Contemporary Italian Women Philosophers: Stretching the Art of Thinking, eds. Silvia Benso and Elvira Roncalli. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2021. viii + 214pp. ISBN 9781438484915.
Antonio Calcagno, King’s University College at Western University
Growing interest in the recent developments of Italian philosophy have helped to bring to broader audiences the key ideas and arguments of important figures like Roberto Esposito, Adriana Cavarero, Paolo Virno, Remo Bodei, and Elena Pulcini. Contemporary Italian Women Philosophers: Stretching the Art of Thinking continues to help expand our knowledge of the Italian philosophical landscape by making available in English new philosophical ideas and positions of a variety of Italian women philosophers. Benso and Roncalli have worked hard to give us a volume that displays the multifaceted, rich, and diverse voices of thinkers like Luisa Muraro, Lea Melandri, Laura Bazzicalupo, Maria Luisa Boccia, Caterina Resta, and Simona Forti, among others. The editors note: “The essays insist, in one way or another, on a close-knit relation between thinking and practice, on the need for a philosophy of and for the world, and on the necessity to engage with everyday life” (7).
Part One of the volume, “Women, Mothers, Bodies,” opens with an essay by Luisa Muraro titled “The Inner Passage.” Known for her work on the role of the mother in shaping female relationships, especially those between mothers and daughters as well as broader societal ones, this essay takes a semi-autobiographical, reflective approach that ponders whether we have come to the “real end” of (modern) politics, which coincides with the end of modernity. Muraro begins by reflecting on how and why she came to philosophy, and the personal reasons that motivated her and helped provide a unique understanding of what philosophy is and does, as well as what it could be and do. It is from this journey from within, consciously and unconsciously, that one grasps, in part, who and what one is as well as the sense of the world in which one dwells. Drawing from her deep interests in psychoanalysis and politics, Muraro intimates that reflection on oneself and the world helps generate language, bringing to the fore concepts and ideas that need words to express themselves. Language, which can give birth to new ideas, especially in the search to build a new politics and sociality, must create and find new language, and this can only be found from within.
Maria Luisa Boccia, a philosopher and politician, offers the second essay in the volume. The piece focuses on the recent move to make abortion illegal once again and to punish those who have, help procure, and/or perform them (33). The central argument of the essay ponders the question of who and what make a mother. Boccia moves between traditional biological and normative stances, which she sees as deeply conditioned by patriarchal orders, institutions, and practices, and proposes, by contrast, that motherhood is a choice to meaningfully consent or not to a certain act, be it conceiving, carrying, or giving birth to a baby. Boccia makes a distinction between the biological, legal, and cultural sense of motherhood determined and justified either by biological-bodily, legal, and or ethical expectation, norms, and practices, and the freedom to choose to accept becoming a mother. The traditional biological, legal, and cultural-ethical standards rely on a model of parenting and parenthood that naturally or biologically binds a mother to a child. The mother’s consent is never recognised as significant and/or constitutive in these traditional structures. Boccia wishes us to move beyond the model of parenthood, and beyond the patriarchal definitions of motherhood.
The third essay of part one, “Aporias of the Maternal in the Women’s Movement,” is by Lea Melandri. Like Muraro and Boccia, Melandri, a philosopher by training, is deeply involved in politics and the fight for women’s freedom. Well-known for her work on the deep patriarchal relationship between love and violence, here, Melandri asks: “[I]s the maternal (real or symbolic maternal; feminine or woman virtues [doti femminili], etc.) a permanence, an invariable, that is, an identity, a role that we inherit from what has been traditionally regarded as the “Woman difference [differenza femminile]” (a difference more or less deriving from the biological ability to generate children) or is it a factor of change?” (47) She also asks whether the body and sexuality women identify with today can now serve as opportunities for emancipation, that is, can there be a reversal of the views of women’s bodies and sexualities that contests the patriarchal visions? Melandri argues that any real change for women, any real break from the patriarchal determinations of the female and woman, depends upon embracing a different model or “orientation” of change itself. Emancipation and liberation, the two orientations she explores, work, she contends, in two distinct ways. While the former draws on discourses of equity, equality, and rights, etc., its core concepts and ideas draw from and extend the patriarchal ground of these key notions and conceptual frameworks. Hence, rather than emancipation, it is liberation that, Melandri argues, is the truly transformative orientation and model of change. Liberation means not only breaking with patriarchy and its structuring power but also focuses on each woman (and each man’s) own desires, own concrete life experiences (53). Rather than generalize or apply the individual’s situation, relationships, and individuality to the abstract ideas of rights and equality, thereby reducing all women to modern patriarchal understandings of a common and shared fairness, Melandri argues that liberation must be deeply individual and deeply personal. It is the very categories of change and how women situate themselves vis-à-vis these categories that will bring about genuine social and individual transformation.
Part Two, “Subjectivity, Power, and the Political,” begins with an essay by Simon Forti titled “Toward an Ethos of Freedom: Notes on Subjectivity and Power.” A well-known scholar of Hannah Arendt’s work, Forti contemplates what it would mean to live an ethos of freedom, understood as a “non-fascist way of life” (57). By studying the figure of Socrates as taken by Arendt, Foucault, and Patočka, Forti argues that a genuine ethos of freedom is constituted by “constantly revoking the affirmative power of what surrounds us and presents itself as the only possible reality” (71). She understands this act of revocation as an “exercise,” largely understood in the Arendtian framework of the practice of thinking. But this act also calls forward the way and modes in which one chooses to constitute oneself as a subject. We must become an-archic subjects.
