FOR THE RECORD: THE NON-LANGUAGE OF ITALIAN FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

Dialectical Relations

Not too long ago, Differentia, review of italian thought, issued its second number.^[1] Though there could not have been, after the publication of its inaugural issue, much doubt as to where this new publication was going, issue number two not only reiterated its initial message, but also committed to paper a much more exacting second message as well: this journal means business, business that for all purposes intends to stay. It is a common practice in the journal industry to promote the editorial desires to be inscribed in a journal to come. Differentia is no exception, except that from the very beginning it plays by its stated rules. In number one we read what the founding editor has to say: "This new publication aims at expanding and intensifying the dialogue between the Anglo-American and the Italian culture." He continues: "Differentia intends to provide a sorely needed outlet for the exposure and diffusion, in English, of contemporary Italian thought." And: "It will cut across ( . . . ) other more local discourses in an effort to constitute loci where differences are evidenced rather than hidden, where discussion is mobilized against any tendency to pass over in silence some of the unsettling issues of our time."^[2]

Yet the dialogue between Italian and U.S. American cultural discourses which the journal furthers did not include--as of its second issue--much of a dialogue on feminist grounds, and the site of local discourses, where differences are evidenced rather than hidden, where discussion is mobilized against any tendency to pass over in silence some of the unsettling issues of our time, that site of differential discourse does not include a discourse which makes difference its primary ground: sexual difference, the cause or consequence of which lead to sexual objectifications and abuse of women in porno-graphy, rape, incest, and advertisement on the one hand, and to the cultural, political and social commodification of women as natural institution of childcare, husbandcare, and homecare on the other hand. The philosophical discourse on sexual difference, which in Italy has followed over the last few decades a most daring and avantguarding trajectory compared to other cultures in the West, that philosophical language is a non-language on the pages of this new and most promising review of Italian thought.^[3]

Surely, compared to other journals on and of Italian studies in this country, Differentia is not much more implicable on feminist grounds than any of the others. Italica only recently, in the Winter of 1988, put together a special issue on Italian feminism, or to be precise, on "Women's Voices," and this after 20 to 25 years of intensive feminist activities in Italy.^[4] Similarly, it was only a few months ago that another journal finally presented its special issue on Women's Voices in Italian Literature.^[5] I am referring to the Annali d'Italianistica, which, under the competent editorship of Rebecca West and Dino Cervigni, hosted many formidable essays in its special issue of 500 pages on the topic. Though the title would indicate that the issue might focus on women's literature rather than more general feminist issues, there are more than a couple of essays which indeed transcend the hardly compromising boundaries of literature and the feminine, or of literature of the feminine, or of feminine literature, by deploying rigorous feminist strategies in theory and in practice.^[6] So if other journals have been somewhat slow in catching up with the feminist paradigm, then Differentia has indeed been no outsider to this inopportune record. What this phenomenon reflects is perhaps not so much the conscious or unconscious unwillingness of the editors of these particular journals or of many others in the area of Italian studies to take part in the irrevocably historical development of feminist thought, though this might be the case in some instances. What this phenomenon is symptomatic of is, I believe, a peculiarly uneven development, or perhaps even an underdevelopment of a feminist consciousness among many women Italianists. For when women in many academic discplines began to effectively organize themselves by the middle and the late seventies, when women got ready to launch what Juliet Mitchell once called the longest revolution, when alliances were created to facilitate a network of material and moral support for women colleagues at all stages of the academic ladder, many women Italianists played it safe. Thus for instance, the attempt to found "Women In Italian" against the background of similar associations which were mush-rooming in other disciplines in the humanities, that association of "Women in Italian" never got off the ground. Many women Italianists, who by influence and power could have best supported such efforts, were not actually avoiding privately listening to tentative plans, as long as their name would not appear on a public roster. So although Italian feminist culture had nurtured, and continues to nurture, extraordinary theorists such as Rossana Rossanda, Maria Anna Macciocchi, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Dacia Maraini, Gianna Pomata, Elisabetta Donini, Silvia Vegetti Finzi, Carla Lonzi, Paola Melchiori, Mariella Gramaglia, Nadia Fusini, Adriana Cavarero, Luisa Muraro, Rosi Braidotti, Lea Melandri--and many other fine theorists should indeed be included in that list--women Italianists seemed to have made sure that the U.S. American publishing market would not carry their mark.^[7] Perhaps there is something to it that one of the few books in English available on Italian feminism has not been published by a woman in Italian studies who has a secured and tenured position but by a woman outside the regular academic track: Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, who, mother of three, loses her position at San Francisco State University for supporting what was then called a "third world student strike," and who, then, blacklisted, patiently reconstructs a professional life of her own as independent scholar and who, without foundation money, scholarships, grants and easy access to information generated in the daily interactions of a professional institution, still writes not only the only book on Italian feminism in the U.S., but possibly also the best one for a while to come.^[8] What is one to conclude: should the existential and professional parameters of women Italianists be so different from the ones operating in other disciplines? Are (were) the Italian colleagues more misogynistic or sexist towards women professors or women students than the philosophers, the historians, the linguists, or the scientists? Clearly, such questioning would need an empirical study with respect to the percentage of tenured women in Italian compared to other disciplines in the humanities. I am not going to spend much more time on that fascinating issue here short of suggesting that the peculiar state of affairs of women in Italian studies--this lack of solidarity and this under-development of a feminist consciousness which more often than not coerced promising women Italianists into leaving the profession, or into existing silenced, de-energized, and discouraged, at the margins of it, and which more often than not encouraged the display of non-feminist women blissfully professing oblivion when it came to the very real existence of discrimination against women--that state of affairs should probably be viewed in relation to the peculiar state of Italian studies in this country, which plays a peculiarly marginal and disem-powered role at most universities. I don't think that it takes all that much insight to figure out that both the poverty of the feminist project in many Italian depart-ments as well as the emargination of Italian studies on many campuses is not just a structure hegemonically produced and maintained from above, but also, and perhaps sometimes even primarily, a structure which agents internal to it, and who could make a difference, are determined to complicitously keep it that way. Though there are some signs that feminism is on its way to becoming a language capable of supplanting the non-language of Italian feminist theory, I suspect that the success of Italian feminist theory in this country will be linked to the extent to which Italian studies manage to supplant its sometimes self-imposed isolation and ghettoization with a vision which furthers Italian studies in an interdisciplinary, intradepartmental, and cross-cultural context. There are some indications that this process of de-provincialization and de-marginalization of Italian studies has already begun and that feminist theory is dialectically already indispensable in and for that process.^[9] And just for the record: rumour has it that Differentia will, with its next number, modestly enter its very own feminist track.

