Memory and Utopia: The Primacy of Inter-Subjectivity [1 ed.] 9781845530259, 9781845530266, 184553025X, 1845530268

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I: The Past and Historical Research
1. Memories between Silence and Oblivion
2. Becoming a Subject in the Time of the Death of the Subject
3. ‘Utopia’ and Desire
Part II: The Present and the Sense of Belonging
4. From the Ironies of Identity to the Identities of Irony
5. The Last Identification: Why Some of Us Would Like to Call Ourselves Europeans and What We Mean by This
References
Subject Index

Citation preview

INTRODUCTION

Memory and Utopia

1

Critical Histories of Subjectivity and Culture Editors: Barbara Caine, Monash University, and Glenda Sluga, University of Sydney This series highlights the relationship between understandings of subjectivity, identity, culture and broader historical change. It seeks to foster historical studies which situate subjectivity in social, political and cultural contexts. Some of these studies interrogate and elucidate broad historical themes and periods, and cultural and social change, by analysing discourses about personal identity and subjectivity, others focus on lifestories and representations of the self. The series has no chronological or geographical limitations, although preference will be given to comparative work and to studies which approach their questions in a broad transnational framework. As the emphasis on subjectivity suggests, questions about gender and sexuality, and national or ethnic identity are central issues in all volumes. Detailed studies also offer a sense of the broad context of historical change: for example, questions of national identity are discussed within transnational and imperial frameworks. The emphasis on “critical” histories is indicative of our interest in studies with a theoretical and historiographical edge, especially those that open up new historical approaches and problematize standard ways of dealing with subjectivity and culture. Published: Histories of Sexuality Antiquity to Sexual Revolution Stephen Garton Forthcoming: Friendship A History Edited by Barbara Caine Remembering Dispossession Aboriginals, Colonization and History Maria Nugent

Memory and Utopia The Primacy of Intersubjectivity

Luisa Passerini

First published 2007 by Equinox, an imprint of Acumen Published 2014 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © Luisa Passerini 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notices Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein. In using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility. To the fullest extent of the law, neither the Publisher nor the authors, contributors, or editors, assume any liability for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products, instructions, or ideas contained in the material herein.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13

978 184553 025 9 (hardback) 978 184553 026 6 (paperback)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Passerini, Luisa. [Memoria e utopia. English] Memory and utopia : the primacy of intersubjectivity / Luisa Passerini. p. cm. — (Critical histories of subjectivity and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-84553-025-X (hb) — ISBN 1-84553-026-8 (pbk.) 1. Psychohistory. 2. Collective memory. 3. History—Methodology. I. Title. II. Series. D16.16.P37 2007 126—dc22 2006010151 Typeset by S.J.I. Services, New Delhi

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Introduction

vii 1

Part I The Past and Historical Research 1.

Memories between Silence and Oblivion

15

2.

Becoming a Subject in the Time of the Death of the Subject

33

‘Utopia’ and Desire

54

3.

Part II The Present and the Sense of Belonging 4.

From the Ironies of Identity to the Identities of Irony

77

5.

The Last Identification: Why Some of Us Would Like to Call Ourselves Europeans and What We Mean by This

96

References

115

Subject Index

129

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

An earlier version of the first chapter of this book was included in Kate Hodgkin and Susanna Radstone (eds.), Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory published in 2003 by Routledge, London. Chapter Three appeared in an earlier version in Thesis Eleven, 68 (February 2002). Versions of Chapters Four and Five appeared respectively in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Idea of Europe from Antiquity to the European Union (Washington, DC; Cambridge: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University Press, 2002), and Bo Strath (ed.), Europe and the Other and Europe as the Other (Brussels; New York: Presses Interuniversitaires Europeennes/Peter Lang, 2000). Italian translations of these essays plus additional material were published in 2003 by Bollati Boringhieri, Turin, as Memoria et Utopia: Il Primato dell’intersoggettivitá. The present volume includes a translation of the Introduction from that volume (translated by Imogen Forster).

INTRODUCTION

1

INTRODUCTION

The past fifteen years have seen important changes in the international debate on subjectivity as a conceptual category in the fields of history and the social sciences. These changes prompted me to review the development of my own thinking, and to explore shifts that reveal a correspondence between individual and collective history. In Storia e soggettività (History and Subjectivity), a collection of my work in this area from the period between 1976, when I began to do research based on oral sources, and 1988, when the book was published, my main concerns were the relationship between orality and writing, the specific quality of oral memory, the nature of autobiography and the status of history. That also implies an interest in the relationship between history and memory, and the use of oral sources in teaching and research, as well as an appraisal of the individual in his or her relationship with (and independence from) the collective. My interests have changed in the time since that book appeared, and have given rise to new thoughts of a different kind on the ideas of subjectivity and the subject, which I should like to present here as a kind of “ego-historical” stocktaking. In this exploratory process I use as a benchmark the positions I adopted in 1991, in my contributions to a collection (Passerini 1991b and 1991c) of seminar papers presented in 1988– 1989 in the social history division of the history department at the University of Turin, headed at that time by Guido Quazza. I believe the approach which I offered as a basis for studying the question of the subject in historical perspective, and which I have tested in my teaching over the past ten years at a number of universities in Italy and abroad, is still valid. That approach assumes three

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areas of meaning for subjectivity in a historical context, which it is our task to recognize and study. “Recognize” seems the most appropriate word, because the subject, and subjectivity, have always been present in history (despite the fact that historians have not always managed to see them), in both the actions and productions of human beings and their forms of passivity and suffering. In this respect the debate on subjectivity may only claim to have recognized at last what ought long since to have been obvious. The first meaning of “subjectivity” in historical context is an answer to the question, who are the subjects of history, and how does their ability to make decisions manifest itself? Foremost among them are individuals, but there are also collective subjects, such as the family and other kinship structures; classes and genders; nations, ethnic groups or “races”; generations or age groups; political parties, religious or labour organizations, corporations, regions, continents. Others will be added to the list as historians recognize forms of decision and shared imaginative activity, and the relationship between individual and collective subjectivity. (In the past they gave fuller recognition, in the main, to organized forms of subjectivity.) The way in which human beings make themselves the subjects of history also belongs in this area. Historians have often paid special attention to forms of behaviour considered imitative or learned (for example, in the relationship between lower and upper classes), instead of studying the interconnections between autonomy and heteronomy, freedom and conditioning, the conscious and the subconscious, that are the source of individual and collective trajectories, and of strategies and practices of various kinds. The second meaning of subjectivity refers to its character as an inheritance, passed down and constantly renewed, a field which I have sometimes defined as “accumulated subjectivity” and which has its origins in Durkheim’s “collective representations,” Maurice Halbwachs’ “collective memory,” and the “mentalités” of Annales. This is the field of identities and the imagination, as a form of shared subjectivity through time and space. In view of the charges of reification that have been made against the concepts of mentality and representation, I should like to emphasize the aspects of cultural production and activity that characterize this area: what is inherited cannot be truly owned unless it also goes through a process of renewal, and in that process, the creative element inevitably gets intermixed with what remains unmodified, even though one or other may predominate, depending

INTRODUCTION

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on the particular case, and one may be transmuted into the other. This area also includes myth and its tradition of carrying meanings that vary from epoch to epoch and from one human life-story to another. The third set of meanings has to do with historians’ own subjectivity, and with intersubjectivity. The attention paid to the former has given rise, during the past fifteen years, to a specific genre, the egohistoire, pioneered in France in 1987 by Pierre Nora and recently revised from a broader European point of view (Passerini and Geppert 2001). The distance between the two collections of ego-histoires is marked by a shift not only from the national to the continental scale, but also from the individual to the generational. I understand the term ego-histoire as the outcome of an attitude of mind in which historians reflect on the connections between the legacy that forms historiography as a discipline, and their own choices in the field of history. That legacy is a kind of collective subjectivity, to be seen predominantly as an inheritance through the father (for the male nature of history see Passerini and Voglis 1999), informed by individual subjectivities and informing them in turn. In the ego-histoire, the autobiographical aspect is closely interwoven with, but not reducible to, a metahistorical and methodological aspect, which enables historians to move away from autobiographical reconstruction and to analyse the reasons for their choices of method and subject-matter. In this approach, intersubjectivity refers essentially to relationships between different generations of historians and the interpersonal nature of knowledge, as well as to the specific quality of the relationship between teacher and student (Passerini 1991c). It is significant that this specificity should appear only from the point of view of the researching and writing subject. Since the theme of intersubjectivity is the fulcrum of the changes that have come about in recent years, the approach needs to be comprehensively revised in the light of these changes. However, this does not in any sense mean a rejection of the past, but rather a reformulation that looks at it in a new light and thus enriches it. In the original approach, I had brought to the fore the importance of the individual subject, since it seemed to me that it had been the element most seriously neglected by historiography, and by the social sciences as they then existed. In addition, I wished to emphasize the nature of the individual as the only true bearer of subjectivity understood in its full sense, in other words, including not only its intellec-

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tual and cultural aspects but also its psychological dimension, at least as far as the concept of the unconscious is concerned. (I have always acknowledged the importance of the collective imagination, but not that of the collective unconscious.) This emphasis was also connected with a wish to underline the contribution of individual historians, and, from the point of view of gender, to highlight that of the individual woman historian. It is only in the past few years that my work has led me to an increasing appreciation of the relationship with the other as constitutive of the self, especially in connection with questions of European identity (see the two essays in Part II), and of intersubjectivity as fundamental to the shaping of all forms of subject and subjectivity. The changes that have taken place in the general debate on subjectivity tend towards precisely that direction. This is especially clear in feminist theory (see Chapter Two, “Becoming a Subject in the Time of the Death of the Subject”), which has been exploring and highlighting relationships among subjects in terms both of the formation of the individual subject and the creation of the social contract. As Wendy Hollway (1989) has observed, the influence of Lacan and Foucault has given way to that of Melanie Klein, with her emphasis on relationships between persons rather than within the individual as a site for the negotiation of meanings. Something similar is found in a recent book by Juliet Mitchell (2000), which argues for the primary (and previously underestimated) importance of the formation of the subject of relationships between peers (brothers and sisters), in comparison with the relationship between parents and children. Intersubjectivity has always been present in my work, in that it formed the basis of the oral accounts, collected in the 1970s, which first stimulated my thinking about subjectivity. That thinking was then extended to other contexts, such as European identity, and the relationship between identities and emotions within a critique of Eurocentrism. I realized that intersubjectivity was also the basis of interpretation, and of the performance of the interview, in that narratives and their meanings are produced through interpersonal exchanges. The specificity of oral memory is located precisely in the fact that research assumes a tissue of narratives pre-existing the interview as the expression of an intersubjectivity that researchers find a way of accessing and recording. This is what I meant when I used expressions like “discursive spaces” (for example, those of women) in my earliest work with oral sources (Passerini 1984). However, I had not drawn out the full consequences all those factors would have for the

INTRODUCTION

5

idea of the subject and intersubjective communication. To use an expression of Hans Blumenberg (1985), it is a line of intersubjective communicability that enables us to narrate and narrate again certain parts of the world, a line connected with the human capacity for inventing myths and stories, but also for receiving and understanding them and bringing them to completion. The quality of intersubjectivity is present in a term that has recently established itself in the language of a number of disciplines: “memory work”, an expression that refers to the potentialities of intersubjectivity as remembrance, or intersubjective memory. Frigga Haug (2000) saw as a “sociological method” the agreement by a group of women whose ages ranged from their twenties to their sixties to write in the third person on “an occasion when I felt afraid.” The collective process of reinterpretation brought out the gendered nature of fear, and enabled them to go beneath the surface of written memory. The “memory work” carried out by Richard Johnson and a group of doctoral students at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University focused on the popularity of nationalism; each participant had to describe a personal experience associated with that concept. Their collected stories show how politics and history are interwoven, and demonstrate the intersubjective character of personal memory. A further (and not less important) aim of this memory work was to question dominant styles of scholarly writing and academic hierarchies (Clare and Johnson 2000). Intersubjective memory work thus demonstrates its capacity to create sites of resistance and innovation in respect of institutions and forms of knowledge. Lastly, the intersubjective nature of individual memory itself is also demonstrated by the memory work done in the liminal area of “revisionist autobiography,” that is, by critical reflection on one’s own autobiographical practice (Kuhn 2000). The fact that these examples are taken from different disciplines – sociology, history and literature – is a sign of the method’s versatility. This change in the concept of subjectivity took place on both the individual/autobiographical and the collective level of the academic debate, and especially within feminist theory, not only for internal reasons of consistency in the debate as a whole. In addition, there was a growing awareness of the intercultural – as well as multidisciplinary – nature of intellectual work. As those who had been seen as “other” – workers, women, black people and many others – made their entrances onto the stage of the subject, it became impossible not to be

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conscious of the plurality of subjects and of relationships between them. Perception of the phenomenon of cultural diasporas as an unavoidable issue in all current research went hand in hand with feelings of anxiety about the role that Europe and North America have continued to play in the world as subjects. In my own case, wars in Europe, especially those in former Yugoslavia, exerted a crucial influence in this process of revision. In fact, the war in Kosovo prompted my return to collecting oral memory, in two research projects undertaken in 1999. The first, involving women in Kosovo, was funded and supported by the Centro delle Donne (Bologna) and Women’s World, a women’s organization based in New York, with the aim to record Kosovar women’s memories of periods before and after the war (http:/ /www.women.it/bibliotecadelledonne/donne_kossovo/). The second was initiated by the IOM (International Organization for Migration) and its results so far include the publication Archives of Memory (Losi, Passerini and Salvatici 2001), a video cassette and an on-line archive. As we carried out our research and wrote up the results, the primacy of intersubjectivity acquired, in my view, a new importance, which also affected our methodological and interpretative approach. Intersubjectivity is paramount in realizing the transformative possibilities that characterize the expectations we hold of research of this kind. The transformative aim assumed its primacy during the course of these investigations, in the three-fold sense of our expectations of transformation in the narratives, the narrating subjects and the subjects carrying out the research. In the case of Kosovo, the work took as its starting point an acknowledgement of the heterogeneity of the subjectivities involved (due to underlying religious, national and ideological differences) and the wish to work in a spirit of solidarity and mutual exchange that would respect that heterogeneity; it would not deny even extreme differences of position, and at the same time, would be ready to identify new forms of intersubjectivity. “Each interview opened up a space of intersubjectivity, between voices and experiences, in which solidarity, tensions and disagreements ‘mirrored one another’ ” (Capussotti 2001). While working on the project to create Kosovo’s Archives of Memory, researchers found a narrative that was dominant in all the groups they interviewed (Serb, Roma and Albanian Kosovars) and which emphasized the triad aggressor/victim/rescuer. In that framework, the only course remaining for individual memory was to become a weapon for the defence of collective identity, cutting off other

INTRODUCTION

7

options in terms of the libidinal economy (Mai 2001). One of the aims of the project was to demonstrate the heterogeneous nature of subjectivity, suspending judgement on crucial aspects such as the situation of women, but its purpose was also in part (using dramatic performances based on the interviews) to shift the relationship between individual and collective, in order to give a voice to something that had existed prior to intervention by the researchers: “Our presence served to make transparent a connection that was already implicit, and which tended to highlight the mechanisms of collective self-representation vis-à-vis an international community” (Salvatici 2001). My role in this process, while not central (I interviewed Kosovar Roma survivors of the war in Italian camps, and helped to interpret the material collected), evidenced some relevant changes in the reciprocal position of the subjects constructing the interview, and generally constructing memory. In the 1970s and the 1980s, there was within oral history a strong political sense of the relatively homogeneous interplay between the self and the other that usually shared political assumptions if not the same language. The attitude of the interviewer was, in most cases, to consider the interviewees either as the subjects of social and political change or as the bearers of positions that would change culture, if not the course of events. The common basis of these exchanges and constructions was Eurocentric, although internationalist and anti-imperialist. I see now a crucial change in the configuration of intersubjectivity, due to the general change of the cultural global context, where there is no longer a shared framework of political attitudes within which one could take similar or differing positions. This lack might be positive in the long run, as it might let new and less Westernocentric forms of politics emerge. For the moment, it subtracts a shared background to cultural intersubjective exchanges. Furthermore, the nature of conflicts and the ambiguous position of European powers – including the European Union with its responsibilities – make it meaningless to simply “take sides.” For instance, the project of interviewing women from Kosovo was undertaken with the assumption that we wanted to bring plurality in, and therefore Albanian, Rom and Serbian Kosovars were interviewed (these three cultural traditions as examples of a much wider plurality). When women belonging to the three traditions expressed conflictual positions to each other, each stressing the element of victimization in their stories, it would have made no sense for us to “take sides” with the ones or the others, and not for lack of involvement: in fact, we were all too aware of

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Europe’s responsibilities in the story. This led to some a sort of suspension of judgement – again, useful in order to favour listening – and to the perception that there is a lot of work to do in order to reunderstand the relationship between the self and the other in the present context. Whether we realize it or not, the specificity of the period we are living through is its post-colonial feature. By this I mean that the Eurocentric (or Westernocentric) subject has yet to take into full account that internal and external “others” have been in the past constitutive of its own forms of subjectivity, and to deconstruct all internal hierarchies and exclusions in the definition of Europeanness. I believe that these tasks go hand in hand with the critique of Eurocentrism that I have made elsewhere, but I am conscious of the limitations of what has so far been done in this field in Europe. There is a pressing need to address this question (using subaltern studies, for example, as a structural approach), in order to make progress in transforming existing relationships between the Western system of knowledge and the peoples and cultures which are the objects of its study (Guha 1997). Intersubjectivity is the theme that runs through all the essays in this collection. Memory and utopia represent two different positions of the subject, one oriented towards the past, the other towards the future, both converging in their strong grounding in the present. The two positions have in common the critical nature of their relationship with the present situation, which makes this grounding fluid, due to stimuli originating in the past and the future. This is possible only if the subject is conceived of not as unitary but as self-reflexive, capable of reflecting upon itself and of being ironical; intersubjectivity is rooted in the process of its own formation; in other words, the subject is shaped through the relationship with the other. Intersubjectivity defines the terms of the cluster of ideas that lies at the centre of this collection. In it, memory is conceived of as a relationship between present and past, silence and speech, the individual and the collective, and thus as a narrative made up of individual and collective forms of forgetting. Utopia is examined in two of its historical forms: as a critical engagement with culture and society made possible by maintenance of the state of desire in a community that is not one of kinship, such as the generation of 1968, and as an expression of a concept of Europe and of being European which is critical of all forms of Eurocentrism and acknowledges the contribution of the other (in terms, for example, of race and gender) in the formation of the subject. In that sense, the

INTRODUCTION

9

primacy of subjectivity represents the pivot around which my revision of my previous positions on the subject in historical perspective turns. The ego-historical nature of this revision must be kept in mind in order to explain my frequent references to my earlier work. Thus far in my introduction I have focused on the new developments that appear, both implicitly and explicitly, in this collection. I should now like to highlight some links between the texts that make it up. First of all, there are profound connections among the essays that make up Part I. In the first chapter, memory is understood as a form of subjectivity, a primary form (the “royal road”) by which historians approach the idea of the subject. It has also been my own route. I have always considered memory a form of subjectivity, and this has been the basis of my attempts to interpret it. I believe that this assumption is widely accepted. Currently, a major debate on commemoration and mourning in the wake of collective traumas, such as those resulting from various forms of totalitarianism, is emphasizing the plurality of subjects and the intersubjective nature of memory (I.1). The concept of subjectivity in these essays was focused initially on the sexual subject (I.2). It is the field of feminist theory that in recent decades has made the most numerous and most interesting contributions towards a reformulation of the concept. In that field, the category of subjectivity has become a central theoretical point, a decisive conceptual benchmark even when sexual difference is not directly the subject. The connection between subjectivity and gender is thus fundamental, in the sense suggested by Sally Alexander (1994: 19), underlining the innovations introduced into the epistemological status of history from a feminist perspective: Feminist history tries to identify the gaps and silences in history – not only in the hope of restoring a fuller past, but of writing a history which might begin from somewhere else. Subjectivity could be that somewhere else, not so much (nor only) in the sense that subjectivity is the location of sexual difference, but also, and above all, in the sense that it binds the past to the present through memory and the imagination, and builds a bridge between reality and phantasy; in short, in the sense that it always involves an unconscious dimension.

Utopia takes the form of a burst of subjectivity that occupies a position in the historical process clearly oriented towards change. Richard Cándida Smith, in his work on the history of artistic avant-gardes in California, makes an explicit link between the two concepts: “radical

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utopia was a way of turning to the elements within subjective experience for a reformulation of the organisation of society” (R.C. Smith 1995: 450); “the utopian aspiration becomes a logical way of expressing subjective response to conflictual social relations” (R.C. Smith 1999: 131). This connection may assume widely differing meanings: while Cándida Smith shows the relationship between a specific male subjectivity, centred on a patriarchal structure, and the utopian project of the artists and their circles, other writers, myself included, have been able to identify a relationship between the subjectivity of May 1968 in France – and of the radical wings of the student and women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s in general – and the utopia of a free community based not on blood ties but on “elective affinities” (I.2). The essays in Part II refer to a specific utopia, that is, to the utopian value attached to the idea of a united Europe in the interwar years, an idea recently revived in a number of publications, including articles by Bronislaw Geremek (2002) and Vaclav Havel (2002). It is significant that we should be talking about a problematic and provisional utopia, located on the cultural plane, with potential political repercussions, and which demands extensive critical work on eurocentrism in the cultural sphere. Elsewhere, I have addressed the task of constructing a memory of the Europeanist utopia as the basis of an identification – not an identity – vis-à-vis a possible Europe (Passerini 1999a). The relationship between the two parts of this book consists not only in the addition of new themes related to Europe, but also in an attempt to find a structure and a historical specificity in the themes of subjectivity and utopia, while retaining a critical perspective. Whether it is possible to dispense with an empirical approach of a new form of utopian community is a question that I put at the centre of my research, in order to avoid any reference to an authoritarian idea of utopia. With regard to themes involving Europe, I note that the concept of subjectivity is much more fluid and more malleable than that of identity. This means that it is particularly useful for didactic purposes; it is applicable to a wide range of research projects, in which it can draw out new insights and new meanings, including those suggested to me by my own experience and the innovative uses to which I have seen it put by some of the students I had the fortune to teach during their university careers. The fact of our journeying together for a time meant that the concept of subjectivity was an area in which we could share our research experiences with one another.

