culture»).
32 The readers underline Ivy’s distrust of “civilization”, according to the polemic that, in several parts of The Yellow Catalogue, they express against the progressive conceptions of history. We will come to this point in the following.
33 Non credere, p. 148-149.
34 Non credere, p. 133.
35 The Precious Books series, available on the Women’s Bookstore website, is introduced with these words: «This is a partial and partisan list of books that have spoken to us. The choice is dictated solely by our preferences, and by the fact that after reading each of them we have found ourselves considering reality with fresh eyes».
36 Non credere, p. 13.
37 L. Muraro, Maglia, p. 91. The same order of ideas returns in the famous stating of L. Cigarini (in one of her reflection on the trial as space for a feminist practice): «I think that freedom concretely consists in being able to make an imposed human condition, such as that of women, the opportunity for a greater existence» (La politica, p. 86).
38 On the famous expression used by Simone Weil (“Leveraging”), see the essays collected in Diotima, Mettere al mondo il mondo, La Tartaruga (1990).
39 According to L. Muraro the role of feminist thinking is to offer the frame of words that allow us to see what is. In the dominant symbolic order (which is no friend of the maternal), people see the maternal relationship but do not symbolize it «because the fact is never enough, the correlation with the truth alone is not enough, it does not hold up, it needs metaphysical truth. To see something, you need to have an idea of it» (Ordine, p. 117, my italics).
40 See L. Muraro, Tre lezioni sulla differenza sessuale (1994), rep. Orthodes, 2011, R. Fanciullacci ed., p. 34.
41 L. Muraro Non è da tutti. L’indicibile fortuna di nascere donna, Carocci, 2013, p. 68.
42 «The game of uniting and differentiating is the deep and precise game that gives life to the Thought of Sexual Difference»: L. Muraro, Tre lezioni, p. 35.
43 Non credere, p. 40. The Thought of the Symbolic is firmly convinced of the positivity of being, which is to say: it is convinced that “being” deserves preference over “non-being”. Judging that being is indifferent to the true and the false – and is therefore «incapable of prescribing anything» – ends up in nihilism; each one becomes a fiction, a copy. But it is a copy of nothing, a performance whose only reality is its exhibition. Its main resource consists in the fact that it is believed true. The meaning of being must be fought with this nihilism, which, to begin with, must be brought into focus» (Muraro, Ordine, p. 20, emphasis mine).
44 The word “reality” (“realtà”, in Italian) has its etymological root in the Latin word “res” (thing), the Romanist Carlo Beduschi recalls in a paper not yet published.
45 L. Muraro, Ordine, p. 28.
46 The Feminism of the Symbolic «fights for the primacy of the relational subject with its own interiority, for us the starting point is the maternal relationship» (L. Muraro, A proposito di primati, in www.libreriadelledonne.it., June 14th, 2019.) The criticism of dualism between facts and values has become increasingly explicit in the Thought of the Symbolic, which not by chance has identified one of its main references in Iris Murdoch, who developed that criticism in a profound and refined way (see the Introduction written by Luisa Muraro to the Italian edition of Existentialists and Mystics, Mondadori, 2006 and 2014).
47 Non credere, p. 130.
48 One of the books written by L. Muraro is entitled “To the Market of Happiness” (Al mercato della felicità, 2002, rep. Orthodes, 2016). The concept is that reality is not indifferent to desire (that is, to what is invested in it): everyone’s confidence in being capable of something great makes the world greater.
49 Famous Hayek’s polemics are foundational in this field, see esp. The Counter-revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason, Free Press, 1952. The Smith’s idea of “spontaneous order” is sometimes referred to as “unintended” order (J.R. Otterson, Unintended Order. Explanations in Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment, Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), sometimes as “unintentional” order (N. Ashford, S. Davies (eds.), A Dictionary of Conservative and Libertarian Thought (1991), rep. Taylor and Francis, 2012. I take the expression “unintentional order” from L. Infantino, L’ordine senza piano, Armando, 2011.
50 L. Muraro, Ordine, p. 47.
51 In tune with Simone Weil, one of its most beloved thinkers, the Thought of the Symbolic consider the “order” first of all one, and the first, «need of the soul» (cfr. S. Weil L’Enracinement, Prélude à une declaration des devoirs envers l’être humain (1949), engl. transl The Needs for Roots, Routledge, 1952; it. transl., from which I quote: La prima radice, Mondadori, 1990, p. 19).
52 L. Muraro, Ordine, p. 115.
53 The polemics of the Thought of the Symbolic against the idea of progress and the modern idea of society is open and profound. Neither “progress” nor “society” give space to what does not progress and does not depend on society, such as the mother-daughter relationship. «There are things that do not progress, not because they remain ‘behind’ and are ‘overtaken’ by others that change over time: they do not make progress because they simply recur, old and new»: L. Muraro, Non è da tutti, p. 79-81.
54 Of course, the topic of the different “historicisms” is vast and complex. I adopt here the distinction between a first or true historicism and a second or false historicism, as introduced in the Italian legal studies by A. Giuliani, The two historicisms, in Il Politico, 1953, pp. 329-35, p. 331. Taking as an example of the first, or true historicism, that proposed by Meinecke (read with a strong recovery of Vico’s conceptions), and for the second the ‘modern’ one, famously criticized by Popper, Giuliani states that the ‘first’ or ‘true’ historicism is «modest, it does not claim to reconstruct history in itself». That is, «it rejects every objective and absolute method of research, because the future will always remain unknown to us, as our individual mind cannot determine the plan according to which human history must unfold. The principles of this type of historicism can be summarized as follows: the sense of individuality and evolution in history, the sense of the perpetual flow and transformation of all human aspects, but at the same time the sense of the fact that these aspects are, yes, types recurring and corresponding to forms that we must rightly universalize, but, also, each of them in its own right has a completely individual and particular characteristic». The second, “false” historicism, aims instead at the discovery of “laws” and wants to be “scientific”, that is, «an interpretation of the method of the social sciences which highlights their historical character, and which aspires to historical prediction».
55 L. Muraro, Non è da tutti, p. 71.
56 «The solipsistic ego is constructed with an undue leap from the experience of the relation with the mother (…). In our culture there is great difficulty in maintaining the point of view of a subject in a constitutive relationship with something other than him/herself. Such a relationship is considered alienating and therefore by definition it does not construct a point of view» (L. Muraro, Ordine, p. 124).
57 See note 35.
58 L. Muraro, Ordine, p. 55.
59 Non credere, p. 18-19.
60 Non credere, p. 150. Emphasis added.
61 Non credere, p. 150. Emphasis added.
62 Non credere, p. 153. Emphasis added.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
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.