Uneven Developments

What now commands our attention, I think, is this: at the very moment in which women Italianists are getting ready to launch their own respectable version of feminist theories and practices, to come out of the closets, that is, and go feminist, and participate in the discourses on gender, sex, and class, academic feminism overall here in the U.S. is at the very verge of entering an unprecedented material and moral crisis. For what else should we call the processes, subversive and otherwise, going on around us: 1) the Ivy League, self-appointed leading arbiter of what is in, has determined in no uncertain terms that what is in is to go post-feminist; 2) gender studies, instead of feminist practices and theories, are preferred agendas for many women studies programs; 3) academic men, who have no intention of changing their unexamined misogynistic practices in private and public lives, teach courses, speak, and write on women's literature, feminist theory, and gender theory; 4) academic women, who have no intention of shaping alliances with other women for the purpose of protecting and mentoring women students and colleagues, opportunely jump on the lucrative "Women's Literature" bandwagon; 5) famous feminists--who made their fortunes and their prestige, and could only have made their fortunes and their prestige because countless women naively worked for years for a feminist movement and in the context of processes which would lead to the realization of a feminist consciousness and a feminist ethics--some of these feminists now are extraordinarily resilient and sometimes even hostile to exercizing the most basic feminist solidarity; 6) feminism has become a lucrative commodity on the publishing and academic market, as if a feminist consciousness could be purchased over the counter with a credit card; 7) and finally, and on a more pleasant note, many women, seemingly profoundly disinterested in carrying the feminist banner in language, scholarship, hairdo, and dress, often turn out to extend their solidarity to other women, protecting them, mentoring them, supporting them, in short, they often turn out to silently practice in their daily lives what many of us would decidedly qualify, perhaps out of lack for a better or different adjective, as feminist. There is no lack of opinion as to why things have turned this way as attempts are made to relate these multiple contradictory and unsettling practices to the generally politically and socially regressive tendencies in the eighties. No doubt, there is something to these theoretical approximations. Yet no matter how we interrogate these phenomena, some of these developments are highly suggestive to me: one, that feminist practices, as many of us attempted to construct them over the last few decades, are in crisis, and secondly, that it is at the very moment that academic feminism enters this general phase of what I would call the poverty of feminism, it is at that very juncture that women Italianists go finally feminist. There is some possibility that the Italianist version of feminism presently evolving around us could get unceremoniously mired in that general poverty of feminism--and judging from the eagerness with and by which Italian sections at the last MLA embraced primarily the always potentially depoliticizable questions of gender rather than the more compromising feminist theories always potentially turning into feminist practices--that possibility can yet become a reality.^[10] Yet like in most crisis situations, dangers and opportunities tend to germinate next to each other. What I would like to propose, therefore, is this: Italian studies--precisely because of its general lack of a significant feminist consciousness until recently, precisely because it lagged behind in a significant participation in the construction of feminist infrastructures and organisms, precisely because it did not become the site of feminist hegemonies and, therefore, of the multiple contradictions, unsettling incommensurabilities and psychosocial problematics which are deeply entrenched in the interstices of these feminist hegemonies--Italian Studies, by not producing a feminist hegemony over the last few decades might well be in a position now to quantum leap into a genuine feminist future by rigorously interrogating the structures and infrastructures that kept academic feminism from becoming genuinely feminist in the past. I think that Italian studies has a historic opportunity at this very moment, as profound develop-ments in the area of feminist philosophy and theory in Italy are proposing a conceptuality whose critical interro-gation and appropriation might not be without revolutionary consequences for feminist practices on this side of the ocean. And it is to the contextualization of that conceptuality to which I will now turn.

