—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, "Observing Reason," Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)

"With maternity a woman achieves a moment of deculturalization: she runs through the early stages of life again in an emotional symbiosis with the child. The outside world seems to her like an alien product quite foreign to the primary needs of the life she is reliving. Maternity is her "trip.” Her consciousness turns spontaneously backwards to the origins of life, and she questions herself[...] We will no longer allow anyone to treat us as the bearers of the species. Our children belong to nobody; neither to their fathers nor to the state. We will give them to themselves, just as we reclaim ourselves to ourselves."

—Carla Lonzi, "Let's Spit on Hegel" (1970)

"The person who laughs at a transvestite is reacting to the faint intuition of this absurdity that he already has—as has every human being—and which the man dressed as a woman, who suddenly appears before him, externalises in the ‘absurdity’ of his external appearance. The encounter with the transvestite reawakens anxiety because it shakes to their foundations the rigidly dichotomous categories of the sexual duality, categories instilled into all of us by the male heterosexual culture, particularly by way of the family, which right from the start offers the child the opposition of father and mother, the ‘sacred’ personifications of the sexes in their relationship of master and slave. We all form and establish our conceptions of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ on the models of our parents, the one as virility, privilege and power, the other as femininity and subjection. To these models, which bind us to them thanks to the hallowed web of family ties that determines our personality, we adapt our conception of anyone who, in the course of life, we encounter or even merely think of. We think only in terms of ‘man’ or ‘woman’, to the point that we cannot even imagine anything but ‘men’ or ‘women’. In ourselves, too, we can recognise only the ‘man’ or the ‘woman’, despite our underlying transsexual nature and despite our formation in the family, where our existential misery is determined by our relationship to mother or father. The child of the master-slave relationship between the sexes sees in him- or herself only one single sex. This singleness does not seem contradicted by the evident fact that we are born from a fusion of the sexes. And yet we need only look in the mirror (during a trip) to see clearly in our features both our mother and our father. Monosexuality springs from the repression of transsexuality, and transsexuality is already denied before birth. Conception itself, in fact, proceeds from the totalitarian negation of the female sex by the proclaimed uniqueness of the phallus as sexual organ in coitus and its ‘power’ in the parental couple."

—Mario Mieli, "Towards a Gay Communism," Towards a Gay Communism (1977)

"Children are Spinozists. When Little Hans talks about a "peepee-maker," he is referring not to an organ or an organic function but basically to a material, in other words, to an aggregate whose elements vary according to its connections, its relations of movement and rest, the different individuated assemblages it enters. Does a girl have a peepee-maker? The boy says yes, and not by analogy, nor in order to conjure away a fear of castration. It is obvious that girls have a peepee-maker because they effectively pee: a machinic functioning rather than an organic function. Quite simply, the same material has different connections, different relations of movement and rest, enters different assemblages in the case of the boy and the girl (a girl does not pee standing or into the distance). Does a locomotive have a peepee-maker? Yes, in yet another machinic assemblage. Chairs don't have them: but that is because the elements of the chair were not able to integrate this material into their relations, or decomposed the relation with that material to the point that it yielded something else, a rung, for example. It has been noted that for children an organ has "a thousand vicissitudes," that it is "difficult to localize, difficult to identify, it is in turn a bone, an engine, excrement, the baby, a hand, daddy's heart…" This is not at all because the organ is experienced as a part-object. It is because the organ is exactly what its elements make it according to their relation of movement or rest, and the way in which this relation combines with or splits off from that of neighboring elements. This is not animism, any more than it is mechanism; rather, it is universal machinism: a plane of consistency occupied by an immense abstract machine comprising an infinite number of assemblages. Children's questions are poorly understood if they are not seen as question-machines; that is why indefinite articles play so important a role in these questions (a belly, a child, a horse, a chair, "how is a person made?"). Spinozism is the becoming-child of the philosopher. We call the longitude of a body the particle aggregates belonging to that body in a given relation; these aggregates are part of each other depending on the composition of the relation that defines the individuated assemblage of the body."

I was reading La donna clitoridea e la donna vaginale by Carla Lonzi. The writing opens with:

“The female sex is the clitoris, the male sex is the penis.” […] “Thus in the man the mechanism for pleasure is strictly connected to that of reproduction, in the woman the mechanism for pleasure and that of reproduction are communicating, but they don’t coincide. Imposing on the woman a coincidence which doesn’t exist as a matter of fact in her physiology was an act of cultural violence which isn’t found in any other type of colonisation.”

Other passages i wanna cite:

“Sex is an essential biological function of the human being and it lives in two moments: one personal and private which is autoerotism, one of relation which is the erotic exchange with a partner. The interdition of autoerotism harshly hit the woman because it not only deprived or disturbed her in this realisation of herself, but it has also delivered her inexpert or blamed to the myth of the vaginal orgasm which for her became “the sex”.”