INTRODUCTION

11

A number of new directions have opened up in the field of research on subjectivity in history, and there are a number of issues that need to be addressed in new ways and in greater detail. They include the relationship between experience and discourse; the relationship between subjectivity and power; the relationship between subjectivization and objects. For each of these topics I should like to point to the work of young scholars who have enlarged the scope and meaning of subjectivity. The concept of subjectivity has introduced important methodological changes into the field of migration studies. Some recent work addresses the theme of the emergence of new forms of subjectivity in the process of migration, and their “temporary articulation within or through intersecting circuits of subjectivization,” both collective and individual. From that point of view, migrant subjectivity is at one and the same time a strategy of expression and a working-out of the word “migrant,” since historical analysis is intent on (also) revealing the discomfort and the impossibility inherent in the process of defining migrants (Laliotou 2004). Using such an approach, it is easy to see how the idea of subjectivity may transform both the object and the subject of historiographical practice. A piece of research on political prisoners in the Greek civil war demonstrates the potential value of the concept of subjectivity in relation to that of power (Voglis 2002). Violently oppressive practices such as arrest, internment, torture and forced labour have shaped the subject in the case of political prisoners, but subjectivity is made up precisely of relationships and processes; it is located in the interchange between structure and agent. Political prisoners, taking up various positions as subjects in the collectivity of the prison – itself a form of intersubjectivity – embody different aspects of the subjectivity of the prisoner. Taking as its starting-point a constitution of the subject (in the Foucauldian sense) in its relationship with the power on which it is dependent, this analysis concludes in the individuation of an active, responsible subject, capable of confrontation. On the third question, I have the sense of observing in the contemporary world (especially in the last thirty years) a tension between, on the one hand, subjectivity as nostalgic memory or as an assertive demand for one’s own rights and on the other, the subjectivity incorporated in objects, to be consumed in similar ways whether they are ancient, old, or brand new. Both appear at first sight to be forms of alienated subjectivity, but forms that conceal a potential for confron-

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tation. The relationship between subjectivity and objects seems to me to be one of the areas that need to be explored next, whether they involve works of art, machines or consumer goods. We could go back to the observation made by Marx, that subjectivity presents itself as split between, on the one hand, those, such as workers, who seem only to have the potential to be subjects in the full sense, but are prevented from so being by their circumstances of oppression and exploitation, and on the other, forces which appear to be the subjects of evolving history, but are not capable of consciousness or responsibility, such as capital. In other words, it might be possible to envisage an enlargement of the meaning of the split between human subjects and objects, in the sense of machines, physical things, goods. The relationship between identity and objects has been explored in a number of interesting pieces of sociological research (Leonini 1988), and in works of high literary quality (Byatt 1978). One example of innovative research on the making of consumer society in Italy from the 1930s to the present day explores the links between forms of subjectivity and self-perception, on the one hand, and on the other, certain categories of objects of consumption and the ways in which they are conceptualized. More generally, it also points to the emergence of new forms of subjectivity in the consumer. There, subject, situation and object are fused, leading to a kind of objectification of social relations; on the basis of discursive practices surrounding this fusion, consumers assert their irreducibility as individuals and their common status, at least in some aspects of their lives (Arvidsson 2002). I should like to end this introduction on a point of methodology. The procedure I have adopted in these essays is, as in many of my publications, to proceed by way of a journey through the work of others. I like to think of this method as a way of expressing a form of intersubjectivity, and I like to assert its primacy on this level also. Furthermore, I see it as a way of showing that all research activity and all writing are on-going processes, a dialogue with others in different places in space and time. That is why quotations and references play such an important part in my work; the new text moves amongst them “like a creeping plant among rocks” (Cristina Campo, in De Stefano 2002: 102), bringing us back to the reassuring certainty that the art of writing presupposes the art of reading (Alessandro Spina, in De Stefano 2002: 102).

PART I The Past and Historical Research

MEMORIES BETWEEN SILENCE AND OBLIVION

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Chapter 1 MEMORIES BETWEEN SILENCE AND OBLIVION

Exordium The title of this chapter illustrates some of the characteristics of our time. First, the plural “memories” alludes to the multiplicity of cultures and languages that originate from the diaspora of peoples throughout the world today, a multiplicity that we hope will become impregnated with a full sense of respect for one another, so that multiculturalism, multilingualism and multiracialism avoid being empty words. The title also alludes to the multiplicity of layers in any process of representation, which cannot be exhausted by the old metaphor of a dual relationship between reality and its image – and memory is representation par excellence. Second, although the term “silence” is complex, to begin with we can take it literally to indicate what is preand post-sound, particularly the area around the word, the space where speech is located. Third, “oblivion” is a word chosen on the basis of its assonance in my language, Italian, where “oblio” is a much used word, as “forgetting” is in English. The Latin root “oblivisci,” which has given rise also to the French “oubli” and the Spanish “olvido,” means “to take away”, while the English “for-get” and the German “ver-gessen” literally mean “to receive away” (Weinrich 1997). The expression “oblivion” implies a mixture of passivity and activity, which is very similar to the original meaning of “oblivisci.” Finally, silence and oblivion are often confused when memory is analysed as narration, be it oral or written: what is not said may be such either because it has been repressed – by trauma, contrast with

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the present, conflicts of individual and collective nature – or because the conditions for its expression no longer/do not yet exist. Sometimes a change in these conditions may break the silence and allow memories to be expressed, while at other times silence can last for so long that it effaces memory and induces oblivion. At the same time, however, it can also nourish a story which is patiently stored away in periods of darkness, until it is able to come to light in a new and enriched form (Bonansea 1999). The Memory of Memory, the Forgetting of Forgetting Augustine in his Confessions observes the peculiar and bewildering nature of memory itself as well as of the relationship between memory and oblivion. Augustine notices the universality of memory – which belongs even to animals and birds, otherwise they could not go back to their nests and occupations – but he also points out the paradox of memory: we cannot look for something we have lost unless we remember it at least in part. Memory is thus based on a self-reflection, recalled as: “I remember that I remember.” It is the memory of oneself, of one’s soul, of one’s story through time: “I remember with joy my past sadness.” Ultimately, the intertwining of memory and oblivion is such that Augustine confesses to bewilderment and has to turn to God for illumination, because “God is beyond memory, however immense memory is” (Confessions, X, 13, 14, 16). This paradox affects not only the history of the individual, but the history of whole civilizations. Yosef Yerushalmi, in a talk on “Usages de l’oubli” given in 1987, said that for some time he had resisted the invitation to speak on the topic. His resistance was based on the memory of the risk of forgetting the Torah in ancient Israel, and was inspired by the loss that the very development of a Jewish specific religion and culture involved for other cultures. In fact, when monotheism took root in ancient Israel, all the vast and rich world of Near East religions and mythologies was forgotten, and only a caricature produced by the Jewish prophets survived, as idolatry reduced to the adoration of wood and stone. And then even the forgetting was forgotten, and the loss was irretrievable. These self-reflecting expressions are clues to understanding the chain of representations that constitutes the process of remembering/forgetting. It is indeed a process of the representation of representations, where any step refers to or mirrors another one, and where the subject

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moves between as well as creating multiple layers of representations. The subject cannot receive representations without creating new ones, in other words it cannot communicate without contributing to this multiplicity. As Augustine and Yerushalmi note in different ways, both memory and forgetting are multiple processes in time and perception. We all meet similar problems in our research, although formulated in more modest ways. How can we find traces of forgetting and silence if they are not directly observable? We know that certain silences are observable only when they are broken or interrupted, but we want to avoid repeating the suppression of what has been until now deemed marginal or less important, as well as to avoid perpetuating what is already hegemonic. Similar problems haunt us in daily life, as Martha Gellhorn (1996) has shown in her description of an experience of uncontrollable memory that suddenly brought her, from a happy moment near the Red Sea, back to an episode sixty years earlier. While she was sitting in the courtyard of the New Tiran Hotel, in the South Sinai, she suddenly felt she was in a room in Gaylords Hotel in Madrid, in the winter of 1937; from Madrid her memory took her to Prague, in the aftermath of Munich. She concludes the evocation of her reverie by asking, what is the use of having lived so long and travelled so widely, if at the end one does not know what one knows? It seems essential, in order to keep a sense of oneself, to perform an act of self-reflection and not to leave the substance of memory or oblivion to default: therefore we must remember to remember and to forget, just as we must try to know what we know. The French ethnographer Marc Augé, in his book Les formes de l’oubli (1998: 32–34), quotes the psychoanalyst Pontalis on forgetting and remembering: What is repressed, Pontalis says, is not a piece of memory – un souvenir – supposedly able to re-emerge intact through chains of associations, like the madeleine in Proust (or better, as some interpret the story of the madeleine in Proust). All our memories are screens, not in the traditional sense, but as traces of something that they reveal and hide at the same time. What is registered on the screen is not directly the sign of a piece of memory, but the sign of an absence, and what is repressed is neither the event nor the memory nor even single traces, but the very connection between memories and traces. From this perspective, our task as researchers can be defined in the following way: “dissocier les liasons instituées,” to break institutionalized links in order to establish “des liaisons dangereuses.” In

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other terms, when trying to understand connections between silence and mention, oblivion and memory, we cannot but look for relationships between traces or between them and their absences, and we must dare interpretations that run the risk of creating new associations. This Century, This Continent When one ventures into the universe of memory, one must be aware of the point of departure – which may be very different from that of arrival – and the position of the travelling subject. The perspective from which I speak is rooted in European literary and scholarly tradition, and takes place in the temporal context of what Eric Hobsbawm (1994) has defined as the “short twentieth century” (needless to say, my approach follows a very different historical route than Hobsbawm’s): from World War 1 to the end of the century. I use the term “European” aware that our European culture is today very incomplete and that, in my case, the points of reference in it are limited to just a few of the many European countries. However, at least my intention is to make reference to a common European cultural space, which is hopefully in the process of being created. As for the temporal dimension, there exists the specificity of the twentieth century for what concerns the processes of remembering and forgetting. Anna Rossi-Doria (1998), in her small and dense book on the reconciliation between history and memory in the case of deportation, remarks that the twentieth century has been, for its greatest part, a time of the cancellation of memory. It has prolonged the tendency to remove the past, and is derived from the crisis of memory and experience typical of modernity, as analysed by Walter Benjamin. This cancellation was attempted by totalitarian regimes, but not only by them; as we will see, it also occurred in democratic or transitional political regimes. Any operation aiming to cancel memory cannot help but produce another set of memories with the intention of violently replacing the previous one. The field of memory is a battlefield in many ways. Indeed, one could argue that we speak from a century which has given rise to a contradictory mixture of memory and oblivion. Suffice to refer to Theatres of Memory by Raphael Samuel (1994) as a fine illustration of the growth but also the ambivalence of forms of memory,

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whereby memory can turn into a form of oblivion, between nostalgia and consumerism. An example of the double character of the simultaneous exaltation and cancellation of memory can be found in the transformation of Hiroshima into a site of pleasure and urban entertainment. Lisa Yoneyama (1994), in research conducted between 1986 and 1990, analysed the ruling aesthetic in Hiroshima’s renewal as brightness, comfort and cleanliness. The town was becoming a future-oriented megalopolis and an international site of commerce and consumption, where the dark and gloomy was turned into the bright and jovial. In the official cartography of memory, concluded Yoneyama, there is seldom space for death, anger, sorrow or pain. It is not by chance that the first example chosen for the present itinerary does not come from the European territories; this choice expresses my awareness that the memory of Europe, within which I want to work, must be placed in the context of the world. Here I want to signal that this horizon, which will become evident in Chapter Four, is present in my mind and research. However, I have also chosen to criticize Eurocentrism from within as a form of cultural intervention (Passerini 1999a). What I find most telling about the mixed character of the twentieth century in the context of memory and oblivion is the contrast between the responses to Nazi persecutions and mass killings in different cultures and peoples (Clendinnen 1999). According to Isabel Fonseca (1996), while the Jews have responded to genocide with a monumental enterprise of remembrance, the Rom have reacted with an “art of forgetting” that combines a peculiar mixture of fatalism and of the spirit of carpe diem. Among the Rom, “forgetting” does not imply complacency; rather, its tone is of sometimes buoyant defiance. Although the numbers of Rom killed are controversial (they vary between almost one hundred thousand and one million, but these questions cannot be reduced to quantity) a huge number of Rom have been swallowed by what in their language is called Porraimos, “the devouring.” Many were subjected to torture and to medical experiments by the Nazis. These mass crimes were not addressed at the Nuremberg trials, to which no Gypsy witnesses were called; as late as 1995 only one Nazi had received a sentence for crimes against Gypsies. Fonseca attributes the silence from the Rom to the fact that they seem to have no sense of and no need for a great historical past. Very often their memories do not extend beyond three or four

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generations – a legacy perhaps from the days of travel, when the dead were literally left behind. Therefore World War 2 and the Porraimos are within memory, but for the moment they have given rise to no significant tradition of commemoration or even of discussion, as if there were among the Gypsies a lack of interest for their eventful and tragic past. Although this may be changing, as Rom people have recently constructed a tradition out of their detention in Nazi camps (Revelli 1999), the original attitudes of Jews and Rom towards remembering and forgetting have been very different. This contrast of attitudes, between defiant silence and monument to remembrance, seems to me expressive of our time, and a version of the double character of the twentieth century. But let us not forget that before building monuments of memory to the Shoah, there was a long period of silence. Indeed, the reflection on the Shoah’s historical significance and its place in the heritage of the West developed very slowly. Genocides were considered monstrous exceptions in the Western tradition, both in the antifascist literature and even in critical analyses of World War 2 (Varikas 1998). The obscure side of that tradition was relatively hidden during the decades of the Cold War. The importance of Hannah Arendt’s The Burden of our Time, written in 1951, which made it clear that understanding genocide is the burden that our time has imposed upon us, was recognized only in the 1970s and only by small numbers of people. Again, while it must be kept in mind that the very concept of genocide may become meaningless if it is extended too far, the task of understanding genocide cannot be carried out only within the boundaries of Europe. We should not forget that other genocides have been perpetrated by all sorts of peoples through history, and in particular by Europeans against the peoples of other continents. One major instance is the colonization of South America, in which case the term genocide has been explicitly used (Jaimes 1992). However, we do not need to go very far from Europe in order to find signs of both the violence of colonialism and the silence imposed upon it. Silence as the Repression of memory and as Imposed ‘Amnesia’ In mid-August 1999, Le Monde published a long article and an editorial concerning a very significant case of public silence in the Europe of the second half of the twentieth century:

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The truth about the repression of a demonstration organised by the Algerian Liberation Front in Paris in October 1961, for a long time hidden by public powers, has emerged a bit more in a report prepared by the Solicitor General of the French Highest Court of Appeal. On the basis of judiciary archives, and having obtained a special right of exception to the one hundred years rule […the Solicitor General disclosed] that on the night between 17 and 18 the victims of the police numbered at least 48, while for a long time the official number had been 3 dead.

The article went on to explain that at the time the government had been informed of the facts – namely that hundreds of people had been thrown by the police into the water of the Seine – through a note sent by the Prefet de Police to the Cabinet of the Prime Minister, but it had preferred to maintain silence about the events. Therefore Le Monde held the authorities responsible for this “amnesia” and recognized the importance of coming to terms with it, more than forty years later, in order to contribute to what it termed the “refoundation of Franco-Algerian relationships.” In this case, the effort on the part of the government to mask its own responsibilities for the deaths of demonstrators and to conceal the implications of the massacre for the relationships between the French and the colonized, between Europeans and non-Europeans, led to an oblivion in public memory. This oblivion was part of the general disappearance of the Algerian War from French collective memory (Prost 1999). The efforts of writers and film-makers to reveal the details of the affair were repeatedly hindered. The film Octobre à Paris, in which Jacques Panijel interviewed those who had survived the massacre, was censored in 1962 and prohibited for the following ten years. When the documents of France Presse were made available to researchers, the dossier on October 1961 was missing (Tristan 1991). We will never be able to know the exact number of dead, but witnesses talk of more than 300 Algerians who disappeared on that occasion, some of whom were probably deported to Algeria. An estimate of around 200 dead seems plausible (Einaudi 1991). The story of the memory of that event is the story of a struggle against a silence intended to impose oblivion, an imposition which only partially succeeded. Moreover, “silence was the refuge of many Algerian workers,” observes Jean-Luc Einaudi, who reports a moving encounter in Algeria with one of them. The man still bore the consequences of that night, his right eye having been blinded by a policeman who had

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fired at his head. The night after the interview, the man could not sleep and the following day he refused to go on, as he told Einaudi: “I do not want to remember” (Einaudi 1991: 292). Forced silence and oblivion had reached the very protagonists of the events. If such public, and private, “amnesia” is imposed by the authorities, it takes place with the complicity of those who are not in a position of power, but accept and prolong an imposed silence. Such complicity is evident in Marilyn Young’s (1997) research on a silence of a similar nature, the Korean War in the United States. The Korean War, which took place between 1950 and 1953, was as brutal as the Vietnam war, its casualties almost as high (and occurring over a shorter time), but it did not lead to the kind of re-examination of national identity and purpose. Young’s project is to understand an absence in history and public opinion. It includes an analysis of the role of some intellectuals of the period in a Partisan Review symposium held in 1952. These intellectuals did not want to take into account the unpopularity of the war, and preferred not to mar the American triumph in World War 2. The Korean War reappeared in public remembering only after the Vietnam experience – as if memory were a living texture where one wound has repercussions on the whole and where associations with latent aspects are often possible at a later time – and the first oral history of the Korean War dates from 1988. This war has rightly been defined “the forgotten war.” It is only recently that the Associated Press disclosed the massacres of hundreds of civilians perpetrated by American troops at No Gun Ri between 23 and 26 July 1950. This disclosure was the result of research undertaken by one Korean and two American journalists (Kauffmann 1999). Coming back to Europe again, this continent has hosted a wide range of examples of imposed silence, big and small, involving individuals as well as communities. There are almost too many examples to choose from. One could refer to the silence imposed in 1988 by British television on “Mother Ireland,” a film exploring how Ireland was portrayed as a woman in Irish culture and how this image developed as a nationalist motif (Davin 1991; Crilly 1991). Or one could refer to the silence that the Catholic hierarchy tried to impose on don Raimondo Viale, a courageous priest from a Piedmontese village in the province of Cuneo (Borgo San Dalmazzo), who during the war tried to save many Jews and assisted partisans – and even Fascist spies – condemned to death by opponents in the struggle between NaziFascists and anti-Fascists. Don Viale was repeatedly reproached and

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threatened by the Catholic authorities, and in 1970 suspended “a divinis,” that is, from the right to celebrate the mass and to preach from the pulpit. Ten years later – in 1980 – he was declared one of the “Righteous” of Israel. His biographer Nuto Revelli reminded his readers that archives concerning don Viale located at the Curia of Cuneo and at the Vatican were still unavailable, and that even in a long interview he conducted with the priest, don Viale seemed to have internalized the imposed silence (N. Revelli 1998: 106). Other silences have also been broken, as in the work by Sandro Portelli on the combination of silence and memory surrounding the Nazi massacre of civilians at the Fosse Ardeatine in Rome (Portelli 1999: 13). I have chosen two examples of silences that were broken in contrasting ways. They were selected on the premise that the most interesting cases are those where silence is not only imposed by an authoritarian regime, but is also accepted or even chosen by a whole community or society. In this latter situation, however, it is possible that some individuals have tried to break the collective silence by reacting in interstitial social spaces. This has been the case in recent German poetry. After 1968, the literary movement known as Neue Subjektivität – established in the context of a revived interest in psychoanalysis – forged a link between individual and collective memory, between the Nazi past and the present, inviting a challenge to the silence that existed in regard to the question of responsibility for the past. In the course of this individual rediscovery of the collective tragic past, women’s voices became more present in German poetry. While this was going on in West Germany, in the Eastern part of the country literature and poetry were able to shatter silences in a different way, as their subjective tone allowed them to escape the bureaucratic impositions of the East German regime’s censorship on other genres. In the East German case, there was a difference in the type of imposed “oblivion”: that silence was not literal, rather it comprised an institutionalized memory of the victims of Nazism, collected together under the general rubric of ‘antifascism’ (Chiarloni 2000). A more recent German example of the role of poetry in the game between memory and oblivion is Heiner Müller’s Seife in Bayreuth, a poem composed in 1992, after the annual neofascist demonstration in honour of Rudolf Hess, Minister of the Third Reich and supreme commander of the SS. Müller’s poem starts significantly with a memory of his childhood, when, having heard adults say that in concentration camps the Jews were turned into soap, he started hating the smell of