From Double-Militancy to Double-Alterity

Recent publications in feminist theory in Italy as well as ensuing debates on these publications suggest that Italian feminism has entered a new stage in the feminist phenomenological process, a stage in which and from which the specific trajectory of feminist consciousness in Italy becomes visible. What I am referring to are several booklength studies: Il filo di Arianna, Letture della differenza sessuale, (1987), Diotima. Il pensiero della differenza sessuale (1987), and Non credere di avere dei diritti, subtitled, and I freely translate: "the creation or generating of forms of feminine freedom in the ideas and in the practices of a women's group" (1987).^[11] What these publications indicate is that Italian feminist thought, which has, analogously to Western feminist thought, evolved along the lines of emancipationist and liberationist conceptual and political struggles, has now reached a position which emphasizes that which needs to be done rather than undone, that which needs to be constructed rather than deconstructed--affirmative, positive creations of a future, that is--rather than negative or reactive attitudes towards the past. We could also say it otherwise: Italian feminist consciousness has reached the position from which it no longer attempts to exist for the other, by unveiling or deconstructing the symbolics of the patriarchal past, but rather it attempts to exist in and for itself by constructing its own symbolics. No doubt, and as the subtitles of the first two books indicated above suggest, the work of Luce Irigaray, with her essentialist emphasis on sexual difference as the non-negotiable ground for both the deconstruction of inequalities in concepts, conceptualizations and theories, as well as the ground for the construction of a feminist epistemology and ethics, seems to play a major role in the formation of this new stage of feminist consciousness, and the major protagonists of this phenomenological drive, Luisa Muraro and Adriana Cavarero, would be the first ones to admit that much. After all Luisa Muraro is the capital translator of Luce Irigaray in Italy.^[12] Yet what is fascinating is not the particular reception history of a French feminist in Italy, although it would surely reveal an almost obsessive Hegelian propensity of these Italian theorists in their understanding of Irigaray. Rather what is fascinating is how the specific trajectory of Italian feminism, how the specific historical experiences acquired by women in the practices of the feminist movement and sedimented in the phenomenology of the feminist consciousness in Italy seem to have led to a theoretical position which but verifies some of the epistemological and ethical accounts provided by Irigaray. In other words, Marx's old dictum, that it is life that determines consciousness rather than consciousness that determines life, seems to suddenly renew its accreditation here. What the experiences of Italian feminists over the last twenty years or so, recorded in these publications above, suggest is that feminist practices generate their very own theoretical model which is both explainable as well as further expandable on the grounds of existing feminist theories, such as Karen Horney's significant work on feminine sexuality, which Luce Irigaray put to revolutionary use in her feminist theories of epistemology and ethics. In order to explicate my point, let me proceed with the following story.

