Saturday, June 28 will be the tenth meeting of the cycle "A philosopher
a month", an initiative that has seen the collaboration of the Germinal- FAI group of Carrara with Prof. Marco Matteoli, professor of history
of modern and political philosophy at the University of Pisa and member
of In.for.male, a Carrara collective dedicated to studies and practices
on the construction (and deconstruction) of the masculine and
masculinity. Each meeting of the cycle includes a speech with a popular
slant on the philosopher of the month, or rather, on the philosophical
thought of the month: each speaker, in fact, selects the themes dearest
to him or her and presents the author in a personal and original way. To
make the relationship even more stimulating there are significant
readings and lively debates; to make it more suggestive, instead, there
is the intervention of Riccardo Solari, who at the beginning or at the
end of the meeting recites one or more poems composed for the occasion,
illuminating with his words the most significant turning points of the
thought of the philosopher of the month - thought in which Riccardo from
time to time immerses himself and then resurfaces with a work of art in
verse. In these first nine meetings behind the table of speakers, a
plurality of voices have alternated, starting from that of our
philosopher-creator Matteoli to arrive at a polyphony that has seen the
contribution of Natalia Caprili, Chiara Bottici, Serena Arrighi,
Alessandra Canapa and Emma Virgilio. The social dinner at the end of
each meeting has so far seen the birth of friendships, projects and
exchanges of ideas between companions and supporters - all between a
laugh and a bite offered by Beppe Caleo, our trusted chef, science
teacher and expert in ethology, photography and gluttony.
When and how was "A Philosopher a Month" born? The path was outlined and
undertaken after the happy experience "A Philosopher a Month", a
mini-cycle of four meetings that blossomed during the spring of 2024: in
March Prof. Matteoli introduced us to Giordano Bruno, in April Michel de
Montaigne, in May Baruch Spinoza and in June, through a reading by John
Toland, the brilliant and indomitable Hypatia. Mathematician, astronomer
and philosopher who lived in Alexandria, Egypt between the fourth and
fifth centuries AD, Hypatia was the first philosopher "of the month"
that we met as the Germinal group. But why does this obstinate female
philosophize? The artistic, philosophical and literary canon is still
strongly gendered: "doing philosophy", starting from school, often means
knowing the history of men's philosophical thought through a list of
male authors - and as much as some try to still present the masculine as
neutral, the overextension and forced universalization of thoughts,
languages and practices lead to the silencing and overdetermination of
women and all the second sexes. In this sense, "A Philosopher a Month"
was a journey of discovery and rediscovery of female philosophical
thought - sometimes feminist or proto-feminist - kept for centuries on
the margins of History and outside the Canon. And then, if you look
closely, our "philosopher" does not only embrace philosophy...
In fact, our journey did not even begin with a female philosopher: in
September, with the summer heat wearily receding, Matteoli spoke to us
about the fifteenth-century author Christine de Pizan, the first
professional writer on the European continent, dedicated to works in
prose and verse. In his La città delle dame (or delle donne) de Pizan he
proposes a counter-narrative to the myths, stereotypes and prevailing
misogynistic ideas, and he does so by intertwining the voices of the
three ladies Reason, Justice and Virtue with the many stories of women
who have distinguished themselves for their intelligence, sagacity and
tenacity.
October saw Matteoli in dialogue with the first speaker of the cycle,
Natalia Caprili, an artist who since her university studies has brought
philosophy and art history into dialogue, with fruitful insights into
the role of women in the French Revolution. Caprili told us about Olympe
de Gouges, a French playwright, writer and activist with abolitionist
and proto-feminist positions: in the midst of the revolutionary ferment
she published her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female
Citizen, in which she claimed social and political equality between men
and women and courageously demystified the famous Declaration of the
Rights of Man and of the Citizen - which, despite its universalistic
ambitions, still excluded and discriminated against women. De Gouges's
compatriots were far from taking off their blue glasses of gender, those
that make the human being coincide with the male-man, and de Gouges paid
for this and other claims with the guillotine.