And then, in a series of how man and woman are defined under patriarchy (such as “woman is passive, man is active”), she ends with “The woman is the vagina, the man is the penis.”

When different types of male supremacists claim that defining women as female humans reduces us to the vagina, to baby-making machines, they also reaffirm this act of “cultural violence” and “colonisation”, the erasure of the clitoris, our true sex.

Carla Lonzi writes: “The clitoridian woman is not the liberated woman, nor the woman who hasn’t suffered the male myth - as these women do not exist in today’s civilisation - but the one who has faced, moment after moment, the invasion of this myth and was not caught by it. […] The clitoridian woman […] has understood a historical machination against her sex.”

This invasion continues in this kind of argument. They keep defining us through male supremacist myths of the female body. Carla Lonzi acknowledges that “this is the femaleness that Freud and Reich want to reassure its continuation in the presence.” and she was right. This is one of the many ways in which it continues.

“Patriarchal fallic culture is a reflection of the male obsession with the identification penis-power. The clitoridian woman, affirming a sexuality on its own of which functioning does not coincide with the stimulation of the penis, abandons the penis to itself.”

Carla Lonzi, Sputiamo su Hegel.

In primo luogo le fonti o l’«origine», appunto. Da tempo singoli interpreti si sono interrogati sui rapporti tra critica d’arte e femminismo in Lonzi, e sulle vie della sua «riscoperta» di talune mistiche cristiane della prima modernità. Attraverso l’esperienza femminile del chiostro, infatti, Lonzi rivendica forme di costruzione del sé che non prevedono mobilitazione o denuncia – non prevedono, cioè, ciò che oggi chiamiamo attivismo sociale, politico ecc. –; ma silenzio, ricerca e scrittura diaristica. Un punto dirimente: perché nel far propri, reinterpretando e modificando, determinati modelli di costruzione del femminile inscritti nella storia della Chiesa, Lonzi si distacca dal femminismo politico di tradizione angloamericana. Non si tratta, per lei, di sostituire il matriarcato al patriarcato, né di competere per il potere come tale, ma di estinguerne il culto.

Evidente che talune posizioni di Lonzi, che oggi le vengono rimproverate come elitarie o spiritualistiche, istituiscono un dialogo a distanza, se non con Elemire Zolla, certo con Cristina Campo. Sappiamo troppo poco della cerchia che, nella Firenze di metà anni Cinquanta, ruota attorno a Anna Banti, scrittrice, moglie di Longhi – sia Lonzi che Campo ne fanno parte – e alla rivista «Paragone Letteratura». Tuttavia è evidente che proprio in tale cerchia nascono prospettive inedite e interessi per forme rinnovate, extraconfessionali, di ascesi, santità, cura del sé. Possiamo muovere a ritroso nella biografia di Lonzi e scrutarne meglio il «primo tempo» fiorentino: osservando ad esempio che l’esperienza del convento, in cui Lonzi stessa, poco più che bambina, sceglie di trascorrere alcuni anni (nel Convento di Badia a Ripoli, dal 1940 al 1943), sembra aver precocemente confermato in lei un orientamento per così dire «impolitico» in merito alla trasformazione del sé o della società. A tale orientamento Lonzi rimane fedele nei decenni della maturità, quando manifesta la più smagliante indifferenza, al pari di Breton o Weil, che certo conosce, nei confronti di ideologie e partiti.

Restiamo a Firenze: per cogliere nel sodalizio che lega la giovane Lonzi a Ottone Rosai, attestato da alcuni brevi scritti, l’occasione di un passaggio di esperienze. Artista e ideologo negli anni Venti e Trenta, Rosai si è da tempo distaccato dal fascismo di sinistra quando incontra Lonzi, e ha maturato una sua particolare conversione al cattolicesimo della rivista «Frontespizio». Proprio qui, sulle pagine di «Frontespizio» e nelle iniziative editoriali correlate, non di rado avviate dall’inestimabile don Giuseppe De Luca, possiamo cercare i primi nutrimenti del pensiero di Lonzi, in particolare una religiosità severa e autoriflessiva, laica sì, ma scevra di anticlericalismo volgare, orientata in senso civile e sociale; e, più in dettaglio, l’attenzione per Teresa di Lisieux, santa che Lonzi elegge a mentore per il suo insegnamento sulla «piccola via» (la circostanza è paradossale: per la copertina di Autoritratto, 1969, Lonzi sceglie dapprima una fotografia di santa Teresa di Lisieux nelle vesti di Giovanna d’Arco. L’editore, De Donato di Bari, ingraiano, rifiuta senza esitazione. Si conviene allora di ripiegare su un Taglio di Fontana. Lonzi ricorda il proprio sconcerto in Taci anzi parla: c’è da dire però che l’opposizione di De Donato è al tempo tutt’altro che imprevedibile. La riedizione La Tartaruga di Autoritratto restituisce oggi a Teresa di Lisieux l’onore della copertina).

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