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soap. Now the poet says he lives in a clean and tidy flat, with a shower “MADE IN GERMANY” which could wake up the dead, but when he opens the window he can smell soap, that reminds him of Auschwitz. “Jetzt weiss ich, sage ich gegen die Stille”: “now I know – continues the poem – now I say against the silence/what it means to live in hell and/not to be a dead or a killer. Here/AUSCHWITZ was born in the smell of soap” (Müller 2000: 379). The fact that the poem was composed after the fall of the Berlin Wall implies that reunification has made the problem of the memory of the German past even more acute. What seems very relevant to me in this example is the crucial connection established by these poets between individual and collective memory, between the public and private spheres. The name of the German literary movement Neue Subjektivität reminds us that there are not only objects in forgetting and remembering, there are always subjects in these processes, subjects whose attitudes are crucial to the way in which silence can be broken. Certain forms of oblivion point to a lack of identity or to an effort to cover up some of its components. This is relevant also for the second example I have chosen, concerning the emergence of memory from a silence imposed by totalitarian regimes. Maria Ferretti (1993) has convincingly described in a chapter on Russian society’s confrontation with its past, the drama of memory in breaking that silence – which was never complete, thanks to the efforts of dissidents. Reflection on the memory of the Soviet Union and its legacy of repression, camps, extermination, an experience which lasted much longer than those of fascism and nazism, reminds us of the comparative “silence” that exists in regard to this same memory in Western Europe. While all sorts of cultural and historical forms of remembrance evoke the crimes of Nazi-Fascism, an equivalent evocation of the crimes of Stalinism is only beginning. This is probably due not only to the greater complexity of Stalinist oppression in historical terms, but also to the insufficient historical re-examination on the part of the Western European left of its own past. This relative “silence” can be confronted with new forms of silence in Eastern Europe, for example that studied by Dina Khapaeva (1995), who interviewed young Russian westernophiles (occidentalophiles) after 1990 – businessmen, journalists, professionals, all younger than thirty-five and all supporters of Western-oriented development for Russia. In their interviews and self-presentations, which idealize the West, not only is the memory of Stalinism not problematized, but

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that past is not presented as part of their identity at all; it is treated as a stranger’s past, the past of another people, while the present is imprecise, transitional and unforeseeable, and the future seems to be largely foreseeable thanks to the projections of the subject’s hopes. The present ends up being excluded from the horizon of temporality, an exclusion which is essential in order to save the ideal image of the West (some of the interviewees are convinced that everything in the West goes well for ordinary people), fixed in its perfection, incorruptible by the passing of time. The cost of this operation is the loss of the role of the intelligentsia through the loss of its own consciousness. As the Spanish political scientist Perez-Diaz (1999a) has noticed, there is a close link between the formation of a democratic public sphere and the memories of the individuals who give life to it: if the memory of the past is trivialized, this leads to “individus manqués,” forgetful individuals who can easily become prey to totalitarian movements. Silence as Full of Memory Another Spanish scholar, Paloma Aguilar (1996), has taken an opposite view of silence. She has drawn an interesting contrast between what she calls the “patologìa amnésica de los espanoles,” the pathological amnesia of the Spanish, in regard to the civil war in the political public sphere on the one hand, and the numbers of films and books written about the same topic, on the other. She refers to the period of transition after Francoism (after 1975, and especially 1978), when it became essential in Spanish political life to forget the rancour from the past in order to reach a consolidation of democracy. A collective traumatic memory, which had been transmitted from generation to generation (generational transmission was crucial, since more than seventy per cent of the population had not lived through the war), had to be put aside in a period of great risk and uncertainty. Although there was a tendency to activate that memory on the basis of alleged similarities between the 1930s and the 1970s, the use of silence prevailed in politics – and it was sometimes linked with an almost superstitious fear of repeating the same mistakes. According to Aguilar, this silence implied certain frustrations, but it helped to establish a democratic dialectic, especially in the sense of avoiding the use of the past as a weapon in political struggle. In order to understand the full sense of this silence, we need to remember that the time of the dictatorship in Spain has been called “a time of silence,” when

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“an imposed quarantine or silencing signified the continuation of [the civil] war as a work of cultural destruction” (Richards 1998: 2). Therefore the use of silence after Franco’s death seems acceptable in politics only if it is considered in connection with other levels of public life, such as the cultural and the academic, where, after 1978, the war was a privileged theme. Aguilar’s interpretation calls to mind Nicole Loraux’s analysis of civic memory in ancient Athens – during the fifth century BCE – in response to the community’s need to reunify by prohibiting the political use of a conflictual past. A negative command, “mé mnesikakeìn,” prohibited the memory of suffering as a means of putting politics first, a civil version of forgetting evil. Loraux also recalls the end of the Odyssey, when Ithaca is plunged into a civil war by the news of the death of the pretenders, but Athena stops Ulysses from fighting and the gods make an appeal to forget not only the misdeeds of others but especially one’s own rage and desire for revenge. The non-forgetting is all-powerful because it has no limits, and in particular not the limits linked with the interiority of a subject. In the Athens of the fifth century it was politics that in the end decided the use and limits of memory (Loraux 1988: 39, 44). These examples remind us of communities where there is still a perception of a common good to be saved or restored, where corruption has not reached the roots of the social and political pact, and where solidarity can be (re)established between the individual and the collective. In such a situation silence has the function of making it possible to distance oneself from the past – not necessarily to forget – in certain areas of public life, while in others the remembering goes on. It is difficult for us to accept such presuppositions, and I am personally inclined to Yerushalmi’s suspicion of public silences. However, we must not rule out the possibility that a charged silence in the public sphere can have a positive meaning. It is easier to think of the positive meaning of silence in the personal and private spheres when it is illuminated by literature and poetry. The difficult terrain between individual memories and collective remembrance has been explored in the light of cognitive psychology, social psychology and patterns of action, the terrain shared by Homo psychologicus, Homo sociologicus and Homo agens (Winter and Sivan 1999). I would like to add to the territory indicated by these figures the area inhabited by Homo poeticus, understanding this term in its original meaning, comprising both vir and foemina.

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The Italian writer and poet Cristina Campo has written some fine words about silence in her recollections of childhood in the interwar period: “Sulla tavola bianca e rotonda, nelle veglie estive all’aperto in giardino, il silenzio rivestiva il suo reale valore, che è quello di accumulare potenze” (Campo 1998: 191) (on the white round table, in the summer awakenings outside in the garden, silence had its real value, which is the accumulation of its powers). This sentence, which is uttered in the tone of memory, puts us on the right track for finding the positive aspects of silence in its relationships with memory: it takes strength, sometimes, to maintain silence, a silence which allows for meditation and reflection, for the absorption of meaning from the environment and its transmission to the future. In this context, I have been thinking of memories transmitted without words, such as those incorporated in gestures, images and objects: the transmission of knowledge about cooking (on the basis of imitation, not recipes), the memories of the body – of both traumas and pleasures – the memory of laughter, the memory conveyed through family names given to the newborn. One can think of photographs, portraits, letters, or of the custom of keeping a minute of silence in order to commemorate somebody who died, or of the silences in a psychoanalytic session. All these are examples of silences that are connected with remembering, not with forgetting. Finally, silence is essential in order to remind us that memory is not only words, it is the “embodied memory” enlived by intersubjectivity (Boyarin 1994). Assia Djebar, the Algerian writer, has composed a poem about the choice she made over the period 1957 to 1997 to express herself in French while, at the same time, defending Algerian culture. The poem is included in a book with the subtitle: “A Reflection at the Margins of Francophony,” which gives various replies to the question: “Why do you write in French?” Djebar starts by reminding us that she has more than two languages: she has Berber, Arab, French, and the language of the body, “un corps de femme qui se meut au-dehors,” a woman’s body which moves outside, and which is not only a single woman’s body but is seen as part of a chain of women’s bodies. The author goes through the memories of her mother, her grandmother, her great grandmother, through a memory populated by women, a “traversée en mémoire feminine.” The poem, called “Entre corps et voix” mentions “ce tangage des langages/dans le mouvement d’une mémoire à creuser/à ensoleiller,” this oscillation between languages, in the movement of a memory to be excavated and illuminated, a memory at the

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border between body and voice. Memory is a woman’s voice for this poet, but it is also “mémoire de l’eau, plutôt mémoire des sables, silence…” (Djebar 1999: 152, 158), memory of water, rather memory of sand, and silence. This is another way of saying that there can be memory within silence and memory through silence. But it is also a way of reminding us that memory is gendered and women’s memories and silences recur through the specificities of their experiences in different times and spaces (Berger Gluck and Patai 1991; Menon-Bhasin 1998). If “memory is more than words,” music has a great deal to teach us about silence. The composer Luigi Nono has called attention to the “listening of silence” which can have a social and political meaning, that is listening to others: “Le silence. Il est très difficile à écouter. Très difficile d’écouter, dans le silence, les autres. Au lieu d’écouter le silence, au lieu d’écouter les autres, on espère écouter encore une fois soi-meme » (Nono 1993: 256) (it is very difficult to listen, in silence, to others. Rather than listening to silence, rather than listening to others, we hope to listen once more to ourselves). Silence may contain an appeal to go beyond ourselves, towards the present as well as the past. It may signal a suspension of the daily noise, of the customary sounds, and express attention, in the sense of approval or disapproval. George Steiner has written about silence that it is “the only decent response to the violations of human speech” perpetrated by fascisms and Stalinism (Steiner 1985: 15). Among various types of silence (the final logic of poetic speech, the ineffability of the mystics, the exaltation of action), he includes the defiance to “a time like the present,” which he dates from World War 1 (Steiner 1985: 69). We can understand these words on the basis of our experience of silence as oral historians and interviewers, when we listen to our interviewees. In a larger sense we can take them as inviting us to listen to those cultures and peoples that have not yet been listened to enough. Women’s studies, for instance, was born out of such an inspiration, as was subaltern studies, to take two important examples. In both cases, the endeavour implied silencing the traditional hierarchies of historical knowledge and its objects in order to open up new ways of listening to voices which had not previously been heard. We can also understand Nono’s and Steiner’s reminders of the importance of silence as warnings never to use or analyse memory without situating it in a context of silence. This has different meanings in various fields. For the work of cultural historians it means recogniz-

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ing the fragmented nature of memory, its complexity and the necessary subtlety of the required approach. One should work as if memory were more than words and, at the same time, concentrate on the textual analysis of whatever traces of memory we have: Not all silences are equal and they cannot be addressed in the same manner; any historical narrative [is] a bundle of silences, the result of a unique process, and the operation required to deconstruct these silences will vary accordingly… Historians can decide, according to their sources and objects of research, whether to reveal a silence, or make a silence speak for itself, or to unravel silence as a mask of conflicts (Trouillot 1995: 27–28).

Taking silence into account means watching out for the links between forms of power and forms of silence. It finally means looking more deeply into those aspects of memory that have to do with oblivion. My own experience of using silences for history suggests that many of the silences we observe are relative and we must understand them as such: for instance, there may be a silence of existing historiography confronted with workers’ culture, or a silence of women’s studies in comparison to a women’s oral tradition, or a silence of the mass media in comparison with poetry. It is constitutive of the definition of a silence to find out its limits, its context, and its reference: in respect to whom and to what is it a silence? Who can define it as such? At the same time, there is the frustration resulting from cancellations of memory, large and small, which all our efforts in research and public life do not seem capable of resisting. Very often, especially when researching those who lost and were repressed, we find people, ideas, books that have completely disappeared, and having vanished leave only scattered and tantalizing traces, in spite of all our efforts. Commiato This itinerary has led us from ancient Greece and ancient Israel to Hiroshima, then on the paths that the Gypsies followed through Europe and to the camps where the effort to exterminate them and the Jews took place; to Paris in early 1960, and to Korea and the USA in the 1950s. Then it led to Ireland, Italy, Russia, Germany and Spain in the last three decades, with references to memories of the previous half century. The itinerary included mentions of Algeria, and allusions to Latin America. The route travelled back and forth between

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various European countries and to a lesser extent between Europe and other parts of the world, while the focus remained on the twentieth century and the European continent. I am not arguing for the specificity of European memory (Namer 1993), a topic which requires much more discussion and thought. If one were to pursue this idea, one would have to take into consideration at least two research directions: the impact, on the contemporary phenomenon of memory proliferation/cancellation, of the accelerated processes of change in the field of communication; the relationships between memory and guilt in respect to colonialism, persecutions and massacres. For the moment, I am just indicating some links and connections. The unsystematic nature of the itinerary reflects the unsystematic nature of memory; in other words, I have followed my own associations, which are grounded in a common patrimony of studies and knowledge. While this itinerary is partially linked to my personal idiosyncrasies and partially due to randomness, the choice of places and times is based on considerations that I believe are shared with others, such as a concern with Europe and its memory, and their place in a world context. Many similar itineraries could be drawn which would be more or less complete than mine, but they would probably go through similar points, because the dialectic between memory and silence in this continent cannot avoid colonialism, totalitarianisms and wars, and their sites within and outside Europe. This dialectic includes also the private, the bodies and minds of individuals in times of peace. I think we could all agree on this: silences, oblivions and memories are aspects of the same process, and the art of memory cannot but be also an art of forgetting, through the mediation of silence and the alternation of silence and sound. However, what are the implications of this sentence for the continuous set of transformations that is memory? I believe that we should turn our attention and our discussions in the following directions: the creation of a new history or a new anthropology or whatever discipline we are concerned with, that takes into account the dialectics of memory, silence and oblivion; the search for the limits of our disciplines in these fields, accepting the definition given by Schachter (1996) of “memory’s fragile power,” where power as well as fragility, compelling force as well as failures, are simultaneously present. Examples of the first direction can be found not only in those works which intend to be “histories of forgetting” (Klein 1997), but in those

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histories that set memories in the context of confrontation and oblivion. For instance, Shahid Amin (1995) has analysed the history and memory of the violent police/peasant confrontations that took place on 4 February 1922 at Chauri Chaura, a small market town in north India, where Gandhian peasants resorted to violence. Amin has “arranged and rearranged” local remembrances against the authorized texts of court records and other official sources, challenging both the version of colonialist history and the stereotyped incorporation of the event within the narrative of the Great Freedom Struggle in post-colonial history. His exemplary work shows the multiplicity of memory and the possibility of its use for a new type of history, where “incongruence with known facts […is] not construed as a lapse of memory, but rather as a necessary element in the stitching together of the story” (Amin 1995: 198). For an example of the second direction, I look outside the realm of history, to psychoanalysis. In Bion’s A Memoir of the Future (1975–81), the future enters the theatre of the mind and has something to do with memory. On this stage, dialogues go on all the time between various characters, and one of them is called Memory. In one scene, Memory is woken up by a conversation between two girls, Alice and Rosemary, and reminds them that some of the things of the past that they were mentioning (black stockings and “practical” shoes) come from the unconscious. It is the mention of those things past that has woken Memory up, but when she (I take Memory to be feminine) starts speaking, the two girls fall asleep. Memory then declares that she has been born in sin, and proceeds to talk about the past with Roland, who is just waking up. These alternations of sleep and waking give the sense of various levels of representation in this scene. But we have been told that the land of sleep, of the unconscious, of the forgotten can be identified with either the past or the future. Memory is therefore situated between the two. A clue to this suggestive interpretation can be found in an earlier text, the 1967 “Notes on Memory and Desire” (Bion 1967); here Bion distinguishes sharply between, on the one hand, memory and desire – which have to do respectively with the past, “what is supposed to have happened,” and the future, “what has not happened” – and, on the other hand, something he calls evolution, which has to do with psychoanalysis and takes place eminently in the present (every session attended by the psychoanalyst must have no history and no future). Memory is the past tense of desire, anticipation its future tense, and both are obstacles to the present-oriented

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attitude which is the only one allowing the unknown to emerge in any session. “Evolution” has a superficial resemblance to memory, which must be watchfully avoided by the psychoanalyst. As historians or anthropologists or cultural critics, we deal with this memory and with the experience that is at its basis, although we are excluded from coming across the “unknown.” Keeping in mind these limits is essential for those who want to deal with memory, oblivion, and silence.

Chapter 2 BECOMING A SUBJECT IN THE TIME OF THE DEATH OF THE SUBJECT

Old and New Forms of Subjectivity This chapter is an itinerary through the work on subjectivity produced by feminist and other scholars in the last thirty years that sets this production into a longue durée perspective. One of the main questions this chapter tackles is: what is the added value of feminism to the ways of understanding and conceptualizing subjectivity? The implication of the title, which aims at expressing one of the many paradoxes of this history, is that the long history of the subjectivization of women has become particularly urgent and dramatic in the fields of knowledge and politics in the last few decades. In presenting this story, I will follow a thread of thought that can be expressed in classic metaphorical forms: sometimes stretched like a line between two poles (or a line for drying laundry), sometimes creeping on the ground like Ariadne’s thread in the labyrinth of present and past subjectivity, and sometimes tied up in knots. These are metaphors that have been used since the archaic past to indicate the human attitude of search, and very often with implicit or explicit reference to women and their cultures. After these preliminary remarks, I can state a principle that I consider a pivot of my position and a foundation of all my work. Women have always been in some way the subjects of their own lives. Subjectivity has meant for them not only agency or strategy, but also the internal kinds of movement that accompany action and planning, that is, the hopes, fears, imagining, and expectancy connected with these. However, the nature, limits, and awareness of subjectivity

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have changed enormously over time and in different spaces. History and anthropology have shown that women of the past, like women in contemporary societies and cultures, had and have ways of negotiating various forms of autonomy. However, their autonomy is never to be understood as absolute liberty, but as a means of asserting individual needs and desires in the context of existing conditions – sometimes very harsh ones – and eventually against such conditions. Thus some women have managed to change/innovate/challenge what others were resigned to accept as a given destiny. One can think of many examples from women’s history and anthropology: for example, the women who decided to control their fertility in totalitarian regimes which had made this act a crime against the race; or the women travellers who in the Middle Ages decided to travel for pilgrimage, for work, for escape, a journey undertaken as “the only movement which was possible to modify their lives” (Corsi 1999: 20); the widows and mothers of seventeenth-century Tuscany who either deconstructed norms on the guardianship of their children or negotiated new ones (Calvi 1990) on the basis of the experience of maternity/motherhood as central for the formation of subjectivity (Palazzi and Scattigno 1990); or a woman like Nisa, who belongs to the gatherers-hunters !Kung San group in Africa, and whose life-story collected by Marjorie Shostak (1983) displays subjectivity in all its manifestations, from love to dreams to conflict. These preliminary remarks are meant to indicate that subjectivity was not invented by feminism, although the word has been used increasingly in the last forty years, a time coeval with second-wave feminism. And it is very important that feminism is always related to the traditions and struggles developed by women in various parts of the world and in various periods in a mode that establishes the continuities and discontinuities of that history. By saying that women have always been in some way the subjects of their lives, I do not intend by any means to attribute to the women of places and times different from ours the types of subjectivity that are familiar to us today. On the contrary, we must make the concept “subjectivity” as flexible and wide as possible in order to accommodate all the possible devices and inventions of the subject. We must be ready to recognize new forms of subjectivity when we discover how women have been able to cope with difficulties and advantages in their various situations. This is one of the reasons why women’s studies and gender’s studies are of crucial importance. They are a means, mediated by the scholarly disciplines

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(and in turn modified and innovated by them), of contacting and coming to know other women distant from us in the past and the present. Already we have encountered two meanings of subjectivity. While the first insists on the capacity to imagine, think and decide one’s life, the second refers to the relationship between subjects in the field of knowledge. In fact, the specificity of the age we are living through is determined by two concomitant processes: the great changes in the cultural, social and economic lives of women, on the one hand, and the “death of the subject” in scientific fields, on the other. The first process is often called emancipation, which for many women includes working also outside of the house and the domestic environment, being able to use contraceptives, achieving high levels of education, having access to various kinds of relationships, wearing whatever they like. All these forms of emancipation can become spaces for the expression of subjectivity. However, it should be evident to us that all forms of emancipation – and of autonomy – also involve new obligations and new chains, and do not by themselves abolish patriarchal stereotypes of women and the feminine. The changes connected with emancipation have often been assigned to modernity. In fact, in the past, the whole movement of subjectivization has been assigned to modernization. But let us be careful not to collapse the two processes into one, nor to ignore the chains imposed by modernity. We know that the processes of Western modernity have fostered a certain type of subject, while many others can exist: “the modern reformulation of reason as subjectivity…influences our ‘post-modern’ condition as well” (Cascardi 1992: 14). It should therefore be clear that the forms of emancipation which in some areas of the world are closely connected with the effects of Western modernity such as the dissolution of close communities and the development of new forms of individualism, can take place under conditions where modernity has different features and coexists with new or traditional forms of community (based on blood, on religion, on marriage). In these societies women may be emancipated from the point of view of work and yet subordinated when it comes to education, fertility, or dress. In any case, today a mixture of subordination and autonomy accompanies all forms of emancipation and all assumptions about subjectivity (suffice it to recall the struggle over the regulation of women’s fertility and developments in biotechnology in the Western world). The second process, the so-called death of the subject, refers in the first place to philosophy and theory, and has had a decisive influence