The feminist experiences in Italy, as elsewhere in the West, were ushered in by women whose primary political experiences were acquired, next to men, in the organizational, intellectual, and critical drives that marked the student movement, the union movement, and the citizens' movement in the Sixties.^[13] The language of the first publications of Italian feminists carries the intransigent mark of what the sixties considered themselves to be about: the resistence to domination, to authoritarian private and public structures, which the Frankfurt School had thematized, in interesting variables, to various degrees. One of the earliest feminist groups in Italy, the Gruppo Demau, indicated its field of operation by its very name: "Demistificazione Autoritarismo." Yet what this feminist group also signaled are political agendas which, already in 1967, at the eve of the memorable protest movement, penetrated the boundaries of left thought unable to problematize questions of gender inequalities. So Gruppo Demau proposed an analysis of the specificity of women's condition which would not only focus on the economic exploitation of women, but also on the function of the sexual division of labor, which required an understanding of the function of the family in the economic, cultural, and political sphere. The family, so it was understood, both against and with feminist theories arriving from Great Britain and the United States, did not only constitute a private sphere, where the reproduction of the species and the material as well as the symbolic activities related to childrearing were taking place. The family was also the site of the microstructural domain of male supremacy, of male power over women and their sexuality. In that, the private was, and is, political and public as well. As in other Western countries, Italian feminists endlessly analyzed the politicality of the private sphere in endless sessions of endless consciousness raising groups. The methods developed in consciousness raising--which Catharine MacKinnon has called, on this side of the ocean, the intrinsic theory of feminism, the method and theory proper to feminism, a feminist science which powerfully unveils and decodes the epistemological, material, and symbolic alienation of women, and their objectification in the realm of law, mass media, advertisement, pornography, and sexuality--these methods were the backbone of Italian feminism.^[14] What was learned by these methods and in the consciousness raising groups, and what made these methods and these groups so powerful, was not the individual, but the collective insight into the fact that one was not born a woman, but that one was made into one, as Simone de Beauvoir once stated it. If Italian feminists shared with other Western feminists the practices of the consciousness raising groups, they insisted, more than other Western feminists, on waging the feminist struggle on two fronts: not only in the realm of autonomous women's groups, but also in left organizations, such as "Potere operaio," "Lotta continua," and "Manifesto." There they hoped to decen-tralize patriarchal hierarchical power structures and to adjust political and social agendas to feminist needs. These activities and the period in which they took place are known as the phase of "double-militancy," a phase which seems to diminish by the middle of the seventies when feminists massively withdrew from their respective political parties.

Yet from the early seventies on, there existed, among Italian feminists, not only that contingent which would, in the spirit of "double-militancy," struggle next to men for the economic, social, political and cultural equality of women; what also existed were those contingents for whom the realization of political, legal, and economic gains would not lead ipso facto to sexual equality. That contingent, which is known under the name of the autonomous women's movement, deliberately focused its energies on methods for both deconstructing the multiple forms of oppression, marginalization, and silencing of women's culture and for the construction of a decidedly feminist culture. The outcome of that effort is familiar to feminists from most Western societies: women's bookstores, publishing houses, newspapers, radio stations, houses for battered women, women's clinics, and so forth; and Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum amply documents, in her Liberazione della donna: Feminism in Italy, the Italian trajectory of that feminist culture. So in Italy, as elsewhere in the West, the movement vacillated between politics of emancipation versus politics of liberation, a vacillation between a politics next to men versus a politics separated from and without men. What both sides had in common, however, inspite their differences when it came to strategy, was their view of woman as the victim and of man as the victimizor. Woman had not yet come to be in and for herself. Carla Lonzi, the unforgettable author of the unforgettable pages of Sputiamo su Hegel (Let us spit on Hegel), put it well in her aphorisms, from which I cite at random: "The image of femininity, on the basis of which men interpret women, is an image created by men. Man is used to talking in the name of the species, he has always spoken that way. Yet half of the species now accuses man of having mutilated the other half, and of having sublimated that mutilation. We think that a history which is constituted in such a way that woman does not play an actively participating subject, is a history which is incomplete. For thousands of years we were mere observers. Now we realize what is going on."^[15] There were also, however, from the very early seventies on, groups of women for whom the construction of a feminist culture, for whom the creation and the practicing of feminist practices was ultimately not conceivable in the framework of either the emancipationist or liberationist theoretical model. In their search for a conceptuality which would transcend emancipation and liberation, Italian feminists entered after almost two decades a phase which I would like to call, with Adriana Cavarero "double-alterity."^[16] From political practices next to men to practices without men which were still grounded in the linguistic, epistemological, symbolic, psychosocial and sexual presuppositions of the patriarchal world, Italian feminists are now experimenting with new grounds based on sexual difference on which and by means of which they hope to create their very own sites of feminine freedoms. The success of this project appears to be contingent on the extent to which women are able to essentially distinguish between the languages of men and the languages of women, and to which extent women are able to, once this essential distinction is established, to sever themselves from the predominant (patriarchal) symbolic and linguistic systems which perhaps colonize our reasons as well as our desires, and which perhaps turned the languages of women into non-languages. Many current Italian feminist theorists suggest that it is by creating an authentic "feminine" symbolic system, an authentic language based on specific relations among women, that the non-linguisticality of women, which many assume as a fait accompli, will turn into a language by means of which feminine freedoms can be obtained. "Double-alterity" then not only affirms the otherness, or sexual difference of woman, which produced the non-linguisticality of women's existence, but it also potentiates this otherness, this sexual difference, to a second degree, by insisting on a second kind of otherness grounded in a specific relation among women. In the following discussion of Non credere di avere dei diritti, which has devoted its collectively written pages to the history of the practices of everyday feminist life in Italy, that phenomenology of the feminist consciousness moving from otherness to double-otherness or "double alterity," will become apparent. What will also become apparent is not only the nature of this relationship, but perhaps also the potentially revolutionary feminist strategies it entails with respect to the possibilities of genuine and authentic feminist freedoms.