Then November led us to another Vindication of the Rights of Woman, the
one published by the British proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft in 1792,
once again in response to works on civil rights that ignored women,
maintaining them in theory and practice in a state of inferiority too
pervasive (and comfortable!) to be questioned by most. Matteoli spoke to
us about Wollstonecraft, insisting - rightly - on a particularly
interesting aspect of her thought: lucid and solid in her argumentation,
Wollstonecraft recognizes the centrality of education and culture in
individual formation, an education so differentiated at the gender level
as to render the misogynistic assumption of female inferiority as a
given of nature inconsistent. As Virginia Woolf would brilliantly
summarize almost a century and a half later, "if a woman is to write
novels she must have money and a room of her own. Which[...]leaves
unsolved the great problem of the true nature of woman and that of the
true nature of the novel" (from A Room of One's Own, 1929). Mary
Wollstonecraft, moreover, two centuries before Simone de Beauvoir, was
already trying to unmask that overbearing myth of the eternal feminine
that for centuries has relegated masses of women to frivolity and
self-discipline, subjecting them to an internalized and therefore
maximally pervasive male gaze. The writer, Serena Arrighi, secondary
school teacher and sister of Non Una di Meno MS, spoke to you about
Simone de Beauvoir in March: starting from the analysis of the article
Femininity, a trap, I touched on some crucial points in De Beauvoir's
thought, placing her in dialogue - among others - with Elena Gianini
Belotti, Naomi Wolf and, above all, Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own.
In our series of meetings, de Beauvoir was preceded by Louise Michel,
who Marco Matteoli and Alessandra Canapa spoke about in February, and
followed by Simone Weil, introduced by the same couple in April, with
Canapa proving once again to be a clear and eloquent speaker in giving
us the passionate portrait of someone who was - quoting from the page "A
Philosopher a Month" - "a mystic, a philosopher, a worker, a teacher, a
militiawoman, a partisan... and also a rugby player." Having introduced
the figure of Simone Weil, a fighter in the anarchist column during the
early stages of the Spanish Civil War, allows us at this point to
mention the two philosophers we met in December and January, both thanks
to Chiara Bottici, a philosopher from Carrara who currently teaches at
the New School in New York, a transfeminist scholar and theorist of
anarcha-feminism. Through her presentations, in fact, we explored and
deepened the anarchist thought of Emma Goldman and He-Yin Zhen: Goldman,
who lived between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was decisive
in the spread of anarchism in Europe and North America, of which she was
a leading exponent and a brilliant and original theorist; her
contemporary Yin Zhen, on the other hand, with the essays collected in
The Thunder of Anarchy, left us a precious testimony of a broad and
disruptive thought that we could already define as anarcha-feminist
before anarcha-feminism.
Finally, the meeting in May had Hannah Arendt as its protagonist and saw
me in dialogue with Emma Virgilio, a university student currently
enrolled in the three-year degree course in psychology and a master's
degree in philosophy. We addressed Arendt's political theory based on
the concepts of authority, democracy and totalitarianism and then
arrived at freedom as participation in her Vita activa, which we
together defined as "the cure" after having re-emerged from the depths
of the banality of evil.
Instead, a new perspective - of and indeed beyond gender - will be
inaugurated by the meeting on Liana Borghi, activist, English scholar,
university professor and feminist-lesbian-queer theorist who died in
2021: a world-famous scholar with a close connection to our Carrara, she
made contributions of great depth and international importance to
feminist, lesbian and queer theory and practice. To present Borghi in
Carrara we will have the pleasure of hosting two people who collaborated
and lived in close contact with her: Giuliana Misserville, writer and
literary critic in the feminist field, and Marco Pustianaz, professor of
English literature and gender and queer studies at the University of
Eastern Piedmont. We from Non Una di Meno Massa-Carrara will introduce
the meeting, through my voice and that of the sisters Chiara Mazzi and
Virginia Sanesi.
And the series of meetings will continue with three events proposed by
our node in Massa-Carrara: faced with the possibility of a summer break,
enthusiasm was making its tremors felt and so, thanks to the
availability and collaboration of the comrades of Germinal, we thought
of adding, in the meantime, a first meeting on Carla Lonzi, activist and
art critic linked to the themes of sexuality and corporeality, the
practice of self-consciousness and the radical feminism of Rivolta
Femminile. Subsequently, we will propose a meeting dedicated to the
exploitation of the body, image and female dignity in the entertainment
of yesterday and today and, finally, a last appointment, this time with
the philosophy of María Galindo, Bolivian activist, radio host and
psychologist author of Femminismo Bastardo. The meeting on Liana Borghi
will introduce us to queer theory, while these three meetings will allow
us to go through the summer without interrupting the exciting journey of
rediscovering our feminine and feminist tradition: a new cycle will
begin in September, that of "A philosopher a month", for which we will
invite philosophers from everywhere to hear them speak in the first person.
If we want a free and libertarian world we must rethink History and
reclaim Tradition - to re-signify our sense of community and inhabit the
present in a new way.
Serena Arrighi
https://umanitanova.org/una-filosofa-al-mese-un-percorso-di-riscoperta-e-riappropriazione-in-dieci-tappe-piu-tre/
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