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on many disciplines. In Western philosophy, the unitary subject has been criticized by Nietzsche, Marx and Freud, a critique continued among others by Derrida and Foucault. The subject has been reformulated as a fiction of grammar, a historical product, a construct against the unconscious. This criticism has been taken charge of by feminists. Some have rejoiced over the death of the subject as the end of an oppression. For instance, Ute Guzzoni has written (in a book with the slightly perplexing but telling title Deconstructive Subjectivities) in reply to the question: “Do we still want to be subjects?” Her answer is No: “as subjects Europeans discovered and colonized foreign continents, Christians converted other people, men disciplined their wives, and husbands and wives disciplined their children. As subjects individuals have suppressed their own inclinations and needs” (Guzzoni 1996: 216). More convincingly, Judith Butler (1992) has indicated that the critique of the subject is not a negation or a repudiation of the subject, but, rather, a way of interrogating its construction as a pre-given or foundationalist premise, and has reminded us of the positive aspect of its deconstruction, which is to open up a term, like the subject, to a reusage or redeployment that previously had not been authorized. Of course, we have to gain from the (partial) death of the subject, or better from the disappearance of the old subject and the resurgence of another. We can accept the metaphor used as a title for a feminist conference organized in Italy, in Verona, by the cultural association “Il filo di Arianna” (Ariadne’s Thread) in 1993, in a discussion on the question of subjectivity between Rosi Braidotti and Adriana Cavarero: “Il tramonto del soggetto e l’alba della soggettività femminile” (the sunset of the subject and the dawn of feminine/female subjectivity). To use the terms proposed by that conference, we have everything to gain in giving up a conception of the subject, that ignored the body, denied differences, and privileged consciousness. However, the re-definition of what it means to be a subject is no simple task, and not only in theoretical terms; things are not at all simpler at the pragmatic and political levels, as the present difficulty of envisaging forms of action and expression for collective subjects indicates. Therefore we can say that today becoming a subject implies a particular complexity. “Becoming a subject” is an expression which implicitly refers to various levels of subjectivity. Not a hierarchy, but a range, a gamut of possibilities from the gleam of subjectivity which is possible even in conditions of extreme oppression (cultural or spiritual as well as material), to the display of potentiality which we can

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imagine when we consider the prospect of being a subject of one’s own life in a full sense, “un sujet à part entière” – although we know that the subject always has a void in itself. The subject is always in the process of being constituted, it is by definition incomplete or impossible – a lack arising from the gap between the real and the imaginary in the mirror phase and then from the gap between the imaginary and the symbolic of the social – according to Lacan the subject only ever will have been (Edkins, Persram and Pin-Fat 1999). For my perspective, or my positionality, to use Gayatry Spivak’s term, this means that subjectivity is always a historical process, a series of changes and not a static condition, a development although not necessarily a linear evolution. It is a narrative, although not necessarily of a single story. Becoming a subject cannot be separated from developing/inventing a capacity for inter-subjectivity. It is indeed one of the major results of recent feminist research that subjectivity cannot be conceptualized without intersubjectivity. This link has been expressed in a number of ways in the existing literature. For instance Wendy Hollway, in her Subjectivity and Method in Psychology (1989), explores the relationships between “gender, meaning and science,” and proposes a concept of subjectivity which “is not only dynamic, non-unitary and embraces the extra-rational, but is discoverable only within inter-subjective relations” (1989: 86). Some years earlier in Changing the Subject, she and her co-editors had written that they chose to “use ‘subjectivity’ to refer to individuality and self-awareness but understood in this usage that subjects are dynamic and multiple,” and criticized the dominance of “the unitary rational subject” (Henriques et al. 1984: 3). It was a logical consequence that this critique had to include intersubjectivity in order to make its final point. The enlargement and enrichment of the previous definition was achieved on the basis of Hollway’s analysis (using the work of Melanie Klein) of some actual case studies of her patients’ intersubjective relations. Hollway was inspired by the fact that Klein privileges the defence mechanisms that work between people, rather than within a person as in Lacan and Foucault, so that intersubjective relations become the location for the negotiation of meaning and its effects, through power, on subjectivity (Hollway 1989: 84). This approach allows her to “reclaim subjectivity” for those who were classed as the “others” of white middle-class men: black and Third World people, working-class people and women (Hollway 1989: 133). Let us retain and keep with us for a while the problematic connection between intersubjectivity and power – of course pointed to by

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Foucault, but particularly problematic for feminists. There are some very relevant efforts by feminists to get rid of this connection. I anticipate that I do not think we can do away with it, but it is crucial for me to discuss those who try. Kelly Oliver, in Subjectivity without Subjects – a suggestive title that exposes a potential outcome of the elimination of the issue of power – develops and complicates a model that she had already proposed in her previous book Womanizing Nietzsche. She takes up biologist Hélène Rouch’s remarks in an interview with Luce Irigaray on the fetus-placenta-maternal body as a system of exchange that prefigures and sets up inter-subjective exchanges (Oliver 1998: 149), and she traces the transition from placental systems to linguistic systems of intersubjective exchange. Oliver acknowledges that Hegel had given an account of subjectivity as relational and intersubjective in his analysis of the lordship-bondsman relationship; but she claims that, while in his model subjectivity required hostility, alienation, dominance, servitude, and a clash of wills in a deadly conflict for the sake of the recognition of the self from the other, the placental model offers exchange, communication, connection, negotiation, which are not driven by a need for recognition (Oliver 1998: 151). In this perspective, self and other are the illusory by-products of subjectivity; on the level of Oliver’s biological model, “there is no subject,” which allows one to “avoid many philosophical problems” (Oliver 1998: 150). Therefore she proposes a theory of subjectivity based on witnessing rather than recognition. While I disagree with this proposal, I am interested in her use of visual material and interpretation. Oliver uses Agnes Varda’s 1985 film Sans toi ni loi (English title: Vagabond), and analyses the ways in which the protagonist Mona relates to others, in order to show that relations to otherness can open up possibilities for imagining relations of difference: idealization, identification, objectification, abjection, compassion, and witnessing rather than recognition. Bearing witness to the other is an infinite process that never reaches its goal (Oliver 1998: 175) and is free from maintaining “the mastery of the subject over itself and the other,” creating an alternative to subject-object and master-slave relationships. I like the method, if not the hypothesis. So, I will digress in order to get something from the method, which I want to argue suggests a possible direction for further research on subjectivity.

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Visual Digression I see as very promising the study of subjectivity through images – in all possible media. For instance, the last documentary by Agnes Varda, La glaneuse et les glaneurs (Gleaning and Gleaners), 1999, is about people who collect what others have thrown away or abandoned: potatoes in the fields, fruit and vegetables in the market, objects of various sorts. I was amazed to see the powerful way in which subjectivity emerges from these images: not only through the self-portrait of Varda, who at the beginning of the film presents herself disguised as the figure in the famous painting by Millet, with a sheaf of wheat on her shoulder – she too is a gleaner – but also through her characters. They constitute for me the moving suggestion that in our society subjectivity or the movement towards becoming a subject can be found in the interstices, in the unseen, despised as much as a garbage site, where agency can take place on the basis of the shrewd practices of recuperation and recycling. There are many other examples of studies of subjectivity in images. I have in mind an essay by Jacqueline Maingard (1995) on questions of identity and subjectivity in South African documentary film and video; or the study by Kaja Silverman (1992) on male subjectivity in Fassbinder and others; and the connections established by Christopher Pye (1994) between the theatre, more generally spectacle, and the market. But I find particularly fascinating and suggestive the insights that come from women’s self-portraits. I am not thinking only of the great portraits by painters such as Sofonisba Anguissola and Artemisia Gentileschi, but also the recent and sometimes rather obscure works of art by women portraying themselves in a very significant and touching way. Not long ago I saw an exhibition in Paris, “Narcisse blessé – Autoportraits contemporains,” which presented art produced from 1970 to 2000, exactly the period of my interest here, including many works by women. In these, a first theme is the multiplication of the selfimage, which can be seen as a metaphor for the non-unitary subject. For instance, Mireille Loup (born 1969) and Tomoko Sawada (born 1977) have done collages of photographs of themselves (“each of my faces,” is the title used by the former), while Esther Ferrer (1937) presents a decomposition of her visage. But I was especially struck by the fact that these artists so often use the tools of the mask, the masquerade, the parody, the disguise. Rachel Laurent (1946) and Anne Ferrari (1962) represent themselves in ironical détournements of the image of

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the bull (there is a long history of the relationships between the bull and the woman in Western mythology), while Kamiko Yoshida (born 1963) has a series of photographs of herself disguised as an angel (“Autoportrait angélique”), and Yasumasa Morimura (1951) appears dressed as Scarlet O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, offering a self-portrait in the mode of Vivien Leigh set against a Japanese landscape (see catalogue Narcisse blessé). These examples vividly inform us of the capacity of the contemporary subject to exercise self-reflection and self-irony, to play with her multiplicity without denying the dramatic sides of masquerade and multiplication. Let me close this digression taking with me these two aspects, selfreflection and self-irony, and returning to my polemic about subjectivity and conflict, and about witnessing and recognition. I would like to rescue the visual method from its connection with “witnessing” – established by Oliver – and move it to a connection with “recognition,” dismissed by Oliver because of its link with the Hegelian figures of enslavement and conflict over power. In both witnessing and recognition, there is an important allusion to the eye, to the image. So, why do I prefer recognition? Not out of sheer love for Hegel. Actually, I am interested in its implications for subjectivity in two ways: because it allows self-reflection, and because it allows conflict. I refer to the way the concept of recognition is developed by Nancy Fraser (1999): the recognition of others occurs in a relationship of reciprocity with self-recognition – which poses at the centre the capacity to interact. For Fraser too, the subject exists only in relation to other subjects, but the possibility of mis-recognition is also constitutive of this relation – a social bond of mutual regard or disregard. Her subject includes a strong ethical dimension, a sense of rightness and dignity, of fairness and normativity. But it is not the ethical dimension that I mostly appreciate in Fraser’s work on recognition. I am aware that the ethical need of a subject can be satisfied in contrary ways. For Jane Flax (1993) a fully ethical position can be found only in the ability to tolerate and the will to encourage fluid and multiple forms of subjectivity; for Diana Tietjens Meyers (1994), who poses the problem of the moral subject trying to reconcile psychoanalytic feminism and moral philosophy, a “moral subjectivity” cannot be reached unless it embraces the dissident linguistic capacities attributed by Julia Kristeva to the decentered self, along with the empathic capacities that Nancy Chodorow and Jessica Benjamin discern in the social self (Meyers 1994: 16). Meyers uses Chodorow’s and Benjamin’s theories of the constitution of subjectiv-

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ity concerning parent-child relations at the earliest stages of development; for Meyers too, the moral subject of empathic thought is nonunitary, pluralistic and heterogeneous. What I find promising in Fraser’s work on this is her effort to reconcile the theory of recognition with the Freudian paradigm of a split subject, and to acknowledge the element of authority that is implicit in the definition of one’s identity. A primary element of recognition is that it can include self-reflection. I cannot envisage subjectivity and subjects without self-reflection, particularly in view of the claims regarding the non-unitary character of the subject. While it is precisely the split nature of the subject that allows self-reflection – how could a solid monolithic subject reflect on itself? – the debate about multiple identities has shown the risks implicit in a vision of the total dissemination of the subject. Self-reflection can act as criterion which avoids the complete fragmentation of the subject and its transformation into an unreflecting multiplicity, a danger antithetical to that posed by the unitary subject; self-reflection seems to me to find a path between the Scylla and Charybdis of too solid and too loose a subject. The element of self-irony is also crucial, not only because laughter is a royal way for the contact between conscious and unconscious, but especially because it may help in de-dramatizing the excessive narcissism that often accompanies the efforts of becoming a subject. Secondly, recognition can include a capacity for both solidarity and dissent. Reflecting upon my own experience of feminism I have become convinced that conflicts between women and the capacity for withstanding them with civility are a primary part of the process of becoming a full subject. While I am glad to exploit the model of the placenta, I don’t want to give up the representation of subjectivity as a battleground where exchange, co-operation and conflict between women take place. There is space here for the cohesion, solidarity, and love, which perhaps prevail during the phases of the genesis of subjectivity – before birth and in the first stages of life, for example. But there is also antagonism, struggle and opposition. My experience of feminism is that conflicts are a very important part of becoming a subject, and conflicts between women, and between feminists, are particularly painful. I think that we all have experienced the sense of annihilation that comes from not being “seen” by and not “seeing” the women with whom we deeply disagree. This is a negative legacy of the past: disagreement without confrontation, without respect, without mutual recognition of the right to be a full subject; it is just as

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negative as denying the other women recognition of their excellence and success. Accepting the conflict and yet being able to look into the eyes of the other woman – that is to say, fully recognizing her and myself as a subject is a major task in which we should be involved, as a means of fighting the forms of fundamentalism that exist within the women’s movements and within ourselves. I firmly believe that the exploration of the ways to achieve forms of civil or democratic conflict – that is, the capacity to dissent without denying the rights of the other – can be one of feminism’s major contributions to civil society, just as the experience of raising consciousness can be a contribution to the notion and practice of direct democracy. I also hope that in this way feminism will contribute to the creation of a space which I have at heart, a new Europe including its Western and Eastern parts, open to everyone who is ready to engage in the common effort of exchange (see Part II). Let us go back now to the connection between subjectivity, on the one hand, and power and conflict on the other. I found useful for this line of thought a collection of essays on Sovereignty and Subjectivity (Edkins, Persram, Pin-Fat 1999: 172). The collection is based on the acknowledgement that modern politics (particularly in its international dimension) cannot avoid tensions between claims about sovereignty and claims about subjectivity: subjectivity comes into being by virtue of the promise of sovereignty for the subject within the social order, which also claims sovereignty for itself – thus generating an unavoidable perpetual conflict. The collection includes studies on the Bosnian conflict, Haiti, Argentina, and one by Eilis Haughey, on “Gypsy Identity and Political Theory,” which is relevant to the link between subjectivity and sovereignty. Gypsy groups began their sweep across Europe at the beginning of the fifteenth century, before states ever existed; according to Haughey they traditionally claimed no unifying group identity, referring to themselves simply as “the people,” and omitting any mention of race, ethnicity, territory, or religion while dismissing any concept of national interest (their experience is reminiscent of that of the Aboriginal tribes of Australia and Canada, who were forced to deny or abandon distinguishing features of their cultures, not only the land, but their lifestyle and, worse than everything else, to suffer “a standardized version” of their culture). The case of the Gypsy shows that the connection typical of the nation-state, between the sovereign subject and territoriality, can simply be abandoned in theoretical terms; Haughey’s inference is that we can imag-

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ine an ethico-political project showing how particular forms of subjectivity produce and legitimize the political arrangements of sovereignty. These cannot be considered any longer as the central organizing principle of international relations theory, but must be viewed alongside the process of subject formation; any change in the two should be envisaged together. Although it is only without a sovereign that a rethinking of the political is possible, subjectivity continues to operate as a strategy of power and identity. In other words, I do not think that we can expel power and conflict from subjectivity and I believe that this term always includes the two elements of sovereignty and of subordination. After this position statement, achieved through a confrontation with other authors, particularly feminists, and by following the thread through its tensions as well as its loose trajectory, I intend to explore subjectivity through the knots, that is, the disagreements and oppositions which have characterized the history of feminism and feminist studies. The term “knot” is of course very ancient, but it has been used in our time by various writers, such as Lacan and Laing, to indicate apparently unsolvable questions and dilemmas. Adriano Sofri (1995) relates the metaphor to the relationship masculine/feminine, and to the different ways men and women have of treating knots. I have chosen three knots, corresponding to an intertwining of different temporal dimensions, to illustrate the historical debates on subjectivity. First Knot When I became a feminist, in 1970, “subjectivity” had mainly an oppositional meaning. It meant being alternative, different, engaged in changing oneself and the world. It was used in this sense – at least in some Western European countries – not only by feminists but also by other movements such as students and workers. If there is a specificity to the Italian movement, it occurs as the insistence on difference – often much too much – and on the relationship between difference and equality. Since the early 1970s difference has meant not only that between women and men, but also the differences among women as well as the whole field of women’s subjectivity. Today, after thirty years of feminist research, the oppositional value of subjectivity can no longer be exclusive. Feminists have explored the right and role of non-oppositional subjectivity, that is, those forms of women’s subjec-

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tivity which are generated within the patriarchal domain and sometimes even produced by men or under their jurisdiction. This debate is linked with the emergence of women’s cultural studies. Terry Lovell, in Feminist Cultural Studies (1995), has written of “typical subjectivities” and includes in her collection many examples of these, such as the “seductive power of feminine subjectivity” inscribed in the performance of a dance in which, however, “at the same time the detachment which may be achieved even from the self is performed”. This double nature of subjectivity had been explored too in the path-breaking research of Modleski (1982) and Radway (1984), who show that mass market romance fiction can host women’s compensatory fantasies of power and revenge, and that women have fought to claim the time for romance reading as their own. Cultures of femininity can be seen as a refuge, as a jumping board, as an area of resistance, fostering the process of “becoming a subject” and oppositional subjectivity, because they have acted as alternative means through which women in patriarchal capitalist cultures have manoeuvred and negotiated to gain some space, some powers, however limited and curtailed, even if they are experienced by certain women – such as the younger ones – as deeply and only oppressive (Lovell 1995). They include what Lovell calls “female-policed worlds of socialisation” but also areas of authority for women. An example of such situations, which I like to quote here in homage to the women of the region Emilia-Romagna, where one of the most important Italian women’s centres has been created, is the figure of the “arzdora” in local tradition – these are strong women who used to govern the rural house in the agricultural sharecropping system. Their image has been relevant also as a model for feminists (Centro di Documentazione delle Donne, Il movimento delle donne in Emilia-Romagna 1990). It is important to recognize the strength but also the ambivalence of such forms of women’s authority within the patriarchal order. At the same time I would like to suggest that oppositional subjectivity – and this is a largely unexplored theme – can contain many elements of “typical” or traditional feminine cultures, such as cosmetics, dresses, coquette behaviour, knitting, cooking, sexual behaviour, all détournés within a project of liberation. Who can say to which extent some of the elements of oppositional subjectivity do not reproduce “women,” “girls,” “femininity” in the old sense of their subordination? The ambivalence of women’s authority can still reappear in some present situations: for instance, consider the role of women’s studies

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departments in institutional and scientific contexts. The doubleness of subjectivity makes untenable the simple dichotomies between a culture of femininity forged by men or patriarchy and a feminist or womanist culture created by women, between feminine ideology and feminine resistance, between “women’s culture” and commercial cultures of femininity. These distinctions are too easy, precisely because women as subjects intervene heavily on both sides. The acceptance of doubleness does not only smash any illusion that subjectivity can be immediately and completely alternative, tout court the basis for a thoroughly new world, but also any moralistic assumption that there are areas of subjectivity equivalent to a “false consciousness” of women, an internalized femininity inherited from patriarchy, to be expurgated and denounced. Let us leave the first knot keeping hold of the doubleness, the tension between the oppositional and the “typical” aspects of subjectivity. Second Knot Another major feminist debate concerns the location of subjectivity between experience and discourse. There have been various degrees of disagreement between feminists, for instance, between those who privilege the former term and those who focus on the latter. As an example one could use some debates of the second half of the 1980s– beginning of the 1990s, such as those among oral historians (Tilly 1985) – which I will, however, skip here – and the observations of Eleni Varikas on the controversy between Louise Tilly and Joan Scott on the connections and discrepancies between structuralism/post-structuralism, deconstruction and politics. Varikas was editor in 1988 with Christine Planté and Michèle Riot-Sarcey of a crucial publication, Les Cahiers du Grif’s special issue on the gender of history. Its intention to make women at the same time subjects of discourse and subjects of history was best expressed in the title of the issue “Femmes sujets de discours, femmes sujets de l’histoire.” Varikas (1991) began with the consideration that the political will to give women the status of historical subjects had grown in the 1970s and 1980s and played an important role in putting feminist historians in touch with women’s historical experiences. She shared Scott’s criticism of the presumption of a close (causal) connection between structural positions and social interests, between social interests and needs and forms of awareness (where we find subjectivity), but at the same

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time she shared Tilly’s skepticism as to the capacity of deconstruction to work out a vision of women as subjects of history. Varikas was concerned with the ways in which the question of historical determination, subjectivity and agency is worked out in the construction of the category of gender. Her criticism of Scott pointed at the impersonality of the discursive forces that construct the meaning of a culture, and at the “literal absence of the subject from Scott’s explanation of theories of the production of meaning” (Varikas 1991: 125), the actors of the conflict being “forces of signification,” “fixed oppositions,” “differentiation procedures” which remove from our view the people implicated. In the end Varikas posed some important questions: “What is the active role of actors at the bottom of the hierarchy in the procedures of differentiation that establish these [gender] hierarchies? Are they in a position to subvert or displace the discursive formations in which they are trapped, or are they doomed to bow to the ‘laws’ of these formations and just come out with a few declaratory variations?” (1991: 125). Up to this point, I agree with Varikas and would like, still today, to echo the questions she poses. But the complexity of those questions is not borne out by her conclusions. She argues that in Scott’s work, “even when women are the subjects of discourse” (we are talking of work up to 1990), “the construction of identities is looked at solely in connection with discursive formations and the cultural model impedes the grasp of some important aspects of the dynamic of social relations between the sexes” (Varikas 1991: 98). Varikas also agrees with Tilly’s criticism of Scott, especially her insistence that Scott casts doubt on both the existence of a real universe and the possibility of understanding or explaining it – and with Tilly’s passionate defence of the role of social history in respecting human initiative. For Varikas a historical practice that claims liberation as its starting point and political aim cannot accept the equivalence between the fact that “it is impossible to reconstitute as such the raw facts of slavery, witch-hunts or the extermination of Indian populations” and the claim that “these facts have the same status as those related in a short story or science fiction novel” (Varikas 1991: 128). I disagree with these last steps in Varikas’ argument, because they seem to me to return to a dichotomous approach. Even if “the construction of identities were [my italics] looked at solely in connection with discursive formation,” as Varikas accuses Scott of doing, I would indeed be satisfied and would see there “the dynamic of social rela-