Simple Narratives

According to Non credere di avere dei diritti (roughly: "Do you really think you have any rights?" or "Just don't think you have any rights") the coming into being of genuine, authentic, radical spaces for women will come from women, and only from women, and not from anyone else. The juxtaposition of title to subtitle of the volume, which reveals a linear narrative moving from finite limits or boundaries to the realm of infinite freedom ("How our feminist practices in the movement taught us to invent feminine freedom"), reflects a certain phenomenology of the feminist consciousness as the authors experienced it. Yet the emphasis is not only on the point of arrival, "how feminine freedoms" have been generated or created, as the title of the German translation (Wie weibliche Freiheit entsteht), a translation which played an extraordinarily polemical and successful role in the Federal Republic, would have it.^[17] So what is important about this story is not only the point of arrival, but also the way in which and by which these women arrived at that point. While the other two volumes indicated above, Il filo di Arianna and Diotima represent the theoretical foundations which philosophically elucidate the feminist practices of Italian feminism, producing a specific kind of consciousness, Non credere di avere dei diritti tells the story of that phenomenological journey. The latter is written col-lectively; thirty eight women, related in some form to the Women's bookstore in Milan (Librerie delle donne di Milano), seem to have been included in that enterprise. It insists on a non-academic, non-bookish and non-scholarly style. No references are made to theoretical models or to individual feminist thinkers. Last names are omitted. In that search for conceptualizing and formulating sexual difference, and in the construction of new conceptualities which would be hospitable to such a search, structures which might have been helpful for such conceptualiza-tions have been strictly ousted from the project. No Heideggerianized, Lacanianized, or Derrideanized or what have you jargon crossed the threshold. Yet the omission of jargonized language, often a non-negotiable quid pro quo in feminist theories on this side of the ocean, is not a calculated, instrumentalist, or disingenious strategy by which the Milanese feminists hoped to obfuscate the influence of French critical theory on their ways of thinking. The simplicity of their narrative reflects, I think, the feminist practices of these groups, which tend, as most feminist practices, to take place without German or French philosophy, and if this narrative is persuasively powerful in its simplicity it is not because the narrative is simple, but rather because the story being told is the simple story not only of the feminist movement in Italy, but the simple story of other feminist experiences in the West as well. It goes something like this:

The consciousness raising groups were a wonderfully hospitable site for democratically exchanging information on the way we women are socialized, acculturized, and often brutalized by the cultural unconscious and symbolic systems which appear to be primarily male. In these groups, the atmosphere was supportive, women refrained from criticizing each other, the politics aimed towards absolute egalitarianism, a politics which worked as long as we stayed within the paramaters of these groups. There was, however, an immense prize to be payed for such peaceful weekly or biweekly free therapy sessions, perhaps a price that is constitutive of most psychotherapies: it was to forfeit utopian visions of the future in the service of adjusting to the dystopian past. For the consciousness raising groups were sites not only to uncover the multiplicities of collective victimization. The conscious-ness raising groups were sites to only uncover that victimization.

Collectively we had built an immense databank of impressively detailed information on the ways--symbolic, semiotic, linguistic, spatial, cultural, economic, political, legal, psychological, etc--in which the apparently predominantly male world interacts with us in order to colonize our unconscious and desires and to impose its will such that it appeared, and sometimes it still appears, that we know more about men than they know about themselves. Collectively we had built an enormous system and body of knowledge which unveiled the pernacious structures and practices underlying women's multifacetous victimizations, emargination, silencing. Yet the moment we left the consciousness groups behind, eager to build a culture, a politics, and a society which would be feminist, at that moment we entered the problematics of a terrain which the consciousness raising groups, by their very structure, their very nature, and their practices, had successfully repressed: I am referring to the very real existence of power relations among women. These relations of power powerfully came to the fore the moment in which we left the deconstruction of what is considered male dominance and hegemonies behind, when we committed ourselves to the construction of common projects for an autonomous feminist future. All intransigent rhetoric and orthodox feminist denial to the contrary, these relations of power exist, not only or primarily because women are coerced into competitive and misogynist behaviour and practices by patriarchal and predominantly heterosexual cultures. And these power relations exists not only or primarily because women consent to or become complicitous to non-democratic and hierarchical practices because patriarchal and predominantly heterosexual cultures require them to act that way. Both explanations have their place in our theories, yet they are ultimately not very useful, leading to an epistemological and ethical cul de sac when it comes to strategizing our next phenomenological move: how to invent our knowledges, our powers, and our freedom.