In “Biopolitics and Economy: Between Self-Government Practices and New forms of Control,” Laura Bazzicalupo makes two significant claims. First, the contemporary discussion of biopolitics, which has its roots in the 1970s, must not be read outside of its intimate relation with Neoliberal economics, these two models of social thinking and practice inseparable, insofar as they condition one another. In a deep sense, Bazzicalupo offers a much-needed reminder and correction to the mistake of reading these two philosophical movements as discrete realities. Second, she argues that the modern idea of subjectivity, with its top-down subject-formation that results in the ultimate overcoming of difference is a failure. We truly are no longer modern; rather, we have “functional and pragmatic aggregations organized by some hegemonic political subject” (85). Hence, she calls for a bottom-up and experimental approach to subject formation. Bazzicalupo advocates a molecular, rhizomatic insertion into the dominant governmentalizing, and economizing biopolitical structures rather than a revolutionary model that seeks to undo the hierarchy of the top while quelling differences.
Caterina Resta, well-known for her work on globalization and our current environmental catastrophe, continues the biopolitical thread woven throughout this section of the book by examining the resources and limits of the immunitary paradigm. Her essay “Immunitary Politics” seeks to grasp the significance of borders in our globalised world. On the one hand, the neo-liberal economic system seeks to break down borders, especially to facilitate trade and the free movement of goods and services. On the other hand, the response to this push for openness has resulted in the closing of borders in some cases, especially to stop the migration of peoples (92). Borders function as barrier and exclusion, but they are also porous and contain open doorways (93). Resta argues that the figure of the migrant anticipates an ever-growing political need: free movement without borders and citizenships. Closing borders simply does not work, given the scale and immensity of the problems we face, especially by climate catastrophe. She argues, instead:
The figure of the ‘resident foreigner’ testifies to a different way of cohabitating, finally free from the demands for exclusive possession of the land. If so, the figure of the migrant embodies the possibility of imagining a future humanity for which citizenship will no longer have limits or boundaries, constraints or conditions. Rather, it will correspond to our being, all of us, co-inhabitants of the same and that hosts us. (101)
Part Three of the volume focuses on question of responsibility, emotions, and time. Laura Boella’s “Responsibility as Being Here in our Own Time” ponders the timely theme of responsibility, in particular, what we cannot be responsible for. She situates her question in our contemporary context, namely, a single individual, with their individual freedom, that is called to assume responsibility for global problems and crises that exceed any one individual’s responsibility and ability to act. We have here a conflict of scales. Rather, than simply lying in the contradiction of scales and disavowing the very possibility of personal responsibility in the face of such huge challenge, Boella reminds us, drawing from Arendt and Patočka, of an important possibility that still remains within individual (and collective) human action (117): It is being in the very in-between of colliding orders that we must situate our action; we must resist defining our capacity and action from its projected and or (non-)achievable end or its uncapturable beginning.
Elena Pulcini’s “Emotional Subjects: For the Care of The Future” continues her long line of thought that seeks to develop the power of emotions to not only inspire and guide change but also bring about a more just and flourishing society. Pulcini’s task here is to justify the possibility of a new form of subjectivity, a relational subjectivity, that displaces a modern individualistic model of selfhood, replacing it with an interdependent one that connects the individual with others though a rich and shared emotional life. It is our affective capacity and experience that can motivate us to bring about the change we need to overcome the current catastrophes we face. In particular, Pulcini discusses the fear of encountering and losing the other as vital resources (136).
Part Four, “Everyday Life, Action, Transcendence,” opens with an essay by Enrica Lisciani-Petrini titled “Everyday Life: For a Vision without Transcendences.” The author turns her attention to the theme of everyday life, which has been marginalized as a philosophical topic of investigation for its seeming mundane and banal qualities. Yet, it is in and through the lived experience of everyday life, mediated through the ideas of Simmel and Merleau-Ponty, that Lisciani-Petrini uncovers important resources for responding to contemporary challenges. Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the impersonal politically facilitates a kind of anonymous flow of individuals of a shared identity that is also pre-personal and transpersonal. It is not the identitarian or determined/determining I or Self that establishes and mediates relations; rather, relationality becomes possible only through the impersonal movements of lives already embedded in a shared life. This part of the volume concludes with Maria Cristina Bartolomei’s essay “The Symbol in Action.” Bartolomei investigates what it would mean for a symbol to be grasped, not from an epistemological context, as an object of cognition, but from the viewpoint of action. Drawing from thinkers like Ricoeur and Schleiermacher, Bartolomei uncovers, in and through language, interpretation, and history, deeper, constitutive layers of the work of symbols by and in us. The symbol reveals itself as a site of a who, a somebody, who gives birth and who enacts the symbol. This who is gendered, embodied, historical, and lives well with others. The symbol also brings into dialogue different fields of study, including theology and hermeneutics. In a deep sense, Bartolomei uncovers the pre-symbolic conditions of an enacting symbol and symbolisation, which have a direct impact on the constitution of personhood and personal identity.
The volume concludes with an interview of Adriana Cavarero by Nidesh Lawtoo. The interview explores the various sense of mimesis at work in Cavarero’s thought, from her works on ancient philosophy to her more recent feminist and social and political thinking. One finds here a discussion of gender, populism, the masses, plurality, and narrative. Particularly useful here is the discussion of Cavarero’s more recent work, as this interview helps clarify the development of her thinking.
The value of this volume by Benso and Roncalli consists not only in bringing forward a wide and varied collection of Italian women philosophers active today, but the way in which the volume communicates the rich responses these philosophers give to contemporary issues, especially on climate change, nationalisms and populisms, growing inequality, economic adversity, and injustice. These philosophers also offer pragmatic guidance and instruction on what we can do, how we can see things differently, and how we can imagine a future and shared world. Here, one finds the hope-work of philosophy that seeks to create new horizons and new openings, especially in times of crisis. This volume speaks directly to our age and to our lives.