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tions between the sexes.” In other words, I would be satisfied to find the traces of experience in discourse, while still asking the questions about the role of the subject Varikas asked. The problem here is the relationship between experience and narration. A convincing approach to this problem can be found in the theory of subjectivity proposed by Kim Worthington (1996) in Self as Narrative, according to which the construction of a subject’s sense of selfhood should be understood as a creative narrative process within a plural intersubjective communication (Kerby 1991), so that narratives can be envisaged as a primary embodiment of our understanding of the world and of ourselves. For Worthington, “the use of the term ‘narration’ is intended to denote the constitutive process by which human beings order their conceptions of self and of the world around them.” This author argues “for a conception of the human subject as agent of both personal and social change” (Worthington 1996: 13–15). Worthington analyses the contemporary fictions – that are also fictional autobiographies – by Banville, Coetzee and Atwood as “selfreflexively scrutin[izing] their own processes of production” (Worthington 1996: 17). Autobiography is a necessary passage in this itinerary through subjectivity. And women’s autobiographical practices are indispensable for understanding the relationship between experience and narration. While I agree that the link between these two is deep, originary and foundational, as Worthington says, I would like to add something more. Sidonie Smith (1993) contrasts traditional autobiography, where the subject was presumed to be universal (male, unique, unitary, unencumbered, escaping all forms of embodiment), with the new women’s autobiographies, where the self is no longer pre-linguistic and extra-linguistic, where subjectivity is embodied, where the excluded and the colourful “talk back.” Although this contrast is too schematic and rigid, it has a moment of truth. I recognize through it my own struggle to write about my personal experience in Autobiography of a Generation and my effort to give experience and subjectivity back to the subjects of my history writing. A point of reference for this complex question – narration of experience, experience of narration – can be found in the women’s movements’ insistence, implicitly and explicitly, on the need to maintain a tension between experience and narration. The movement based one of its major practices, consciousness-raising, on the narration of experience; this practice became crucial precisely as experience of narration. By reflecting upon this knot in the history of feminism (I believe

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that we have not yet drawn all the implications, both practical and theoretical, from our practices), I infer that it is better to neither undo nor loosen it, as I try to do for the first and third knots, and certainly not to cut it as if were a Gordian knot. I propose to keep it as a knot in one’s handkerchief, in order not to forget to find the link between experience and narration in our studies and in our politics. Third Knot A third knot involves what at first sight appears to be a grammatical question: does subjectivity have a plural and can it stand adjectives? The problem does not involve the word “subject,” which stands very well in both its plural and adjectival forms. Some of the adjectives invented by feminist theorists are very meaningful, and have added new value to the term subject: “nomadic” (Braidotti 1984), “excentric” (de Lauretis 1999), “elusive” (Jane Flax 1993). They express the great changes in subjectivity that I have been trying to describe by talking of the death and resurrection of the subject. But “subjectivity” is a different proposition. Let me offer some examples. I found references to “Victorian subjectivity” (Gagnier 1991), “lesbian subjectivity” (Associazione etc. 1998), “erotic subjectivity” (Kulick and Willson 1995), “racialised subjectivity” (Mama 1995), “middle-class subjectivity” (Kessinger 1993), “wartime subjectivities” (Summerfield 1998). All these phrases generate some uneasiness, because the multiplication of subjectivities recalls the stiffness of some identity politics; I am afraid that all those expressions reduce subjectivity drastically, depriving it of its duplicity because they privilege its empirical contents. An even greater uneasiness is stirred in me by the terms “female subjectivity” and “feminine subjectivity,” because I do not like to understand the gender divide as slicing subjectivity neatly and evenly like a cake. However, this question is not solved by pointing out, as I have already done, the concomitance of opposition and typicality. It requires that we pick up the relationship between the individual and the collective, a major theme for feminists in the second half of the twentieth century, and therefore the differences within the collective, based upon region, race, and age. This is what is involved if we want to pose the issues of solidarity between women (which at a certain point came to be expressed as “sisterhood,” a word which I do not like very much, as I prefer terms based on elective affinities rather than on biological ones). The “grammatical” question is indeed highly

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political. The problem is how to become a collective subject that is capable of acting and thinking and imagining together, of moving like a subject while exalting the individual and individual relationships. Among the many meanings of the relationship between collective and individual within the field of subjectivity and the context of feminism, the sore points are those that mark the differences between women where subjectivity meets region, race, and age. I will leave aside the regional differences, such as those between women of Eastern and Western Europe, although they are of the utmost interest to me. In regard to ethnicity and race, I just want to quote briefly an example in Avtar Brah’s volume on Cartographies of Diaspora (1996), a particularly useful example for understanding the question of differences among women. She presents the case of two black young women of Jamaican parentage living in Britain: one defines herself as Jamaican and/or Caribbean; the other, in spite of her similar background, asserts a black British identity; yet they both wish to repudiate the same process of exclusion. Brah observes that “the subjectivity of the two women is inscribed within different political practices and they occupy different subject positions.” Brah uses the concept of diaspora to signal processes of multi-locationality. These processes help us to understand the subject as constituted in the interstices of the articulation of “difference” and “commonalty,” therefore as inherently relational processes of identification and differentiation (Brah 1996: 247). Pursuing this line of thought, I prefer not to pluralize and adjectivize subjectivity, but rather to talk of different locations which women as groups and as individuals can occupy within the field of subjectivity. Let us now come to the area where subjectivity meets age. This question has been defined, at least in Italy, as the problem of the transmission or creation of a feminist tradition. Often the two are considered as more or less equivalent terms, although Franca Bimbi (1991) has established an interesting distinction between them: tradition implies passing on symbols (continuity) with a possible discontinuity (innovation) of contents and meanings (as in the mother/daughter relationship), while transmission – a more modern concept – has to do with successful socialization. Personally, I prefer the term “tradition,” because it seems more political and because it can include “betrayal” and radical change. Even if we accept this distinction, in feminism the two processes are linked together, which renders both very problematic. The question of transmission/tradition is posed in both fields of

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politics and knowledge and in the areas intertwining the two. Therefore it is linked with what has been called the emergence of feminine subjectivity in the field of knowledge, according to Marino and Cesaro (1993), who stress the specificity of the transmission of knowledge between women, and also with the problem of continuity in the political memory of feminism. Memory is a form of subjectivity, but feminism is well known for its constant combination of memory and amnesia. Having been an oral historian for many years, I have never completely abandoned the practice of reflecting on that expertise. Memory has helped me to introduce subjectivity into history, a constant focus of all my work. But now I am no longer satisfied with that approach, let me try to say why. I remember that in 1991 I published a book of essays on the history of feminism in Italy, largely based on oral history and inspired by the principle “restituire soggettività,” return subjectivity to women in history. In the introduction to that book, I posed the problem of the connection between “transmission and freedom,” that is sending a message which is neither authoritarian nor authoritative, but rather suspended, incomplete – the opposite of the message of the veteran or the survivor. Not: “you who have not lived that experience cannot understand – unless you listen to me,” but: “I cannot understand my experience unless you take it up and propose your meaning for it” (Passerini 1991a); my self-recognition is impossible unless you, the newborn of Hanna Arendt (1961), recognize at the same time yourself and me. But I added, following Roland Barthes (1990), that this suspended, unfinished message had to be given without an expectation, in order to avoid pre-determining any reply, as in a love which might well be unrequited. Solitude and responsibility, individuality and shared subjectivity were combined in this proposal, and memory was an essential tool. I don’t disagree with the words I wrote more than a decade ago. I still hope that at a certain point the innumerable practices of remembering by women – in written, oral and visual form – might constitute what I call an accumulated memory, and this is certainly happening in a general sense. I am still convinced that in many situations the possibilities that allow women to have their voices heard are crucial and can induce important changes. I continue to believe that the form of solitary transmission to which I was alluding has some meaning in the field of knowledge and teaching, where the reply to my words often comes years after they were uttered. However, in the field of

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politics and of creating a political tradition of feminism, I now seriously doubt that the individual memories of feminists can solve the problem. Indeed, I am now convinced that sometimes they make it worse, especially if they are delivered in a “veteran’s tone,” which uses experience as a means of exclusion; the “I” and the “we” are limited rather than enlarged by this generational appropriation of memory. Finally, knowing the amount of work that is necessary to transform memory into a historical source, I wonder how much, and in which direction, it is necessary to work in order to make memory a tool for founding a political tradition. The memories of feminists are a fascinating genre and an important tool only if we succeed in creating a context where they can be fully used. Since tradition cannot simply mean one-way communication – whether in the field of teaching or in politics – an urgent task is the creation of a context generated by and generating in its turn twoway communication, where the first to speak is not the older woman. This issue has some similarities to the encounter of subjectivity with the issue of race, a field where white middle-class middle-age feminists have accepted the need to be silent, at least for a while, in order to listen and to speak again only after having listened and questioned. Silence may be sometimes an affirmation of subjectivity, and this is true also for the exercise of listening, a lesson learned from oral history: a temporary silence can be filled with expectation (see I.1 in this volume). I believe that we must take as a point of departure the voices of the younger generation. A point of departure towards where? Towards the creation of a language. There is no substantial common language between generations of feminists, or it exists only partially, in areas where the interlocutors are often linked by personal relationships and where the personal has not openly become political. There are many hints about where we might begin in order to listen, to question and to discuss. One of these points of departure is the Introduction to the Next GENDERation Network by Esther Vonk and Diana Anders (2000). It begins by observing that there are a lot of young women today that do identify themselves as feminists and express the desire to be heard and seen, to take a subject position that is not voiced in the public debate. Continuities with the desires and intentions of previous generations are evident, but I am most interested in the discontinuities (and of course in the relationships between continuities and discontinuities). A discontinuity is the character of the “given,” the

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“inherited” which is expressed in one of the opening sentences of this “manifesto”: “we suddenly find ourselves in the position of ‘young feminists’ ” (a challenge to the media image of young aggressive “girls” in the shopping mall, but also a challenge to the connected image of the old feminist “complaining”). And I realize, through these words, that I could suddenly find myself too in the position of “old feminist.” My proposal is to accept these positions defined by age and yet at the same time recognize that I can jump in and out of such positions, play with these determinations without denying them, thanks to subjectivity. We, of all ages, need to transform this “given” – this “being born into,” “being cast,” “finding oneself” – into a full subjectivity. The potential for this transformation is already there, in germ, in the challenge to use the word “feminist” (which we can change at any time – for a long time our generation did not want to be called feminists). One crucial move would be the effort to create elements of a common language, or, even better, of interlocution: in what sense are the generations reciprocal interlocutors? (Pallavicini 2002). We should remember that among the younger interlocutors some men have proposed, implicitly or explicitly, a full interlocution (Bellassai 2000; Pustianaz 1999). Another move might be to understand better what “generation” means in relationship to feminism. There seems to be a need to deconstruct – politically, and not only sociologically – the term “next” or “younger generation,” first in the sense of disaggregating it, since it includes many types of young women, with many differences among them, including age. The debate within the network “30 something” – a network created in Italy by women of this age (Inchiesta: presentation by Anna Lisa Tota and Saveria Capecchi 1999) – included the proposal that the concept “cohort” be used in order to stimulate this disaggregation. This is a welcome idea, if cohort can be liberated from its originally narrow numerical definition indicating five years, just as “generation” has been liberated from its biological meaning of people born within the same fifteen or twenty-five years, and enlarged to a political meaning of those who have shared a similar experience such as the Resistance or 1968. At the same time, we should also disaggregate terms such as the “old” or “previous” generation. Again, not only in the sociological sense, but in the political one, trying to discern different messages, different discourses, different forms of interlocution. But a constructive move too might be useful, which indicates what the new generations share. I have in mind a piece by young

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feminist historians (in the book Generazioni, the outcome of a workshop organized in Orvieto by the Italian Society of Women Historians, SIS, 1993), which grouped together women born at the beginning of the 1960s, who expressed their common heritage and a need to develop relationships with the future, with the generations following them. The terms they use to describe this generational relationship are “ascent” and “descent,” but we should no longer think of all this in terms of vertical metaphors. The different locations, the disparity must be envisaged as occurring at the same level. The same level means equality, as in the search for truth, where everybody can learn from everybody else without any hierarchy, and “meet in the process of rediscussion of the world-system” (Torre 2002: 101). In this sense I find it significant that Juliet Mitchell (2000) in her book Mad Men and Medusas reclaims the effect of sibling relationships on human conditions – what she calls the great omission in psychoanalytic observation and theory. Not because I want to extend a biological metaphor to feminism as a contemporary version of sisterhood, but because I like the interpretative and methodological implications of this term. Sibling relations in Mitchell’s work include rivalry and murderous feelings, love/hate ambivalence; therefore this concept evokes the difference and displacement that the old and the young/ new experience towards each other, envisaged as a horizontal not a vertical relationship. I would like to end this chapter in two ways. First, by summing up the contributions of feminism to subjectivity, the added value brought by the women’s movement to the forms of subjectivity that women have always lived with. Feminism has made subjectivity central, and has shown that intersubjectivity is constitutive of it; it has given new meanings to the term and the concept; it has helped us to become subjects in a never-ending process. Second, I would like to quote a passage from Virginia Woolf which I believe expresses the relationship between the individual and the collective – where “collective” can be given many meanings, the epoch in which one lives, the shared state of old or young age, and even the collectivity of feminism. The passage is from Orlando and comments on the fact that Orlando – already a “she” – has come, through the decision to marry, to a transaction with the spirit of the age; by deciding to marry, but maintaining a degree of self-irony, she reconciles her individual and collective perceptions: “she need neither fight her age, nor submit to it; she was of it, yet remained herself” (Woolf 1928: 188).

Chapter 3 ‘UTOPIA’ AND DESIRE

Premise My intention in this essay is to contribute to the historical conceptualization of 1968 as a period with unique characteristics. I am convinced that if we could understand “what really happened” around 1968, in the sense not of reconstructing events but of giving a historical meaning to those processes, we would at the same time be able to measure the distance between ’68 and its future. Since the distance changes with time, this effort amounts to measuring our distance from 1968. Only by understanding the historical relevance of 1968 can we figure the continuities and discontinuities within which it is placed and at the same time contribute to a vision of the potential of the present. This essay is situated on the terrain of “historical ideas,” in the sense proposed by Siegfried Kracauer (1969), that is, as interpretations that aim to introduce a principle of historical understanding going beyond the empirical material on which they are based. Such “ideas” have a foundation in the study of events, but they also have roots in an “intuition” which may be used as a guide for further historical research. Therefore they situate themselves in a temporary balance between the particular and the general as well as between the subjectivity of the historian and the “objectivity” of the research. 1968 is understood here as referring to the social, political and cultural movements that, from the early 1960s (for instance at Berkeley in 1964) to the mid 1970s, included students, manual and intellectual workers, technicians, intellectuals, artists and professionals, gay and

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women’s movements. In this approach, the expansion of time – well expressed in the title of the French book Les Années 68, which could be translated into English as “the 1968 years” – is coupled with the plurality of the historical subjects of revolt. Despite the inter- and intra-movement differences and conflicts, the movements of 1968 present a similarity of mental and emotional attitudes, forms of struggle, and collective practices (sit-ins, teach-ins, consciousness-raising groups, marches within the factories, occupations of public and private spaces), a similarity that has been referred to as “l’esprit 68” or “la culture 68” by the editors of Les Années 68 (Dreyfus-Armand et al., 2000). In this essay the similarities will be my focus more than the differences, as a means of keeping this analysis at the level of “historical ideas.” My definition of 1968 poses a general problem of temporality, or rather of the series of temporal sequences in which 1968 is situated: the relatively brief time span of the events themselves, the mediumlength period of the social movements, and the still lengthier period of cultural changes. The two first dimensions are relatively clear, although they require further research and reflection. The importance of the transformations brought about by 1968 in regard to the third period is such that some changes cannot yet be said to be “over,” in the sense that several long-term changes set off by the short and medium terms are still going on. An example of this is the so-called end of deference to authority, or, at any rate, a radical modification in that attitude. This involved a cultural change that revealed itself in the family, the workplace, and schools, and which either began or accelerated in 1968. Another example can be found in the field of intersubjective communication. Changes took place which can be understood only in relation to the longue durée, that is, epochal changes in the relationships between bodies, from sexuality to good manners. From this perspective, the movements of 1968 can be seen both as a part of and as a resistance to processes dating from the eleventh century, whether the growing autonomy of the economic sphere, or the separatedness of individuals due to bourgeois individualism (Dumont 1983); the same processes led to the increasing importance of solitude and intimacy in the formation of the Western individual (Duby 1985; Ph. Braunstein 1985). 1968 can well be considered as having a place in all these processes (Passerini 1990).

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A Conceptual Triangle In the past I have tried to conceptualize 1968 in terms of the history of subjectivity and the subject; for instance in 1988, writing in Le Mouvement Social, I gave a definition of ’68 in Turin as “prise de parole et explosion de subjectivité” (Passerini 1988c). I would like now to integrate this interpretation introducing two other concepts, and to claim that the resulting conceptual triangle – subjectivity, desire, utopia – is essential for understanding 1968. The movements of 1968 asserted the right of people to become subjects of action and decision in their own lives, in whatever activity they chose to undertake. They criticized and questioned the existing order from the point where they stood (“dig where you stand”), including as a priority everyday matters. The use of irony, the practice of détournement, the inversion of values and the turning upside down of hierarchies were all procedures that openly introduced subjectivity into the political and scientific world, while showing how unilateral its claims to objectivity are. The vindication of the right to subjectivity had as a corollary the refusal of hierarchies between the subjects of revolt. The movements of 1968 challenged, on the one hand, the concepts of centre/periphery used by progressive political economists to describe the contrast between various regional sub-situations, and, on the other, the hierarchical notion of a privileged subject of social change – the industrial workers of advanced societies – which had been central to the political structure of the Internationals. At the same time, the student movements attacked the notion of another likely privileged subject – youth – when they criticized the sociological definition of young people as the rebellious social category par excellence. In 1968 the prevailing view posited the equivalence of revolt in various sectors of work and life and geographical zones: students in both Berkeley and Turin felt legitimized in rebelling, inasmuch as they were students, and they did not feel they had to justify their actions according to any alliance with other social strata. At the same time, they were convinced of the link between all struggles for freedom throughout the world. The hierarchy within the factory was disrupted by the fact that at the vanguard of the workers’ struggles were the young unskilled. Women announced not only an enormous enlargement of the definition of the historical subject and its location – now extended to home and domesticity – but also the importance of intersubjectivity by affirmation of the principle of sisterhood (much later this was questioned by women of colour

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who criticized the approach of white middle-class women). By and large, 1968 affirmed the plurality of subjects and the need for intersubjectivity together with what was then considered a universalistic approach. The stress on subjectivity and intersubjectivity was closely linked with a deep criticism of the structure of knowledge. 1968 not only disputed the hierarchies and power relations in institutions responsible for imparting knowledge (for example, by exposing and attacking the links between university organizations and military-industrial production). It also criticized the rapport between the individual and the group in scientific research, as well as in any specialization treated as an end in itself, the internalization of authority as a criterion for learning, the divisions between sciences, and the disparities in classification and power between subjects of knowledge. This was true of the student movements in schools and universities, of the workers’ movements among blue and white collar workers, and of women’s movements throughout the social and institutional structures. Women also introduced to the question of knowledge a fundamental reference to experience – individual and group – which included the theme of the gendered body. Experience became a touchstone category not only for practices such as consciousness-raising but also for knowledge at large, for instance in feminist studies. The use of this category has been recently criticized by Joan Scott (Scott 2001). This criticism has not ruled out the category of experience altogether, although it has introduced some fundamental cautiousness towards its use. From the perspective of subjectivity, knowledge is linked with the state of mind and emotions of the knowing subject. The student movement took into account the disparities of power within the institutions of knowledge from the point of view of the emotions of the student. The women’s movement brought to the forefront the role of emotions not only in the sense of criticizing them as traps (as in the form of romantic love) but also insisting on the importance of paying attention to one’s own emotions and refusing the pressure of social and cultural imperatives. The subjects of history were understood not only as subjects of action and knowledge, but also of desire. Emotions, desire and the body were linked together in a knot which was sometimes confused and contradictory, yet compelling in both a theoretical and practical way. The revolution in knowledge was closely linked with the sexual revolution; this was meant to include the body in the field of knowledge, establishing new relationships between bodies and