Surely, faced with the apparent ubiquity of power, one could go, with and next to the Foucauldian-Nietzschean doctrine, decidedly post-feminist, and some women, particularly here in the United States, have over-whelmingly chosen to do so, whether consciously or not, and sometimes for persuasive reasons. Effacing sexual difference, in the name of an undifferentiated concept of power, is also the object of desire of proponents of androgyny, cybernetic technology and genetic engineering, which will, so it is believed, make the reproduction of the species independent from the uterus, and thus the imaginary and the symbolic independent from the phallic valence it enjoys, against our wishes, in our history.^[18] Yet the post-feminist alternative, in its many forms of gender theory, and theories of social technologization and computerization, is not the one Italian feminists on the whole chose to pursue when confronted with the very real problem of power and relations of power in the practices of their daily lives. What they chose instead is the elaboration of a concept which would enable them to empower themselves by acknowledging the existence of power in human relations, particularly in the relations among women, and by attempting to use that specific power for their feminist advantage. The concept they developed, called in Italian "affidamento" or "the state of one woman entrusting herself to another woman," is related to "double-alterity."^[19] In the following section, I will explain it like this.

Processes of Empowering a Subject

The collectives of the women's bookstore of Milan reasoned, encouraged by theoreticians of impeccable feminist credentials, such as Luce Irigaray, Luisa Muraro, and Adriana Cavarero, that the precondition for creating sites of freedom for women is the creation of a symbolic, a linguisticality, a language which is specific to woman. If women move, think, and speak in the contexts of symbolic systems which are not their own inventions, but the inventions of men and thus specific to the passions and desires embedded in a man's body, and if, therefore, the non-freedom, the enslavement of women is tied to the non-existence of autonomous symbolic realms relevant to women, their sexuality, and their body, then the invention of a symbolic system based on sexual difference, based on women's bodies as well as their minds, will become the precondition for the invention of genuine feminine freedoms. The invention of that symbolic system is the new political practice women intent on the feminist project are encouraged to pursue. How does this political practice become enacted? To begin with, it is a practice practiced among women. It is the practice of the "affidamento," the practice of one woman, perhaps a younger and less experienced, less powerful and less knowledgeable woman, of entrusting herself to another women, perhaps an older, more experienced, more powerful, and more knowledgeable woman. By this practice, which reenacts the age old relation between mother and daughter, the more powerful woman will function as symbolic mediator between the outside world and the less powerful woman, between the symbolic of the patriarchal world which coerces the younger woman into not speaking her language and her body and the striving towards a world in which the younger woman will, aided by the older woman, produce her own language based on the possibilities and potentialities of her body. Though a relation of power is maintained among these two woman, in that "affidamento" is decidedly a relation of power, where one is above and the other below, it is by integrating that relation of "affidamento" into a feminist ethics that this dual and dialectical "mother-daughter" relation becomes, in Hegelian terms, the prerequisite for feminist freedoms. The disparity among women, its recognition and the recognition of the potential functionality of that recognition, becomes the quid pro quo of freedom for women who opt for freedom. While in principle the production of freedom is availabe to all women, its realization is contingent on submitting oneself to the powers of another woman, or to say it the other way around, by the acceptance of one woman to function as the "authority" or mother for the other woman. This presupposes an awareness of disparity, a will to accept it, and a desire to overcome it.

In Diotima. Il pensiero della differenza sessuale, which I would like to consider as the theoretical and philosophical appendix to the handbook on the invention of feminine freedom, the Non credere di avere dei diritti, the authors evoke the notion of a feminine transcendence based on disparity or inequality, a transcendence among women to be discovered and to be produced on the basis of sexual difference. If sexual difference marks the nature of the relations women have among themselves and with the world, then an understanding of that sexual difference will produce new relations among women and between women and the world. Philosophical practices including Hegel and Freud have created and adhered to conceptualities in which women have been relegated to particularity and men to universality, in which sexual difference, the sexual difference of women has served as the particular or the other without which the universal or the norm could not have been born. Yet simultaneously, the sexual difference of women has been effaced in the degenderization and neutralization that underlies the production of concepts and universalities. It will be the project of women, so Italian feminist theorists suggest, the project of women in all kinds of sciences, from linguistics to anthropology and psychoanalysis to ethnography and philosophy to decode the apparently androgynous character of science and the other disciplines and reveal what their character conceils: the sexed nature of knowledge, which is not based on a symmetrical oppositional pair, such as passive/active, mind/nature, man/woman, form/matter, public/private and so forth. This sexed nature of knowledge is based on an assymmetry, in that it is hierarchical and power-laden in its duality. It is by insisting on the assymetrical position women embody with respect to knowledge that the possibilities of new forms of knowledge arise for women, forms of knowledge which arise from and respond to women's experiences. It is, moreover, by reclaiming sexual difference from the languages of philosophical and patriarchal thought that had obfuscated sexual difference that the symbolic fecundity of sexual difference can come to the fore.^[20] In this the collective authors of Diotima rely on the work of Karen Horney, who, in the twenties, had corrected Freud's notion of penis envy, the feminine version of the castration complex, by pointing out that penis envy is not a primary, but a secondary and reactive formation, a formation which is indeed preceded by a primary formation, in young girls, who have experiences of desire associated with their anatomy, the anatomy of a young girl's body, and not associated with the anatomy of a boy's body. Yet the Italian theorists also rely on Irigaray, from whom they borrow the non-negotiable essentialism of the essentialist metaphor, while simultaneously endowing it with an Hegelian aura.

