Lea Melandri - Love and Violence: The Vexatious Factors of Civilization

L OVE AND V IOLENCE

SUNY SERIES IN C ONTEMPORARY I TALIAN P HILOSOPHY

S ILVIA B ENSO AND B RIAN S CHROEDER , EDITORS

L OVE AND V IOLENCE

The Vexatious Factors
of Civilization

L EA M ELANDRI

TRANSLATED BY A NTONIO C ALCAGNO

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

From the Italian original, Amore e violenza , Lea Melandri

2011 Bollati Boringhieri editore, Torino

English translation 2019 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Melandri, Lea, author.

Title: Love and violence : the vexatious factors of civilization / Lea Melandri ; translation by Antonio Calcagno.

Other titles: Amore e violenza. English

Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2018] | Series: SUNY series in contemporary Italian philosophy | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018006714| ISBN 9781438472652 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438472669 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: FeminismItaly. | Man-woman relationships. | WomenViolence against. | Violence in men.

Classification: LCC HQ1638 .M443713 2018 | DDC 305.420945dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018006714

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C ONTENTS

A CKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS TRANSLATION would not have been possible without the generosity of Dean Sauro Camiletti of Kings University College, Canada, who, along with the Colleges Research Grants Committee, awarded me a grant that enabled me to finish the project. I am greatly indebted to Kathy Daymond, the English-language editor of this volume. I would like to thank my research assistant, William Cockrell, who patiently looked up and checked references and quotations. He also read the final draft of the text to check for any potential errors. Paola Melchiori diligently read the English translation to make sure that I captured the Italian sense of Lea Melandris ideas and insights. I owe a debt of gratitude to Silvia Benso and Brian Schroeder, the editors of the SUNY series in Contemporary Italian Philosophy. Finally, I would like to thank Andrew Kenyon and the staff of SUNY Press for their support and work on this translation.

Antonio Calcagno
Kings University College, Canada

T RANSLATOR S I NTRODUCTION

LEA MELANDRI represents a stream of Italian feminist thought that occupies a unique place in the history of philosophy. In contradistinction to Anglo-American feminism, which emphasized both equality and emancipation as ends, Italian feminism can be said to have stressed female difference, autonomy, and liberation. The discussion of difference was also taken up by French feminist philosophers, including Hlne Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Monique Wittig, and Julia Kristeva. But what marks Italian feminist thought as unique is the desire to integrate both practice and theory. Lea Melandris writings express and always return to the need for integrating both theory and praxis.

Deeply influenced by psychoanalytic theory and practice, Melandris Love and Violence argues two central claims. First, love and violence ought to be viewed as coexistent. Society sees love and violence as unrelated opposites, ultimately refusing to see how often they coincide. This has severe implications for the lives of women, for the violence they bear at the hands of their male counterparts is either ignored or even justified because of the unconscious, societal privileging of love over violence. Love and loving are supposed to mitigate or nullify the violence and suffering that women endure, either because women (as wives and mothers) are expected to love, forgive and/or accept aggression, or because it is part of the natural order of society.

Second, if it is true that love and violence often coincide, as Freud rightly shows in his discussion of eros and thanatos, especially at the level of the unconscious, then how does this psychic structure play out in male-female relationships? It is Lea Melandris response to this question that distinguishes her philosophy from other feminist thinkers. She argues that the unconscious bifurcation of male and female includes the dynamic of love and violence insofar as male aggression forcibly structures the female and society to accept horrendous forms of violence against women, and all in the name of love. Melandri closely examines motherhood, the workplace, public life, male-female love relationships, and even social phenomena to demonstrate how the unconscious bifurcation of male and female deeply instills and justifies the need for violence against women and how love ultimately can be used to cover over the brutality and suffering caused by such violence. The practice of the unconscious or consciousness-raising is one way in which one can begin to uncover and see both the unconscious dynamics and the playing out of love and violence in daily life. Seeing how this complex dynamic plays out demands that we change our conscious practices: we must reject its deep roots and create for women a public space in which they can autonomously and fully express their unique differences. Conscious practices aimed at ending violence against women will undo, or at least have the potential to undo, the unconscious writing of a more traditional primary scene in which women are subject to and forced to accept male violence and aggression.

Italian feminism and feminist thought of the 1970s were marked by an explosion of theory and practices that had a wide-ranging impact on art, politics, literature, social thinking, psychology, and philosophy. Lea Melandris ideas were and are deeply influential. She continues to travel throughout Italy and Europe to present her philosophy. It is my hope that, with this translation, readers will become familiar with one of Italys more original philosophers, who tries to integrate both thinking and living, philosophy and doing.

Antonio Calcagno
Kings University College, Canada

P REFACE

WE MUST NOT BE MISLED by the assault on womens dignity by the degrading images that represent them on television and in advertising and the various pleas to women to rebel against them. The female body has occupied media space for many years, but the pornographic imaginary now contaminates the order of discourse and language. Exhibitionism and voyeurism, deliberately wedded together on reality television, have permeated the passive enjoyment, if such enjoyment can be said to have ever existed, of the viewer. The sudden reawakening of offended moral conscience, of feminine intelligence humiliated by the commercialization of its sex, comes after a series of events that could not have left us indifferent, for the protagonist of these events was one of the highest officers of the state, namely, the prime minister of the Republic of Italy. These events involved the casual exchange of sexual favors for money, political careers, and even television roles.

Television viewers see a continuous flow of women-objects, women-images, and women-ornaments. We see this flow of women on daytime, prime-time, and late-night television; we see it on programs about culture and in lightweight entertainment, on both publicly supported and private channels. The female body, as aesthetic embellishment or erotic stimulus, as something that simply stands next to the words of men, no matter their political orientation, is recognized as the signifier of originsa signifier unequivocally deployed by the dominant sex. Furthermore, the evidence about womens sexual objectification and their value as sexual objects to be exchanged, which lies before all eyes, on the streets and on the walls in subway stations, on television and in the newspapers, needs no scandalous dramatization in order to be made visible . Even so, Silvio Berlusconi, Italys prime minister, and a plethora of showgirls and escorts were implicated in a series of events that corroborated this evidence. Those engaged in feminist culture and practice find talk about the silence of women irritating, but we must have the courage to ask ourselves uncomfortable and embarrassing questions about what appears as a glaring contradiction: a movement that has given to women previously unknown mobility and world citizenship nevertheless finds women to be adaptable and disinclined to initiate conflict. Agile acrobats, women sustain the impossible reconciliation of separate realities: the home and the polis, the body and thought, feminine fragility and virile endurance, personal feelings and the requirements of social relations.