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new frontiers for exploration in the process of knowing. Subjects were conceived as embodied, and this came to acquire its full significance with the women’s movement, for whom it meant gendered subjects. Although the connection between desire and knowledge was present in many movements – students, workers, artists, women – there was a step forward from the subjectivity of the student and worker movements to that of the women’s movement, which introduced the theme of difference/equality as related to the body; no equality, it was argued, could be established without taking into due account difference and the question of the cultural construction of the gendered body. This view inspired the 1970s feminist critique of the ’68 ideology of sexual liberation. The fact that in the movements of ’68 the notion of subjectivity had desire as a central dimension emerges clearly from a psychoanalytic interpretation of ’68. In 1968, the psychoanalyst Elvio Fachinelli wrote a famous article published in Quaderni piacentini, “Il desiderio dissidente,” in which he tried to understand the gap between the fragility of the movements’ programs and behaviours, on the one hand, and their capacity to resist absorption by the system, on the other. He analysed the situation out of which the student movement had developed in the industrially developed countries: this was a situation of despair – both private despair and social atomization – and the students’ spontaneous reaction was to group together all those who were in the same condition. This was not new, Fachinelli wrote; what was radically new was the fact that the group had set the dialectic of desire in motion. Every goal and proposal was left behind as soon as it was achieved: “What was requested yesterday and is obtained today is no longer considered enough” (Fachinelli 1998a: 81). This explained the suspicious and diffident questions and comments posed by the movement’s opponents: “What do they want?”, “It is not clear what they want,” “Who directs them? Who put these ideas in their heads?”, “They want the impossible” (Fachinelli 1998a: 80–81). The participants in ’68 realized that what counts is not the object of desire but the state of desire, and that the satisfaction of desire is the death of the group. The existence of the group shows that the utopian tension it organizes secures the only possibility of denying this present. According to Fachinelli, if desire is satisfied – for instance through its embodiment into a leader or a value – the group is no longer based on desire but on need. That is why decisions must be taken in common and leaders must always be in statu nascendi. The group understands

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that the realization of desire is an illusion, and to a society that offers satisfaction of needs, the group insists: “It is not enough.” In other words, in opposition to the satisfaction of “needs” that was the interpretation of revolt and revolution given by the left that was still linked with the Third International, the students proposed “desire.” In fact, protagonists of the political and cultural scene at the left of the Italian Communist Party such as Rossana Rossanda and Franco Fortini criticized Fachinelli’s interpretation because it did not consider the elements of class conflict present in the movements, namely the socioeconomic factors of the revolt (Melandri 1998). This criticism advocated a regression from desire to need. At this point I have introduced the concept of utopia, although in 1968 this term was not used. According to Fachinelli, it is the relationship of the subject to its desire (let me treat the subject as neuter, referring to that area of subjectivity which is not immediately gendered) which suggests the utopian dimension for ’68, as a “utopia” of desire put into practice. I use inverted commas when applying the term to ’68 not only because there is a contradiction in terms (a no-place which is suddenly here), but especially because many ’68ers did not like the term “utopia”. Significantly, Fachinelli uses the term “utopico,” which is in Italian the positive form of the adjective, in contrast with “utopistico,” which has a tone of impossibility and absurdity. Unfortunately, this nuance gets lost in the English translation. The difference between various meanings of utopia has been theorized by Paul Ricoeur. In his Chicago lessons of 1975, Ricoeur indicated that utopia can mean either an alternative to power or an alternate form of power. In the former meaning, the problem of utopia – especially for sexual utopias such as Charles Fourier’s in the nineteenth century – is how to deal with hierarchy, since the concept of attraction is anti-hierarchical (Ricoeur 1986). During an interview held twenty years after his interpretation of ’68 as dissident desire, Elvio Fachinelli described “the utopian tension organised in groups,” referring also to the Italian workers’ hot autumn in 1969, and defined 1968 as a great collective falling in love (un grande innamoramento collettivo) which at the same time allowed a cold and lucid view of society. He now suggested that the logic of desire had exposed the lack of meaning in society; once the utopian tension had subsided, it was the anguish provoked by the risk of returning to a political void that had pushed people in the 1970s to search for refuge in old organizational forms such as the party or party-like groups.

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Fachinelli connected the disappearance of utopia with the successful role of some of its advocates: “It is not by chance, on the contrary it is thanks to their cold and lucid view, that today ex-68ers are brilliant brokers or managers” (Fachinelli 1998b: 199). If the term “utopia” was not used at the time, it can be found in many of the writings that refer to ’68, after it was finished or considered as finished. In this context it reveals the sense of loss for that past. Gianni Statera’s Storia di un’utopia, which is about the European student movements and was published in Italy in 1973, had its title changed to Death of a Utopia when translated into English in 1975. This change of title was faithful to the spirit of the book. Statera argued by reference to Mannheim, that ideology had superseded utopia and that the student movement had finally succumbed to reality as it was. In the last thirty years, the notion of utopia has undergone a torsion which has accentuated its sense of impossibility and absurdity. This has happened more than once in the twentieth century. As Judith Shklar put it (1998), the plaintive question “why are there no utopias today” often expresses the nostalgia of those who were – in her case “young and socialist in the 1930s” – and who resent the lack of sympathy among younger people. In fact evidence from 1968 to the present shows that a large debate about utopia does not mean that the spirit of utopia is present (according to Baczko [1978] it may simply indicate diffidence and disquiet), while the refusal of the term and idea of utopia can coincide with utopian efforts. We seem now to live in a period when there is a renewed interest in utopia. As the French review Magazine littéraire wrote in its special May 2000 issue on “la renaissance de l’utopie,” utopias seemed definitely buried: the twentieth century was done with totalitarian utopias, and some euphoric dreams, including American counter-culture and May 68, had not been able to remedy the disaster. To that example we can add another, the utopia of European unity, which seemed to vanish exactly at the moment when European construction started, even though it might have been useful to keep utopia in mind as a basis for criticizing the European Union while it was being constructed (see Part II). And yet, as soon as the death of utopia is announced, the term re-surfaces, as if utopia were a vital social necessity. Indeed, in the last few years, many books and conferences on utopia have appeared both in the US and in Europe; there have been exhibitions, conferences, and special journal issues. Now there is a

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vast ongoing discussion of the meaning of utopia. Two aspects of the current debate are relevant for the historical conceptualization of 1968: the first is the stress on the element of order and normativity present in many utopias, in a more or less evident way. In classical utopias, order has a central place, even if in the form of a new definition of order, which can be open-ended and redefines itself, but still order it is, with its regulative aspects (Donnelly 1998). Since normativity is present in any effort to save the identity of a group or individual, there are links between identity, utopia, and totalitarianism (Niethammer 2000b). A second aspect of the debate is the emphasis on the link between a general sense of death and the end of utopia. This is expressed either in the form of a dull insistence on the disappearance of utopia (Jacoby 1999), or a disenchanted acceptance of the sense of end and the proposal of an ironical and melancholic form of hope (Magris 1999). From these two elements of the current debate, it is clear that utopia has reappeared in the form of nostalgia for rebellion, as the pivot of an elegant scepticism included in a lay and sad vision of history. Its reappearance reflects a widespread mood at the end of the millennium, a form of consolation that does not cancel its despair; thus, even the utopia envisaged by Claudio Magris looks more to the past than to the future, it is a memory more than a hope; hope is mentioned but remains vague and unexpressed. This meaning of utopia is ambivalent, since it reinstates the supremacy of the present as it is, although it faces it with a firm disillusion. In this sense, the term is inapplicable to 1968, for which it would be simply anachronistic, while it is justified for the memory and nostalgia of ’68. It is certainly because of utopia’s connections with order and with end/death that ’68ers would not use the term. But it was also because Marxism had denounced utopian socialism in favour of a scientific one, and finally, but most importantly, because the term retained a sense of something too ideal and far away, and not realistic enough. The protagonists of ’68 did not like to use “utopia,” because the negative sense of the word had prevailed, indicating something that could not be attained, a sentiment against the spirit of ’68. At the same time, however, slogans such as “Being a realist means demanding the impossible” testify to the utopian strength of 1968 and some sort of fruitful contradiction on this ground. I am convinced that if it is emptied of its resonances of nostalgia and order, and if the component of desire is inserted into it, “utopia” can be applied to 1968. In this sense it

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can be taken to indicate that what until yesterday was nowhere, can come into existence here and now; it means not struggling for something to come, but starting right now to put that something into practice. Utopias of Daily Life and Gender In order to provide an idea of this sense of “utopia” I have chosen two texts that were produced by women around 1968 and have gender at their core. They are significant because they express an attitude towards change which was also meaningful at the time for movements not explicitly concerned with gender but with class, and because they evoke the general atmosphere of that period. I believe that in order to have a historical grasp of ’68 we should look not only at the political and social sides of the movements, but also at the cultural climate in which they moved and which was shared with vaster strata of people (especially young, although not only) who did not belong to the movements. This wider approach is coherent with the historical object, since the tendency to go beyond the boundaries of the movement was intrinsic to the ’68 movements: the tendency was to enlarge from students to everybody else, from the factory to the territory and – within the factory – from the representants to the represented, as the claim “we are all trade union delegates” implies with the assertion of direct rather than representative democracy, from feminists to women in general. This tendency to enlargement, however, was ambivalent and contradictory, as it could give rise to a genuine fraternity or to a prevaricating universalism which simply assumes the other to be identical with the subject. The first text is The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin (1997), published in 1969, and now a classic of science-fiction literature, a genre which has often hosted utopias. It is the story of the mission of Mr Ai, the Envoy of a confederation of some eighty worlds, to the world of Winter, a snow-bound planet that is being considered for inclusion in the federation. The people of Winter do not know war, and experience very little violence, thanks to a peculiarity: they are bisexual, or, better, they are not identified on the basis of sex, except for certain periods of time in their life, when they can become either woman or man and eventually give birth, after which they go back to a state they do not even consider neuter, because they do not use gender in order to identify the subject.

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My point is that the description of Winter reflects the actual desires of many people around 1968: on Winter, “no physiological habit is established, and the mother of several children may be the father of several more” (LeGuin 1997: 74). According to the report of a woman anthropologist sent to Winter by the confederation: “the fact that everyone between 17 and 35 is liable to be ‘tied down to childbearing’ implies that…burden and privilege are shared out pretty equally.” What is a given of nature on Winter, appears as a desirable and liberating goal on Earth: “a child has no psycho-sexual relationship to his mother and father. There is no myth of Oedipus on Winter.” This means that “there is no unconsenting sex, or rape. As with most mammals other than man, coitus can be performed only by mutual invitation and consent [...] seduction certainly is possible, but it must have to be awfully well timed.” That sounds like a code for political correctness, in a world where gender division is revealed to be the root of all inequality and violence: “There is no division of humanity into strong and weak halves, protective/protected, dominant/submissive, owner/ chattel, active/passive.” In the 1968 period, this hope was certainly shared by many who substituted “class” for “gender.” It was more literally shared by those who, in the women’s and gay movements, hoped not to give up gender roles, but to live them more freely and to be able to combine them in alternative ways. Their hopes are well expressed in the novel by Mr Ai when he finally understands his friend and lover Lord Estraven, a citizen of Winter: I saw again, and for good, what I had always been afraid to see, and had pretended not to see in him: that he was a woman as well as a man. Any need to explain the sources of that fear vanished with the fear; what I was left with was, at last, acceptance of him as he was. Until then I had rejected him, refused him his own reality… I had not wanted to give my trust, my friendship to a man who was a woman, a woman who was a man (LeGuin 1997: 202).

Such an epochal change in conceiving the self and the other could not avoid implying a change in temporal perception. In fact, the novel by LeGuin includes the theme of time: time-jumping on spaceships allows people to live comparatively very long lives; more importantly the planet Winter has a different way of calculating time, in which years are not numbered consequently from a base year forward to the present, because the base year is always the current year. This means that the inhabitants of Winter live fully in the present, thus realizing

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another desire of the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s: a different political temporality, in which the political and the public include the private and the personal. This theme found a deep consonance in the movements, in which people experienced an acceleration of time, as many testimonies say or imply. Various works on memory (Fraser 1987; Passerini 1996) have shown that people in the ’68 movements experienced a sense of finding themselves situated at the beginning of time, a feeling expressed in the formula “being born again” that was used by movements in various countries. This brought the sense of immediacy, of living through an emergency, a feverish perception that the waiting had come to an end and a new time had begun, while the future was urgently close. The intensification of experience extending from daily to nightly life, as a time of meeting and decision, meant that the day was multiplied and the hierarchy of timetables radically challenged; the allocation of time and space for specialized activities was subverted. At the same time, this entailed an ambivalent attitude towards history, an intolerance of it on the one hand and the sense of being in it and making it on the other. While Ursula LeGuin’s book reflected existing attitudes, it also confirmed and inspired them, through a well-known circular relationship in the imaginary. Another important source of inspiration for utopian attitudes was the best-seller by Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, published in New York in 1970. The Dialectic of Sex is an essay and a manifesto, not fiction; therefore it lacks the mediations provided by the literary genre, but it still has a visionary quality. Gender is understood by Firestone as the pivot around which a total liberation of society could take place. The book shows the normative elements of utopia, which are no less so for its being connected with gender. In the last chapter of her book, Firestone felt “tempted to make some ‘dangerously utopian’ concrete proposals” regarding alternatives to the family. She proposed various forms of “living together,” which in a transitional period would probably still be monogamous even if the couple chose to live with others. The household system would consist of a group of ten or so consenting adults of various ages linked by a limited contract of seven to ten years. Firestone expected that in this situation the power hierarchy would break down: children would no longer be minors under the patronage of “parents” and would have full rights, including that of immediate transfer to another house-

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hold. Rotation in domestic work was to be associated with collective responsibility for children. Machines would allow both adults and children to indulge in serious “play.” The aims would be the economic independence and self-determination of all, the total integration of women and children into the larger society, while production and reproduction would be simultaneously reorganized in a non-repressive way. One of the most interesting aspects of the book is the insistence on architecture and city planning: small units of self-determined housing – prefabricated components set up or dismantled easily – were proposed as well as central permanent buildings. Let us not forget that in countries like Italy and France the student movements fought for the inclusion of town planning and sociology in university syllabi. While all this may today appear unrealistic or even repressive, it was not so for the many people who participated in ’68. The extent, to which these ideas – of utopian revolt, in Bloch’s terms, against the epoch – were present in the minds and actions of many participants in the movements, is difficult to determine exactly. A good number of them actually put similar “utopias” into practice, generating communes in industrial countries which lasted until the 1990s (Ciuffreda and Janigro 1997). However, these utopian ambitions produced some naive and grotesque attempts at realizing immediate “equality.” What was positive in the realized utopia was the fervent sense of living through the epochal end of patriarchal and capitalist forms of domination, through a change of time in its fullest sense. In view of all this, the utopian tension underlying the movements of and around 1968 is not to be understood in the sense that they projected the ideal picture of a perfect future world, but rather that they engaged in a radical criticism of the present and in changes that had to be begun immediately in the context of one’s own situation. The firm belief that it was possible to change the world for the better was held both in political and in social terms; indeed, the distinction between these two terms was abolished in the desire to break boundaries between politics, art, and all the specialized activities, on the one hand, and daily life, on the other, while new forms of balance between the collective and the individual were adumbrated in the critique of “bourgeois individualism.” This utopian tension intended the disruption of the existing political sphere, its methods and its aims. It also implied a challenge to the forms of power in daily life, and thus the discovery of the political

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dimension of every sphere, including the private. The most important aspect of this critique was a widespread anti-authoritarianism, whether in the school, the university, the family, or the factory. In political terms, it presumed a direct rather than representative democracy. The power of the word in denouncing injustice was coupled with direct and exemplary action. Dualisms between theory and practice, centre and periphery, public and private, were denied, and distinguished the new anti-imperialism (“the Vietnamese and us, the same struggle”) from the previous forms of “soutiennisme.” Desire was present in this idea as well in the idea of egalitarianism, as an attitude proper to the private sphere as well as to the public, to the home as well as to the factory and the farm. This meant that one more dichotomy was challenged, with an attack on the very boundary between the utopian and the real as they were conventionally conceived. This attitude was close to Bloch’s conception of this relationship as “a door…to an incipient Being like utopia”: “there is no realism worthy of the name if it abstracts from this strongest element in reality, as an unfinished reality” (Bloch 1986: 624). The particular intertwining of the utopian and the real – and the modification of both concepts – emerged from the movements’ experimental way of proceeding, of trying something, abandoning it, trying something else and so on, from the pursuit not of single objectives but of a collective state of mind. This feature of the utopia of the period has caused some interpreters to attribute a religious dimension to the regeneration of which ’68ers spoke. There is something in the idea of utopia itself which makes one think of a religious inspiration in a lay form (as Ortoleva [1988] put it, in 1968 everything was to be “do-it-yourself,” including religion). “As long as Christianity satisfied men’s minds, utopia could not seduce them; once Christianity began to disappoint them, utopia sought to conquer them and to establish itself there” (Cioran 1960: 89). This statement may not be historically valid, but it surely provides an important theoretical insight. Whether the connection between utopia and religion is to be understood in the sense that both share dogmatism, or in the sense of regeneration and fraternity, the connection is difficult to disprove. However, one could add that the 1968 “utopias” were often soaked with irony, a feature that most religions can hardly claim.

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Community, Communication and Contradictions In their book Révolte et mélancolie, Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre (1992) consider May 1968 as a form of twentieth-century Romanticism. They recognize “le souffle romantique de Mai” not only in the oppositional nature of 1968 – that is, in its “negative attitudes” (in the words of Touraine 1972) towards industrial society, particularly towards its growth and modernization – but “in the sentiment of a reinvented human community, in the experience of the revolution as a feast, in the ironical and poetic slogans on the walls, in the appeal for collective imagination and creativity as a political imperative, finally in the utopia of a society freed from all alienation and reification” (Löwy and Sayre 1992: 224). The “reinvented human community” is a central feature of ’68. It is, in fact, in the field of community and communication that the “utopian” inspiration of 1968 can be found in its clearest form. Communication should be understood, in this context, in both its literal and its wider sense. Interpreters have emphasized the creativity of the movement in proposing new and “poor” forms of communication and new communication techniques, in creating new audiences, and, finally, in providing a large number of new personnel for the emerging fields of the mass media. The international student movement assumed that a crucial site of political struggle was the system of communication, which they understood – also on the basis of the critique by the Frankfurt School – as critical to capitalist domination and to the internalization of capitalist values by the whole society, including those who were participating in the revolt (Ortoleva 1988). The direct conflict of the ’68 movement with the dominant system of communication and with the most important means of mass communication – press and television – did not stop 1968 from making different uses of those same means “from the inside,” by deconstructing their dominant logic. At a basic level, the possibility of an alternative form of communication, capable of transmitting revolutionary contents and of revolutionizing the forms of communication themselves, soon appeared illusory or short-lived. The modes of communication proposed by the movement were both a product and a sign of the great innovations that had taken place in the cultural industry between 1920 and 1950. 1968 accelerated the technological novelties of the 1970s and 1980s, that is a new system, characterized by decentralization, interactivity, the reshuffling of hierarchies and genres, and the fragmentation of audiences. But these changes were soon depoliticized. It has become

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a commonplace that, of the professionals who were at the forefront of mass media in the following decades, many had learned their skills of and passion for technical and formal innovation in 1968. In its wider sense, “communication” refers to the importance attributed by ’68 to exchange in all its forms, above all within the communities constituted by the movements themselves. The movements were united by links which were neither of blood nor ideology – thanks to the rupturing of relations with the family and with the form of the political party. They were rather links of elected affinity, based on affective and cognitive choices. The community, understood in this way, was a space where the divisions between public and private were broken down, and where the utopian possibility of direct communication with anybody suddenly became possible. The genealogy of this communauté inavouable or the negative community of those who have no community, as theorized by Blanchot when writing about the need for Communism and community, goes back, through Jean-Luc Nancy’s communauté désoeuvrée, to George Bataille’s community of lovers. This genealogy leads us directly to a logic of desire. For Blanchot: Mai 68 a montré que, sans projet, sans conjuration, pouvait…s’affirmer (s’affirmer par-delà les formes usuelles de l’affirmation) la communication explosive, l’ouverture qui permettait à chacun, sans distinction de classe, d’age, de sexe ou de culture, de frayer avec le premerie venu, comme avec un etre déjà aimé, précisément parce qu’il était le familier-inconnu (1983: 52). May 68 had shown that, without a project, without a conspiracy, an explosive communication could appear, beyond the usual forms of communication, which allowed everybody, without distinctions of class, age, sex or culture, to interact with the first newcomer as if this were an already loved being, precisely because this was the “familiar-unknown.”