How do we women produce knowledge based on sexual difference while simultaneously reclaiming from the symbolics of the patriarchal system that which has been alienated from us? How do we produce both that which has been alienated from us, our very own knowledge and freedom? The ancient relation of mother and daughter, this ancient relation of disparity among women becomes transformed, in the practice of the "affidamento," into a relation in which the recognition and acknowledgement of one woman of the "more" or a "surplus" of knowledge, power, prestige, social position, and so forth of an other woman renders one of the woman into the "voce autorevole," or the authority-discourse, and the other woman into the "voce-nonautorevole," or into the lack-of-authority-discourse. Thereby, the originary relation of positioning-dispositioning underlying consciousness and knowledge is reproduced, and with it the dialectical nature of that relation, which brings about the empowering of the non-authoritative into the authoritative. In this relation between two women an identity or a phenomenological stage in the history of the feminist consciousness and in the history of feminist knowledge is irrevocably produced, in that the younger woman moves from an alienated state of being in herself, as the degendered yet sexed other of male discourse, to a state in which she is less alienated from herself because she is also for the other (woman) an other, a sexed other and a differential sexed other, from which she moves to a third stage, which, by consisting in the reciprocal recognition of being the other of and for the other woman, of being identical and different with and from the other woman, mediates the now mediatable alienating gap between the subject and the object and drives the subject to a qualitatively higher stage, directed towards feminist freedom. In this double-alterity, in which consciousness is both the other with a small o, the degendered other, but also the other with a capital O, the gendered other and the mother, and the sexed other, new forms of feminist consciousness and freedom can be obtained. A woman or a feminine subject is endowed with such a possibility, not simply because there is another woman, but because the subject knows that she is a subject endowed with potential freedom precisely because there is the object or the other woman, who potentiates and alone potentiates the possibility of feminine freedom in the dialectical relationship between mother and daughter. Ontology enables destiny.

From double-militancy, Italian feminist theory has reached double-alterity. It is a powerful trajectory, and, thus it evokes as many promises as it revokes. By relying on Irigaray, Italian theorists not only relied on her notion that philosophy or philosophical language becomes the primary terrain where the sexed nature of knowledge becomes obfuscated, but also that philo-sophical discourse paradigmatizes discourse and practices tout cout. So many of the epistemological problems of essentialism, and of the problems of different kinds of writing, resurface with and in this discourse, and it is not the place to address these problems here. What makes these developments so fascinating, in my view, is not their Hegelianization of Irigary, so that commands attention to the ways in which cultures appropriate conceptualities and adjust them to their own internal structures. What is more pertinent to me at this point is that Italian feminist theorists have learned, on the basis of their daily practices, to address, what seems to be the Achilles heel of academic feminism in the U.S.: the unexamined power relations among women, which are enacted by feminists of all denominations, most feminist rhetoric to the contrary. It could be the historical task of women Italianists here in the U.S. to keep us updated on the successes the practices of the "affidamento" have to record in their search for overcoming these power relations, in their search for feminine freedoms. In doing that we would not opt for an uncritical appropriation of the "Italian" solution to a real problem, simply because cultural practices are not simply enacted or enactable in a different cultural context anyhow; rather, and perhaps more importantly, we would opt for a continous and rigorous interrogation not of the solution to the problem, but of the problem itself. For the very real problem of profoundly unsettling power relations among women is surely not going to depart from our practices as long as our practices remain the sites of unexamined and dogmatic feminist rhetorics, essentialist and non-essentialist alike.

^[1]Differentia, review of italian thought, edited by Peter Carravetta, Queens College, New York, New York. Number 2 appeared in the spring of 1988.

^[2]The quotes are from the introduction by Peter Carravetta to Differentia 1 (Autumn 1986).

