Articles for DWF
Reviews for DWF
Books reviewed by DWF
Articles for DWF
Figures of the sexual difference, 1986, n. 2, pp. 111-122
In this essay, the authors - Giovanna Borrello, Laura Capobianco, Simona Marino, Angela Putino, Giovanna Senatore, Silvana Totaro, philosophers of the Cultural cooperative "Transizione", in Naples - sinthetize the issues of a year of work; during this year they had three meetings with "Diotima" in Verona and the Cultural Centre V. Woolf in Rome, who have centered their reflections on sexual difference, so as it is defined by L. Irigaray.
They point out first of all the dangerousness of each philosophical theory based on structured conceptual categories - as the subject, the unity, the being - even when they apply to the foundation of the feminine; as far as Nineteenth century philosophy is concerned, they point out the necessity of not reducing women's thought to an aspect of the issue "crisis of the subject".
They propose the concept of "the figure of the difference" explaining the plurality of meanings, the passages and the crossings that are made possible. The "resemblance" and its figures has been the foundation of male thought (that pretends to be neutral); we need to give meanings to the "figure of the difference" and we can do it only among women.
Quoting L. Irigaray the authors adopt the term "mucous" ad an image of opening and they end up with the image - which is both another "figure of the difference" and a political proposal: "a wide stitched net: dia-logue.
We think this is the way to transformation, dialogue, the way to appraise the "dia", the intermediary, the difference. Difference that, therefore, becomes a proposal of care, reciprocity, net and, at the same time, a loosening of interpretative conceptual bonds and of the tightness of knowledge".
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Jumping, 1987, n. 5-6, pp. 9-15
Three points of reflection: "thinking for/by oneself" as the founding stone of responsibility in the territory of women's thought; "squaring up to", that is conjugating responsibility and self-assertion, calling into question the collective female subject; "on the tragic, and yet on the comic as well", where political responsibility means also escaping the domain of imposed laws, disobeying and at the same time escaping the pain it could entail.
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Warrior woman, 1988, n. 7, pp. 9-14
The author analyses the cultural context necessary to women's liberation. This process implies: the rejection of a common idea of women that denies the sexual difference: the foundation of one's own history; the relationship within the women's world; the escaping from the domain of imposed laws; action in the social context without being determined by it. The woman symbol for the author is Pentesilea, the warrior woman, able to escape the given war system.
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A Mid-way Land, 1990, n. 12, pp. 60-72
A philosophical-political speculation on what happens when a woman, taking her body - a woman's body - as her starting point, turns to words, and enables herself and other women to communicate. The "midway land" born of a relational syntax is what will not be defined from outside; on the contrary, it defines everything else from its own location.
The "mid-way land" is not a hiding place, it is the premise of a political action to modify the very structure of society. The author uses the image of the mongol, the nomad, in order to point out a different, more efficient strategy of freedom, with its own norms, its economy, its symbolic money.
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The spirit of the assembly, 1993, n. 20, pp. 49-54
Philosopher Angela Putino explains here why Themis has been chosen to name this new section of the journal (which she will be editing in collaboration with Giovanna Borrello and Valeria Frescura). She puts forward an interpretation of the myth of Themis, who personifies the order of things as they are regulated by laws, usage and justice.
It is well known that in the Greek polis women were denied participation to the public assemblies, where only male adults were admitted. But the myth of Themis, the goddess who presides the assemblies, can suggest that there was in Greek thought some awareness of a female order.
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PUTINO Angela - FRESCURA Valeria, Equal-unequal, 1994, n. 22-23, pp. 43-51
This section of the journal, named Themis, after the Greek goddess of communal living and assemblies (edited by Angela Putino in collaboration with Giovanna Borrello and Valeria Frescura) is devoted to a philosophical reflection on significant concepts and themes of feminist thought. Here the authors enter the renewed debate on the meaning of equality and difference, as well as on the meaning of politics.