The impossibility of recognizing an enemy vivified everything, but it also precipitated towards the conclusion that there was nothing to conclude, because no particular “event” had taken place. The aim had not been to take the Bastille or the Winter Palace or the National Assembly and not even to turn the old world upside down, but to let the possibility emerge of being-together (again, we might recognize the ways of desire). This gave back to everyone the right of equality within fraternity, thanks to the freedom of speech that produced a general exaltation in the first place. When Blanchot wrote about the

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explosion of communication, he was treating ’68 as a utopia that is situated in the past rather than in the future. On the historical plan, the utopian capacity of 1968 for creating communication and community was fugitive, as much as desire always is. Positive examples of utopian inspiration included some moments in the creation and activity of workers’ councils, students’ collectives, and women’s consciousness-raising groups, as well as certain aspects of enterprises such as alternative crèches, communes of life and work, women’s “daily life in common” (care, attention for others, desire of the new). However, the same examples could be considered for their negative aspects (hidden forms of oppression and power, confusion, disorganization, disregard for the deep needs of children). Utopian capacity oscillated between two poles: utopia was often taken only in a literal sense, as the need to put something into practice as soon as possible without paying deep attention to its spirit. Only in certain circumstances were an active sense of the ‘now’ combined with criticism and any change of the present situation. Practices often were contradictory in themselves: a first instance was the contradiction, within the student movement, between small groups and committees (often run by women), on the one hand, and the assemblies, dominated by a few leaders (most often men), on the other; a second was the contemporary presence, in women’s practices, of solidarity and destructive conflict; a third might be the workers movement’s combination on the shop-floor of democratic discussion and of violence. The element of order, the normative side, emerged too much or too little. In the “utopia of a transparent relationship,” the emotional experience of collective action showed its dark sides, and desire its limit; the dark sides of 1968 were a sense of omnipotence and the fear deriving from the threat of the “crowd,” in other words the negative aspect of collectivity (Melucci 1999). The movements of 1968 were contradictory both in themselves and between each other at the level of political principles and practices. The student movement supported the principle of direct democracy, criticizing the insufficiency of representative democracy; but in fact it practized forms of charismatic leadership. The workers’ movements talked of equality and unity, criticizing a work organization based on mechanization and qualifications, but they realized only partially, and for brief periods, structures that were able to bring about, at least in part, the spirit of their aims. The women’s movements shared the other movements’ call for the right of every person to speak for him

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or herself, but many women refused to acknowledge this similarity and accused the other movements of not following through on this call, claiming that they were held back by a profound sexism even in the proclamation of sexual liberation. In the European movements besides there was very little awareness of ethnocentrism and Eurocentrism. Furthermore, the division between the east and west was palpable, so much so that during the Prague Spring the attitude of the western movements was mixed: while some components of the movements recognized the similarity of inspiration between themselves and the Prague movement, many others were tied up with old forms of Marxism, Leninism and Third Internationalism which kept them from attacking the Soviet Union directly. The contradictions of 1968 have been described by Jacob Tanner (1998–1999) as the “aporiae of utopia.” According to this author, the “great refusal” drew its energies from utopian projections, but at the same time it wanted the radically new in ways that were equivalent to a denial of utopia; even those who wanted the new, were stuck with the old. The intense desire to change was transformed into myth by the lack of political tools, and this mythology was based on a misinterpretation of the simultaneity of various revolts in the world, leading to the self-misunderstanding of revolt as revolution. Therefore ’68 was not sufficiently utopian in a positive sense, while it was utopian in a negative way, when it took as already achieved what was only a potentiality, and mistook wishful thinking for actual possibility. In a number of cases, the dark side of collectivity prevailed and the brief duration of the equilibrium achieved in creating new forms of community and communication degenerated into the horde, the clan, and the sect. This particular feature, with its forms of solidarity and conflict, must be considered together with its opposite extreme, which later became a dominant trend, the isolation of the individual or the group. The relationship between individual and collective was affected by the same contradiction as that between particular and universal. The new type of subjectivity, having denied all forms of hierarchy between subjects, would no longer sustain the old claim of Third Internationalist origin, that one particular subject can represent and embody the universal liberation of all oppressed subjects. The moment of communicative utopia…no longer assumed that there is a privileged standpoint in the social structure which bestows upon its occupiers a special vision of the social totality. The community of needs and solidarity is created in the interstices of

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society by those new social movements, which on the one hand fight to extend the universalist promise of objective spirit – justice and entitlements – and on the other seek to combine the logic of justice with that of friendship. These new social movements do not share the hybris of the nineteenth century that one particularity can represent universality as such. They are aware of “difference” and regard this as a positive moment (Benhabib 1986: 352).

This type of subjectivity was not consistently present in all situations at the same level as in Berkeley or in some German and Italian universities. The conviction that there existed a direct relationship between the small, the local and the individual on the one hand, and the planetary level of oppression on the other, was sometimes so schematic that it ignored the national and regional dimensions of the movements themselves. No wonder that, in the two last decades, the tendency of the so-called identity movements has gone in a direction contrary to the spirit of 1968: the vindication of specificities, gender and race – gay pride, black pride, women’s identity – and a suspicious view of any claim to universal rights, as oppressive of a community’s rights. There was scope, in the thirty years following ’68, for the development of a range of historical processes, from terrorism to pacifism, from ecology to wild consumption. The germs of each of these processes can be found in 1968 and its contradictions. At the same time, these germs must not be understood as direct antecedents of something that developed in a linear manner. The contradictory nature of the 1968 movements must be understood in the sense that they reached temporary forms of equilibrium at an advanced level, the continuation of which then proved impossible, not only because of internal weaknesses but also because of external opposition and attack. At this point, one of the two sides of the balance developed, so to say, by default. This was the case for terrorism: when the symbolic violence, which had conjugated utopian tension and the pressure for change, lost its impetus, terrorism appeared, with the resort to practical violence, which was exacerbated into assassination and deprived of any utopian inspiration. Therefore the derivation of “red” terrorism from ’68 involves both continuity and sharp discontinuity. A similar derivation by default holds true for consumerism, since 1968 combined an ideal of poverty and of the right to every possible good; the two then separated and became characteristic of different social groups and at-

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titudes, for example punks and yuppies, and in the course of this separation they lost their disruptive strength. From the Present: Travesties of Utopias and the Historical Unforeseen Present marks of the distance between us and the utopian tension of ’68 are: the gap between discourse and experience; the refusal of any universalism in favour of particularities; the acceptance of specializations; the vanishing/distortion of the categories of class and gender and the appearance of those of age and race; the disappearance of the discourse on body liberation. All these tendencies contain something positive which corrects residues of positivism and false universalism. At the same time they are contradicted by certain specific developments such as, for instance, changes in the images and practices of masculinity and femininity, or certain challenges to specialism emerging at the margins of the disciplines. This type of situation generates uncertainty in assessments of the strengths and weaknesses of 1968 as well as its outcomes, understood, in simplistic accounts, as “political defeat, cultural victory.” I share Perry Anderson’s judgement (2000) that the only starting point for a realistic left today is a lucid registration of historical defeat. That there is no possible consolation coming from a supposed “cultural victory” is made evident by considering that an important part of the defeat is precisely the extreme separation between culture and politics – just as bad as an excessive conflation of the two. 1968 has been interpreted as the global crisis halfway between the end of World War 2 and the end of the Cold War and a testing ground for a ‘new world order’, prefiguring the great transformation of 1989– 1990 in the Soviet Union (Fink et al. 1998); the importance of “networks of rebellion” and the “globalism of freedom” is central to this interpretation. However, these are exactly the two elements that, according to Boltanski and Chiapello, have been recuperated by “l’univers connexionniste” of the third era of capitalism. According to these two authors, the new spirit of capitalism since its crisis in the years 1960s–1970s has moved away from the type of social capitalism based on state planning, considered obsolete and oppressive, and has incorporated the values of autonomy and creativity proposed by ’68. It has assumed the necessity of inventing new forms of coordination

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and forms of social relations based on proximity, elective affinity, mutual trust (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999: 288–89). This analysis indicates that utopia has been appropriated by the new spirit of capitalism, with its promise of a world conceived as a flexible network, where the ideal figure is a nomadic network-extender, light and mobile, tolerant of difference and ambivalence, a world realistic about people’s desires, with a less rigid relationship to property, since renting and not absolute ownership represent the future. While we can be sceptical about the possibility that capitalism might keep its promises, we recognize in all this a type of perverse victory, that is, a subordinated and distorted translation of the vindications of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. We can discern in a grotesque form various elements of that “utopia,” for instance, the ways in which the personal has become political: see the relevance given by the media to events such as Tony Blair’s paternity, the bisexuality of an Italian minister, or President Clinton’s sex life. The boundary between public and private has been moved – but in a form that is a caricature of that envisaged by the 1968 movements. What has definitely been lost is the sense of “public happiness,” which Hannah Arendt wrote about with reference to ’68, together with a vision transcending the differences between Eastern and Western Europe. It has been said that the successive decades gave two replies to the request for happiness posed by the movements of 1968, cynicism and hedonism (Melucci 1999). The question of public happiness is a touchstone that allows measurement of the distance between the actual satisfaction offered by the new spirit of capitalism and the state of desire which united the ’68 movements. However, the latter can hardly reappear in its old way. Anybody looking for a repeat performance will meet with the reply that Abbie Hoffman gave before finally committing suicide: “it was fun to have that sense of engagement when you jumped on the earth and the earth jumped back – that sense that you were a part of history. Can it happen again? No way. It’s never going to happen again” (P. Braunstein 2000). While this is literally true – the repetition cannot happen again – the precariousness of a situation based on travesties of utopia cannot be ignored: despair, boredom, drugs, violence, coeval with the new potentialities of technology, speak clearly enough of frustration and waste. What is unforeseeable, but not un-announced, is the next utopia. The fact that both desire and revolution have a utopian quality and therefore are historically unforeseen – if history is conceived as mere continuity – is

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due to the very factor of subjectivity that is central to both. This is what always surprises the “custodians of the system of needs” (Fachinelli 1998b: 199; Melandri 1998). From a historiographical point of view, the conceptual triangle composed of subjectivity, utopia and desire can help us to further comprehend ’68. Utopia is innovated by the non-hierarchical conception of subjectivity, while subjectivity is embodied, and translated into intersubjectivity, by desire; at the same time, utopia allows the concrete putting into practice of desire. The notion of utopia has also helped to give words to two major problems: the contradictions within ’68, and the relationships between ’68 and the present. Finally, the conceptual triangle can help us understand the multiplicity of temporalities with which we started, since both utopia and desire alter the hierarchy of temporalities, making present what is usually postponed to the future. The importance of this theme is linked with the fact that today time has become an area of crucial contradiction. (I am thinking of the division of time between those who have too much time and those who have too little; this division does not only correspond to the situation of work, the scission unemployment/employment, and all the nuances of under-employment, precarious employment, multiple employment, which alternate in the lives of individuals. It has also something to do with the rhythms of collective daily life – traffic, transport, the multiplication of information and communication, engagements of all sorts for people of all ages, starting from childhood – although old age and poverty are often left aside by these frenetic rhythms.) When we talk of utopia today, we do not need the inverted commas, since the notion has regained its connotation of impossibility and absurdity. However, we can use its negative strength as a means of criticizing the present. In his recent books, Romano Màdera (1997; 1999), a philosopher of the 1968 generation, stresses the fact that “we have been hardly and deeply defeated,” and, at the same time insists on the idea that utopia is the only human reality and reality is a part of utopia, in the sense that human beings are literally u-topian, since they have no fixed place and can make of any environment their own place. He proposes the comprensione biografica (biographical understanding) of one’s own story as a way of initiating a criticism of previous utopias – treated as materials for the elaboration of new utopias – without missing the sense of their value: a tolerant universalism and a syncretism of utopias antagonistic to the existing civilization.

PART II The Present and the Sense of Belonging

Chapter 4 FROM THE IRONIES OF IDENTITY TO THE IDENTITIES OF IRONY

The Idea of Europe and European Identity Europe Europe as you watch me descend helpless and lost into one of my Frail myths among the hordes of beasts, I am a son of yours in flight who has no Enemy other than his own sadness… Europa Europa che mi guardi scendere inerme e assorto in un mio esile mito tra le schiere dei bruti, sono un tuo figlio in fuga che non sa nemico se non la propria tristezza… Vittorio Sereni, from Diario d’Algeria, August 1942, in Poeti italiani del secondo Novecento 1945–1955 (Cucchi and Giovanardi 1996).

When this poem was written Europe was at the centre of a civil war between “hordes of beasts” (the Fascists), on the one side, and the anti-Fascists on the other, and its fate depended on the outcome of this conflict. The idea of a united Europe under Fascist rule had been seized upon by both the Nazis and the Fascists in the period between the two wars, as well as during the war itself. Two examples of this can be seen in the Convegno Volta, a conference on Europe organized under the auspices of the Fascist regime in Rome, 1932, and the projects for a “new Europe” united under the Nazi dominion, pre-

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sented by Goebbels and Von Ribbentrop in 1942–1943 (Lipgens 1985). Those who resisted the various types of Fascism and yet still sought to be “sons” of Europe could count on only a “frail myth,” if I may be allowed to extend the metaphor above in this way, and this myth projected a possible Europe and possible Europeanness into a future that was still completely uncertain. At that time the sense of belonging to Europe was more of a wager than a reference to a given reality. The tradition of a united Europe was centuries old, but World War 1 had reduced this tradition to ashes. The many and varied attempts to revive it between the two wars – including Coudenhove-Kalergi’s Pan-Europe in 1923 and the proposal for a United States of Europe made to the League of Nations by Aristide Briand in 1929–1930 (Pegg 1983; Pistone 1975) – were accompanied by an extensive debate on the possibility of turning Europe into an autonomous and coherent cultural and political unit. Despite the fact that World War 2 once again dashed any hopes of an autonomous Europe, it also gave rise to a new wave of Europeanism. Some anti-Fascists imprisoned on the island of Ventotene drafted a Manifesto, which proposed the idea of a European federation, borrowing their framework from the debates held on federalism in Great Britain at the end of the thirties in organizations such as the Federal Union (Bosco 1991), in which a federation was understood as a guarantee of relationships with other peoples and continents, in view of a peaceful cooperation aiming at the political union of the globe in the more distant future (Spinelli and Rossi 1998). The Manifesto di Ventotene, as it became known, appeared in the summer of 1941, exactly one year before Sereni composed his poem. This Manifesto with its stress on democracy and equality, reminds us of the legacy of ideas that came out of the European Resistance. The construction of a united Europe with its origins in the post-war period, from the founding of the European Economic Community in 1957 to the election in 1979 of the first European Parliament with universal suffrage (Paolini 1979, 1983) and, finally, to the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, was accompanied by an increasing uncertainty in regard to what European particularity represented culturally and what it meant to be European. The great histories of the idea of Europe (Chabod 1961; Curcio 1958; Duroselle 1965; Voyenne 1964) and the collections of documents and examples of the past (de Rougemont 1961), published in the twenty years following World War 2, express a much less problematic attitude towards the idea of a European par-

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ticularity than is evident in the succeeding decades. It was indeed during the 1960s that Europe began to be posed as a problem, along with the idea of “identity” – a term which had hardly been used until the 1950s, and which began to be employed more frequently as a result of the new social, cultural, ethnic and regional movements. Three strands of discussion about Europe have dominated the period since the 1970s: the first centres on the concrete procedure of the unification of Europe, the second on the different ideas and ideologies regarding a united Europe, and the third on European identity. Each of these strands is to some extent independent of the others, however, this does not reduce the complexity of the relation between them, on the contrary exacerbates it. For example, the importance of a link between the idea of a united Europe and the institutional reality of the European Union has at times been underrated, as if the latter were simply the result of the calculations of the member states in order to maintain their wealth and security. Perry Anderson has highlighted the historical role played by the idea itself – or at least a version of it – in his claim that the post-war construction of Europe is inexplicable unless the federalist vision of Jean Monnet and his small group of technocrats is taken into account. Anderson has also observed that ideas did indeed play a role in the history of European integration in as much as they were articulated by political and intellectual elites, if not by the masses, and that a unanimous European public voice only emerged after the collapse of the Soviet system, expressing widespread approval for an openness towards the Eastern bloc. All the same, for most of this period, the public voice that spoke through the media, particularly through the press, was not that of the wider public nor that of the electoral body. The different strands therefore are distinct, but they intersect in a potential European public sphere, where institutions, ideas and ways of feeling can exist in various and connected ways (Anderson 1996a, 1996b). In his attempt to understand the so-called boom in identity, Robert Picht (1993) has written that in some ways identity can be compared to health: one becomes aware of its disturbing elements only when confronting transformations that throw doubts on its presumed normality. When human beings feel rootless, they try to reassure themselves by identifying enemies and dangers and by declaring their loyalty to collective organisms. Frequently, then, these identifications are of a regressive nature and express the need for self-protection against the unknown. If all this can be said to be convincing – as I believe it to be

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– the growing debate about European identity and the use of the term both in appropriate and inappropriate contexts (many texts which are headed by the term do not in fact place it at the centre of discussion) is a sign of uncertainty and discomfort, on the one hand, and of regressive operations which aim at protecting old values, on the other. This can be seen in the attempt to define European particularity made by the European Community (as the Union was then called, when it was composed of nine members) in 1973. The declaration, which was approved in Copenhagen, represented an idea which had itself been affected by the debate on identity and was unable to avoid the contradictions of Eurocentrism. The Declaration on European Identity was based “on the principles of the unity of the Nine,” on their “responsibilities with regard to the rest of the world” and on the “dynamic nature of the construction of Europe.” This unity – even while it admitted a diversity of cultures – responded to the “basic necessity to ensure the survival of the civilisation which [the Nine] have in common.” European identity, according to this document, should be based on a common heritage conceived as composed of: the same attitudes towards life, converging with the creation of a society that measured up to the needs of individuals; the principles of representative democracy, rule of the law, social justice and respect for human rights. “An essential part” of European identity was at that point represented by a common market based on a customs union, established institutions, as well as policies and machinery for cooperation. While the first sections of the Declaration repeated presuppositions that were already familiar and acceptable in the main, the rest established a true and proper hierarchy of relations with the rest of the world. First, there came the aim of intensifying ties with those European countries with whom friendly and cooperative relations already existed; then came the aim of maintaining and strengthening historic links with the Mediterranean and African countries and with the Middle East. The “close ties” with the United States – a country that shared the values and aspirations of a common heritage – were held to be “mutually beneficial” and should be preserved “on the basis of equality and in a spirit of friendship.” “Close cooperation and constructive dialogue” were foreseen with Japan and Canada; a policy of détente with the USSR and the countries forming the Eastern bloc; “exchanges in various fields” with China; the extension of already existing commercial relations with other Asian countries; an increase in “friendly” relations with Latin America, and in particular with several countries

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in the same area. As for “the less favoured nations,” the Nine declared the “importance of the struggle against under-development” through trade and financial aid. The last point announced that the European identity “will evolve as a function of the dynamic of the construction of a united Europe.” It is not only the competitive and hierarchical nature of the Declaration whereby relations with the rest of the world are organized according to a descending scale from “equality and friendship” to “aid,” which has been criticized, but also the concept of identity and its legitimizing use in this context (Niethammer 1997). The potentially homogenizing character of the concept of identity has sometimes led to a preference for terms such as “identification” (Bhabha 1990) or “subjectivity” (Passerini 1988a). Here I will use the term “identity” only in order to debate it; thus its use will be critical and deconstructive and I will attempt to avoid all references to identity as a simple function or product of the European Union or as a base that is instrumental for its legitimation. The document cited highlights the dangers that are implicit in a flattening of European identity around the idea (and the reality) of a united Europe; the connections between the two exist, but each remains relatively independent of the other. One can see something of an idea of a united Europe already in the political, social, economic and (high) cultural fields, while the notion of identity refers to a field which is at the same time wider and narrower, as it moves from everyday life in both its material and emotional aspects to “high” and “low” cultural forms, of the elites and the masses. The advantage of keeping separate the identity and the idea of Europe is that in this way the discourse on European identity is able to keep its distance from political projects and their realization. The tension which derives from this allows for a reciprocal critical attention between such discourses and projects. A similar distance must be maintained between the historical forms of European identity and those that are possible for the future. This is why it is a good idea for the myth of Europeanness to be “frail,” in Sereni’s terms, and for the contents derived from past forms of identity to be questioned, because attempts to found future forms on given cultural characteristics cannot but provoke a sense of uneasiness about the appropriation of the past by the present. The central example of appropriation is the identification of Europe with modernity and progress, an equation that is almost as old as the Enlightenment. To-

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day, however, Europe is no longer at the centre or the vanguard of modernity (Therborn 1993) and this identification has lost its meaning. One reaction to the loss of old identifications has been the trend not to search for one single value capable of organizing an entire cultural universe, but to choose a way by which to accumulate various specificities. One example of this is the interesting attempt at the beginning of the 1960s to analyse “European ideas,” that resulted in a long list of concepts including modern science, Christianity, human rights, evolution, imperialism, the subconscious, youth revolt, and so on (Lund et al. 1962). Another of the many examples of this approach are the epithets employed by Hoggart and Johnson (1987) to connote the European continent: “fragile, restless, contradictory, inconsistent.” Faced with these adjectives, one can only ask to what other continents they could not also apply. The problem is that comparisons in which a clear definition of the second term is missing have been a constant characteristic of Eurocentrism, and definitions of identity based on such conceptions run the risk of reproducing rhetorical formulae which are either empty or suspect. Even “European ideology,” defined by Norberto Bobbio (1986) as centred on the government of liberty and antithetical to oriental dispotism, has been worn out in the second half of this century by a sense of guilt linked to the experiences of totalitarianisms and decolonization. For what concerns the former, it is impossible not to agree with Bronislaw Geremek (1996) when he rejects claims that the Nazi system and the Gulag archipelago are in flagrant contradiction with the spirit and sentiment of Europe on the presupposition that totalitarian systems are a total negation of the European tradition. On the contrary, “the dialectic of the Enlightenment” typical of the European tradition, that according to Adorno and Horkheimer includes the contemporaneous development of terror and emancipation (Horkheimer and Adorno 1979), should be accepted. A central role in European memory should be assigned to the Shoah and other processes of persecution and marginalization, as we have seen in Chapter One. However, a collective memory of all this constitutes a difficult and dangerous battlefield, out of which different and opposing identities may well emerge. It is no coincidence that the challenge of transcending the aporiae of European identity has promoted a pattern of insistence on the characterization, which seems to pertain more to formality than to con-