^[3]Though in Italy the publishing market is flourishing when it comes to feminism, as is the case in other Western countries, there is not as of yet much available in English on these topics. For an initial introduction to Italian feminist theory and feminism as well as initial relevant bibliographical information see the following: Renate Holub, "Towards a New Rationality? Notes on Feminism and Current Discursive Practices in Italy," Discourse 4 (1981/82): 89-107; Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, Liberazione della donna. Feminism in Italy. (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1986); Judith A. Hellman, Journeys Among Women: Feminism in Five Italian Cities. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). And as of recent: Teresa de Lauretis, "The Essence of the Triangle or Taking the Risk of the Essentialism Seriously: Feminist Theory in Italy, the U.S., and Britain," Differences 1(1989): 3-38.

^[4]"Women's Voices," in Italica 65 (1988) 4: 293-350, edited by Robert J. Rodini.

^[5]Rebecca West and Dino Cervigni, editors, "Women's Voices in Italian Literature," in Annali d'Italianistica 7 (1989).

^[6]I am referring in particular to Lucia Re, "Futurism and Feminism," (253-271), and Maurizio Viano, "Sesso debole, pensiero debole," (394-422), the latter of which would have more of an impact if it also appeared in English, however.

^[7]All of these theorists have published extensively in Italy.

^[8]This excellent study has been selected as the winner of the 1987 Book Award of the Before Columbus Foundation. See my review of this study in Italica 65 (1988) 4: 346-349.

^[9]Undoubtedly, much work in a new direction is already in progress. Protagonists of these new directions are, among others, the circle around Peter Carravetta in New York, the circle around Anthony Tamburri in the Midwest and the Chicago area, and the circle around Lucia Birnbaum in the Bay Area and San Francisco. For a critique of the marginalization of things "Italian," in current theoretical discourses which regard themselves as de-marginalizing the marginalized see my "Humanism, Heidegger, Antihumanism," in Differentia 3/4 (March 1990).

^[10]See "Italian Literature," PMLA 104, 6 (1989): 1022.

^[11]Franca Bimbi, Laura Grasso, Maria Zancan, Gruppo di filosofia femminile Diotima, Il filo di Arianna. Letture della differenza sessuale. Rome: Cooperativa Utopia, 1987. Adriana Cavarero, Cristiana Fischer, Elvia Franco, Giannina Longobardi, Veronica Mariaux, Luisa Muraro, Anna Maria Piussi, Wanda Tommasi, Anita Sanvitto, Betty Zamarchi, Chiara Zamboni, Gloria Zanardo, Diotima. Il pensiero della differenza sessuale. (Milan: La Tartaruga, 1987). Part of this volume was submitted as an entry to the Encyclopédie philosophique of the Presses Universitaires de France. Libreria delle donne di Milano, Non credere di avere dei diritti. La generazione della liberta femminile nell'idea e nelle vicende di un gruppo di donne. (Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1987). This latter publishing house has been very active in feminist matters over the last few years and for interesting forthcoming material it should be kept in mind.

^[12]Luisa Muraro, author of a pioneering study in feminist medieval scholarship with her Guglielma e Maifreda. Storia di una eresia femminista, Milan: La Tartaruga, 1985, has become something of an Irigarayan "Ur-Mutter" on the Italian feminist scene. She has translated almost all of Irigaray's work, including Speculum (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1975), Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978), and the extraordinary L'amante marine (Milan: Feltrinelli 1981), as well as Poésies élémentaires (Milan: Feltrinelli 1983) and the very important Éthique de la différence sexuelle (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1985).

^[13]For information on the movement see Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum's study and Renate Holub "Towards a New Rationality," both cited above.

^[14]Catherine MacKinnon, "Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: An Agenda for Theory," in Feminist Theory. A Critique of Ideology. Edited by Nannerl O. Keohane, Michelle Z. Rosaldo, and Barbara C. Gelpi. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982): 1-31.

^[15]Carla Lonzi, Sputiamo su Hegel. La donna clitoridea e la donna vaginale e altri scritti. Scritti di rivolta femminile 1,2,3. (Milan: Rivolta Femminile, 1974). I have been inspired in the order of these aphorisms by the German edition of Non credere di avere dei diritti.

^[16]Adriana Caverero, "Per una teoria della differenza sessuale," in Diotima: 42-79.

^[17]Libreria delle donne di Milano, Wie weibliche Freiheit entsteht. Eine neue politische Praxis. (Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1988).

^[18]One of the earliest proponents of this position was Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex. The Case for Feminist Revolution. (Bantam Books, 1970). For a discussion of feminism and Foucault see Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby. Feminism and Foucault. Reflections on Resistance, (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988).