Putino remembers how, as soon as, in a women's group, the sphere of intimity lost its centrality, and the questions focused on the modes of the relationships among-between the women in the group, "there the political event took place". The circle of the assembly is a void which depotentiates strength (bia) and creates a different strength (kratos) located in the common space (koinon).
Frescura reinterprets some foucaultian concepts to envisage, with Weil, a philosophical knowledge linked to the experience of human beings, and able to grasp and reformulate questions in an unprecedented way.
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Disciplined Bodies, Vexed Bodies, Desiring Bodies, 1994, n. 24, pp. 7-17
The author first retraces Foucault's analysis of institutions and their history, focusing upon its two key questions: the issue of power and that of sexuality. This brief reconsideration of Foucault's work is the starting point of a critical reading of some developments of the theory of sexual difference.
Especially in Irigaray's later writings, a position seems to emerge, according to which female identity coincides with the discourse about sex; thus, the theme of sexuality might once again be inscribed in the given symbolic order.
"Sex as a signifier charged with meaning is the privileged site; therefore, sooner or later, the couple will inevitably, become the focus of attention, in accordance with a constant feature of Western thought. An already posited sexual identity finds its other (clearly consequential) point of reference: man".
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What's at stake, 1995, n. 26-27, pp. 71-75
Putino, who is also responsible for this philosophical section of the journal, comments upon a document about procreation recently released by the Rome Cultural Centre Virginia Woolf B.
She argues that "perhaps what is at stake today is not control upon 'the female power' to procreate, but rather a more pervasive 'control of the living', which tends to enhance and bring to the fore women's desire for maternity - presented and experienced as a will ('to want or not to want a child'). Putino criticises the collapsing of desire into will, for it legitimises male indifference towards relations, as well as a decontextualized 'care for the living'.
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Discourse, truth, government, 1996, n. 30-31, pp. 73-79
The author looks at two different but related problems: the relationship between discourse and truth, and that between discourse and government.
Firstly, she argues that positioning female difference against the background of its interpretations in modernity or postmodernity is today, for a woman, the taste of a discourse of truth - that is to say a critical discourse: a critical analysis which involves both the possibility of understanding our gender and the diagnosis of the world we live in.
Secondly, she highlights the subtle awareness of the threads which linked the practises of governing with the strategies of knowledge, with the communicative and symbolic processes: a passionate, specific work undertaken by women, in a reinterpretation of Foucault's thought.
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PUTINO Angela - BRUZZESE Marina, Normativity and "Doing", 1998,
n. 39-40, pp. 24-28
According to the authors, the newly acquired possibility of "doing" together as women does not automatically produce a critique of the given state of affairs, nor of its recurring threats of normativity. Rather, it may be a deceitful last refuge against the anxiety experienced by every being faced with her/his weakness. What is needed is the capacity to comprehend each and every event not only in itself, linking together a diagnosis of our present times and the possibility of female freedom.
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Ingeborg Bachmann. Entering the desert, 2000, n. 45-46, pp. 48-53
Reading Bachman's unfinished book on the desert, Putino reflects on the desert as the only possible space for an "I" on the run, an "I" who is the Western, white, male colonising subject; running away in/from the desert, where this "I" 's discursive features - signs, traps, lies - are revealed.
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Reviews for DWF
CIGARINI Lia, La politica del desiderio, Parma, Pratiche, 1995
rev. by Angela Putino, 1996, n. 29, pp. 85-88
PUTINO Angela. Amiche mie isteriche, Napoli, Cronopio, 1998
rev. by Vania Chiurlotto, 1999, n. 41, pp. 98-100
PUTINO Angela - SORRENTINO Sergio (edited by), Obbedire al tempo. L'attesa
nel pensiero filosofico, politico e religioso di Simone Weil, Napoli, Edizioni
Scientifiche Italiane, 1995
rev. by Lina Fisauli, 1996, n. 30-31, pp. 98-101