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tent, of the so-called European multiplicity. The tradition of Europe as a unitas multiplex is a long one. Take, for example, Diderot who, under the entry for Législateur in the Encyclopédie, wrote on the diversity of European governments – republics and monarchies – which gave rise to a wide range of sentiments and customs. Diderot believed that as a result of such diversity in Europe, wars would always take place (“il y aura toujours des guerres en Europe”). Recently the theme of diversity of Europe has been renewed in relation to historical phenomena such as the fall of the Soviet regime, the accompanying explosions of nationalisms and regionalisms, the growing number of member states in the European Union, and the new waves of migrants who want to enter it from the East and the South. The theme has also reappeared in the context of an intercultural understanding, and has lent itself to new interpretations. In the 1991 preface to the Italian edition of his essay Die Vielfalt Europas (The multiplicity of Europe), Hans Georg Gadamer (1989) confirms the thesis announced by the title of the essay, written in 1985, according to which Europe has always been characterized by such a linguistic variety that it has been required to undertake the hard task of learning coexistence. According to Gadamer, the cultural destiny of Europe was formed through the distinction, and dialectic, between various areas of human creativity, in particular between philosophy and science. Science lay at the foundation of a coherent European identity. All this was very different from the situation in China for example, where none of the great masters could be called a poet rather than a thinker or a theologian rather than a knower (Gadamer 1989). For Europeans today, both the general objective outlined by Gadamer, to experience the other and the others as the other of our self, in order to participate with one another, and the intermediate one of developing the heritage of different regions, single groups and their ways of life in order to contrast the tendency towards levelling out, are important. I believe, however, that today the statement that the “spiritual unity” of Europe is “already a reality, as well as a duty” (Gadamer 1991: 46), whereby the two terms seem to be placed on the same level, is unacceptable. Not only has the concrete existence of a spiritual unity been clamorously belied by the historical events of the twentieth century, but this kind of claim goes against modern sensitivity. If we want to avoid all risks of essentialism, spiritual unity neither can nor should be taken for granted; it can only be understood and

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undertaken as a duty, mainly in regard to the future, and always critically towards the forms that have preceded it. Gadamer’s elegant formulation does, however, avoid the triumphalism that other less shrewd versions of European multiplicity exhibit with what can almost be defined as self-satisfaction. One example of this is the definition of the European as a “multiform and evolutive personality” determined by an ideal, a definition that is connected to the concept of European consciousness as an incessant search for happiness and truth, as for example in Paul Hazard’s La crise de la conscience européenne (The European Mind: The Critical Years) (Moreau Defarges 1983). Another example is that of the interpretation of the “unity and multiplicity of Europe” offered by Cees Noteboom. He not only refers to the polyphonous chorus of European languages and the resulting polyhedral experience of learning them, but also to the hybrid lifestyle which comes about through spending the winter in Amsterdam and Berlin and the summer in Spain (Noteboom 1994: 15). It seems to me that it is no longer possible to share this kind of facile optimism in reference to such privileged experiences – even though they follow on from experiences of oppression and positions of resistance – which in reality simply allude to the ease with which Europeans now travel in Europe, not very differently than in the period prior to World War 1. It is indeed enough to think of the experience of migrants, undertaken for reasons of political or economic necessity, for the multiplicity of languages and travels to take on quite another meaning. Ursula Hirschmann, one of the founders of the European Federalist Movement at the beginning of the 1940s and founder of the group known as “Femmes pour l’Europe” in 1975, focused her attention on her experience of migration and travel. During a political meeting, she suddenly understood why it was so much easier for her to be “European” than for the others: “I had to speak, and I realised that I could not do so in even one language.” She had lost, as it were, her German mother tongue, which had become “flat and unflexible” as a result of living abroad for so long, while Italian – the language in which her children had been brought up – felt foreign to her. After likening herself to a Jewish friend in the sense that he too was a “wandering European,” Hirschmann concluded with a declaration of the “Europeanisation of the rootless”: “we deracinés of Europe who ‘have crossed the borders more often than we have changed our shoes’ (Brecht) have nothing to lose but our chains in a federalist Europe,

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and so it is that we are federalists” (Hirschmann 1993: 21–22). The multiplicity of languages in Europe is expressed here in terms of suffering and alienation, of rootlessness and loss, which have been the lot of so many in twentieth-century European history. It would take too long to make a complete list of these people – Jews, women, immigrants from within and beyond Europe, refugees, the dispersed, the “uncultured”; but this partial list of “others,” historically present in Europe in a subordinate and conflictual position, suggests that a break is necessary, that is to say, a gesture of radical discontinuity needs to be made to be able to credibly claim the value of diversity on the European continent. As a result, the problem of European identity accepts the solution offered with the formula of multiple identity only as a first approximation. In reference to Europeanness, it has been noted (A.D. Smith 1992) that the number and extension of currently possible cultural identities has increased: the identities based on gender and generation are vital, those based on class and religion continue to exercise an influence, but professional, civic and ethnic identities have also proliferated and attract increasingly large groups all over the world. While national identification is still frequently the political and cultural norm that transcends and organizes other loyalties, human beings maintain a multiplicity of belongings that tend to push the national into the background. In regard to this central problem, the concept of “multiple identity” is limited to underlining the quality of tolerance and to allowing for some potentialities. It remains, however, conceptually undifferentiated and undefined, as does its correlate, multiculturalism, in the sense that both these terms and concepts lack a description of the power disparity between the subjects and the forms of subjectivity that they denote. Given this situation, it is not surprising that occasionally the notion of a truly contemporary European identity is denied. According to some, there is no sentiment or European identity which is in line with the modernization of continental affairs, as confirmed by the fact that Europe is only marginally present in school curricula (Papcke 1992). According to others, European consciousness – however this is defined or justified – is only a form of group partiality, a kind of nationalism on a larger scale which includes some and excludes others, thereby negating any authentic universalism (Wilterdink 1993). These negative opinions are often based on the fact that it is not possible to develop a European identity that has the same emotional impact as

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national identities. However, as Kaelble (1998) and Rusconi (1998) have reminded us, this is not the real problem, because European identity is not meant to substitute national identities, but to coexist with them and eventually to influence and moderate them. Rusconi (1998) has observed that the juridical courts are already weaving through their decisions a network of links that will contribute to keeping together different European countries. On the historical question of the nation, Haupt (1998) has denied the usefulness of binary concepts such as state and nation in scientific analysis, limiting their value to social groups’ strategies to define themselves. In the light of these analyses, the question cannot be to replace national identities with that of a European super-state, but to favour the intertwining of different loyalties and senses of belonging. At the cultural level, we can try to bring up-to-date the intellectual tradition going from Ortega y Gasset (1930) to Salvador de Madariaga (1952), who both considered European culture as an interconnected system, in which the development of a national culture cannot be understood without taking into consideration the exchanges with the other cultures. Europe and its Others Signatures are not enough appeals are of no use to rid us of our smooth guilt; the intellectual is guilty, for centuries Europe with its principles has been guilty, the missionary who preaches resignation is guilty, the state which preaches segregation is guilty, the army which crushes to be obedient is guilty. Racial hatred plunges down onto us once more… Non bastano le firme non servono gli appelli a toglierci di dosso levigate colpe: l’intellettuale ha colpa, da secoli l’Europa coi suoi principi ha colpa, il missionario che predica rassegnazione ha colpa, lo stato che predica segregazione ha colpa, la milizia che in obbedienza schiaccia ha colpa. L’odio di razza ci ripiomba addosso… Nelo Risi, from Dentro la sostanza, 1965, in Poeti italiani del secondo Novecento 1945–1955 (Cucchi and Giovanardi 1996).

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The lines cited above and the date on which they were published – in the middle of the decade that was characterized by anti-imperialist struggles worldwide – reflect a distancing from Eurocentric attitudes which has continued well beyond this period, even if in a way that is sometimes underground and blunted. Indeed, this distancing may now be one of the impediments to the development of a concept that offers a positive prognosis for a European identity. Eurocentric attitudes continue to exist more or less implicitly, because although they have been rejected, they have never been discussed or analysed in any great detail. Above all, their rejection was a reaction to the criticism that came from those who had been designated as “others” by the Eurocentric subject: “what characterised the experience of the Europeans was also the experience of its victims” (Goody 1993: 815). On the cultural level, victims were often constituted by processes of assimilation which at the same time privileged and recompensed them, rendering the very use of the term “victim” incongruous. And again, the other was often to be found within Europe. In order to understand Europeanization from this viewpoint – as the levelling of other cultures to a Western norm and the difficulty of halting this process – it is useful to read the criticism of Eurocentric attitudes, drafted in Moscow in 1909–1910 by Trubeckoj, and published in Sofia in 1920 (Trubeckoj 1982). Trubeckoj proposed a “negative orientation” that tends “to place the reader in front of a void” (Jakobson 1982). It is only by means of negative orientation that a process which today we might call deconstructive might be initiated, as the premise of a process of construction whose direction can only be prefigured by its protagonists. In Trubeckoj’s essay, both egocentricism and eccentrism (i.e., the placing of the centre beyond oneself, in this case in Western Europe) were rejected. But this idea formed only the first part of a trilogy that remained unfinished on account of his premature death. The controversy over the Eastern border of Europe goes back centuries, but the formula “from the Atlantic to the Urals” has still not lost its attraction. The process of breaking down the Soviet empire, reunifying the two Germanies and ultimately Europe, which began in 1989, has rendered more acute an awareness that federal events tended to be based in Western Europe; this made the question of what it means to be “European” even more difficult to answer. The war in the former Yugoslavia tragically illustrated the possibility and reality of interEuropean conflicts of all dimensions. All this accentuates the need to maintain the distance between the European construction, on the one

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hand, and identity as a dimension of culture and subjectivity, on the other: any observations on a kind of Europeanness capable of embracing both the West and the East (including Russia) is, in cultural terms, a task which could be begun immediately. For example, observations on how to integrate scattered items and common experiences without negating the discontinuity of the continent can be initiated straight away (see, for instance, the atlas of Central and Eastern Europe by Michel Foucher, 1993). One fruitful direction of work has been to find the idea of Europe in the literary production (Bonneville 1961; Lützeler 1992; Valentino 1990), and more recently the idea of European identity within a framework of histoire des mentalités (Astier and de Grève 1993). Literary history is recognized to have a “European structure,” within the European literary polycentrism, characterized by “constitutive dis-union” (Moretti 1993: 844–46). The attention to the literary sphere recalls the importance of translation for the creation of intersubjective relationships between Europe and the world (Barret-Ducrocq 1992). On the one hand, translation is considered a model of communication and mediation that can be very useful for Europe (Koslowski 1992) but, on the other hand, the field of translation makes cultural hierarchies and the different roles of various national languages more evident. In any case, the literary field will prove crucial for studies on European identity. One of the most interesting aspects could be the role of writers such as Czeslaw Milosz and Milan Kundera in insisting on the idea of Europe in the period when the continent was divided under the influences of the USA and the USSR (Milosz 1980; Kundera 1993). For many years, forms of European identity were also – but not only – built up through contrasts (Mayne 1972) and oppositions, creating various forms of orientalism and occidentalism. Europe’s “other” shifted from Asia, Africa, and then to America – or to some peoples of these continents. The European ambivalence towards these “others” manifested itself in two different but indivisible relations: concrete relations with non-European peoples (political, military, socioeconomic, and missionary) through colonial expansion, and imaginary relations, created through images that derived not from observation or experience but from psychological drives (Baudet 1965). The other was therefore both the primitive – a store of positive values which might rejuvenate a corrupt civilization and act as a touchstone for European progress – and the “savage” to be exploited, converted, and “civilized”. The very translation of the customs and attitudes of

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others into European languages – with their own metaphors, stylistic characteristics, and forms of inertia – was a form of assimilation, which took place through the accounts of travellers, missionaries and anthropologists (Asad and Dixon 1985). The figure of the other, however, has also been projected onto the country which overtook Europe on the road to modernity and progress – the United States. This projection was so strong that it created in Europe persistent trends of anti-Americanism (Nacci 1989, 1996), which were often ways of either claiming ex negativo forms of European identity or expressing the crisis of this idea. It is for this reason that the concept of the West, which includes Europe and Northern America and particularly the United States, is particularly ambiguous and conflictual. A part of the “negative” patrimony constituted by European representations of others can be reversed and translated in order to bestow value on processes of cultural interaction and to remind us that an implicit Europeanness has frequently become conscious only through the experience of migration or travel to other continents, above all for the working strata of the population. While the contributions made by “subaltern studies,” in particular their emphasis on the positionality of any scientific view (Spivak 1988), are essential for understanding the relationship between Europe and its others, it is useful to refer to the discourse on critical ethnocentricism proposed by Ernesto De Martino in Italy. For De Martino, “Europeancentrism,” inasmuch as it has always made reference to a privileged relation with the divine, has excluded “confrontation between human beings” and has compromised “the fight against the dispersion of peoples” (De Martino 1977: 333). In contrast, the unification of peoples and cultures is a concrete duty and task for Europeans to carry out, and certainly not a plan pre-established by God or materialism, given that history continually risks losing any kind of sense without the active intervention of human beings to provide it with some. The onset of this task is based on the twofold presupposition that one cannot help being ethnocentric, but that one can make critical use of Western interpretive categories, going beyond “the scandal of reciprocal incomprehension, the extreme scarcity of common memories,” and accepting the sentiment of “guilt and remorse towards the ‘separated brother’ ” (De Martino 1977: 393). The objective is “therefore neither a dogmatic Eurocentricism nor an unrelated cultural relativism,” but “a critical European-centrism,” aimed at founding a new solidarity in human relations on our planet. While I agree entirely with De Martino’s

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idea that in this undertaking “it is not a matter of eliminating the West but of questioning it deeply, and of becoming aware of the limits of its humanism, which to date has been corporative,” I also believe that it is no longer possible to return to the West “its compromised hegemonic power” (De Martino 1977: 352). De Martino’s proposal has to be corrected in the sense that the loss of the role that Europe held as the “centre” must be fully admitted, to the benefit of the search for its cultural specificities, and without any pretensions of superiority. What is left as ethnocentric is the point of view of the individual, connoted in the belonging to a certain gender, generation, and social and geographical location. This approach attempts to stake out a perspective for cultural identity which finds the other within the subject herself (Màdera 1997) and which links identity with alterity. The break with the expectation of the superiority of one’s own tradition is accompanied by the assertion of one’s heritage and the possibility of correcting this through the reciprocity of intercultural exchanges. For example, the value of peace – mediated by other world cultures and by European minorities – can be integrated into the European tradition which has been mainly warlike, sparing only the wars of the critical spirit and claiming from our past the arms of criticism, while rejecting the form of criticism that employs arms. From this perspective, European cultural identity takes a step forward towards the world and makes a commitment towards the unification of humanity, not in the guise of a counter position or an hegemony, but as a reversal of most European history and as a duty to be undertaken in the name of the future. On this view, proposals that invite Europe and its institutions to act as intermediaries between the local, regional, national and global make sense. As do those that ask, on the cultural plane, that the European project be placed between national or local revivals and cultural aspirations of a global dimension (A.D. Smith 1992; Picht 1993). These positions render out-of-date the old debate between pan-Europeans and anti-Europeans (today often dressed up as Euro-sceptics) and proposes a solution to the twofold need for rendering justice to universalist aspirations and for finding cultural roots (Lenoble 1992). “Being European” Milan has sunsets of red gold. One viewpoint just like another

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were the vegetable gardens of the suburbs after the large houses of the “Umanitaria” School. Between hedges of sambuco and some small doorways made of tin and broken shutters the smell of a coffee factory together with the distant sound of the foundries. Because of that rust which reigned invisible because of that sun which set larger in Piedmont in France who knows where it felt as though I was in Europe; my mother knew very well that I wouldn’t be staying with her for much longer and yet she smiled against a background of dahlias and clustered violets. Milano ha tramonti rosso oro. Un punto di vista come un altro erano gli orti di periferia dopo i casoni della “Umanitaria”. Tra siepi di sambuco e alcuni uscioli fatti di latta e di imposte sconnesse, l’odore di una fabbrica di caffè si univa al lontano sentore delle fonderie. Per quella ruggine che regnava invisibile per quel sole che scendeva più vasto in Piemonte in Francia chissà dove mi pareva di essere in Europa; mia madre sapeva benissimo che non le sarei stato a lungo vicino eppure sorrideva su uno sfondo di dalie e viole ciocche. Luciano Erba, from L’ippopotamo, 1989, in Poeti italiani del secondo Novecento 1945–1955 (Cucchi and Giovanardi 1996).

From the viewpoint of the history of mentalities and attitudes, few peoples have held themselves to be at the centre of a European particularity; most peoples have experienced and continue to experience Europe as something to which they belong, but where they also feel they represent something separate. This was true for many years of Great Britain (Passerini 1999), but also of Portugal and Spain (Lourenço 1991; Luca Pires 1992; Diez del Corral 1954), and certainly of Greece (Herzfeld 1998). European identity has for a long time included hier-

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archies and exclusions – a “Europe-Europe” and a “lesser Europe” (Lourenço 1991: 73). Although in the last few decades the conviction has become stronger that the centre and the periphery are now everywhere, for many the sense of not forming a full part of Europe is still strong. This sensation can be linked to the difficulties of participating in the European Union, a participation which is rendered problematic by, for example, monetary unification, although it is not only a matter of a reaction to material problems. There is also, and not only in Italy, the attribution of an ideal and normative value to Europe, as if taking an active part in it meant freeing oneself from weaknesses, public vices, and national ills. In Italy, great political and idealistic value has always been attributed to the Europeanness of the country and its culture (Pistone 1982), although in a dreamlike way, as in Erba’s poem above. There is still, or perhaps it is simply perceptible once again, a utopian colouring linked to the idea of entering Europe or of “keeping pace with Europe” or of managing to “catch the European train,” to use some of the many metaphors which have appeared in the debate on forms of collaboration between the countries of the Union. Thus it is that a hope is expressed, spreading throughout daily life into the opinions of the public at large, which may irritate the Euro-sceptics, but which stimulates cultural historians. The strong hopes that Europe catalyzes, including “the introduction of the private into the political” and the integration of a female politics with equal rights onto the same footing as male politics (Hausen 1993), should not be seen as a political programme to be put into practice immediately, but as a preliminary or cultural condition that reveals some of the potential of Europe. The results of this condition may well depend on the kind of cultural commitment made by intellectuals, teachers, and cultural operators. There can be no doubt, for example, that pedagogic activity with regard to Europe in forms which include its emotional and relational aspects is only beginning to be addressed in education. The question of what should be taught about Europe and its possible cultural identity is now presenting itself as a concrete issue in secondary schools (Shennan 1991). To conclude, I shall return to the discourse on European cultural identity, assuming that we have moved sufficiently towards the “other heading,” to use the title of the essay by Derrida on the theme of identity (Derrida 1992). “Europe has always recognised itself as a cape of headland” (Derrida 1992: 20), and the first heading was Europe

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itself, that is, that “small sticking-out peninsula which wants to represent at all costs ‘men’s progress’ with respect to Asia” (Nietzsche 1988a). Moving to the other heading, therefore, can mean renouncing the claim of being the vanguard of progress and centre of knowledge, and accepting one’s position on the other side. It seems to me that, in relation to this, Derrida’s criticism of Valéry is extremely significant – this latter had expressed what we might call the Eurocentric paradox: “our special quality (sometimes our ridicule, but often our finest claim or title) is to believe and to feel that we are universal – by which I mean: men of universality... Notice the paradox: to specialise in the sense of the universal” (Derrida 1992: 74). Derrida’s response implies that “to be men of universality” cannot be the exclusive right of the Europeans, and he highlights the two concepts which even today divide European consciousness: whether to accept foreigners by assimilating them or by acknowledging their otherness. Derrida ends by accepting something of the above-mentioned multiple identity – “I am not, nor do I feel, European in every part, that is, European through and through”; “my cultural identity – that in the name of which I speak – is not only European, it is not identical to itself”; “I feel European among other things”; “it is up to the others, and up to me among them, to decide” (Derrida 1992: 82–83). However, he makes important modifications and clarifications. For example, multiplicity takes on a twofold meaning: first, in regard to European identity, belonging to the continent is not only not interpreted as dominant (that is to say, it is not the value that hierarchically organizes a whole set of other values). Secondly and above all, identity can include being European, being born in Africa, being male and of Jewish origin, as well as belonging to a certain generation and social class, with the understanding that all these determinations are not thrown together higgledy-piggledy in an exaltation of undifferentiated multiplicity. Being European among other things means both being among the others and taking on roles that have traditionally been assigned to those who represented for many years the other, such as Jews, women, and immigrants, and therefore taking side with those who today are cast in the role of representing the other. Framing this perception in terms of the feminist tradition, Rosi Braidotti has written that European identity has always been “a notion fraught with contradictions” and has “never been One,” so that “its alleged unity was at best a poor fiction” (Braidotti 1994: 9–10). She believes that Europe has forged its position during the course of his-

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tory as the centre not only of the world economy but also of thought, knowledge, and science. At the symbolic and discursive level this implies that “others” are relegated to the position of entities which are of necessity peripheral and underrated. At the roots of her own feeling of “Europeanness,” according to Braidotti, was “not the triumphant assumption of a sovereign identity but rather the disenchanting experience of dis-identifying myself with sovereignty all together”: the Europe to which she feels she belongs is the place of possible forms of resistance to the systematic devaluation of the other, and to the destructive conflicts to which this leads. “To be European today” – an expression which is typical of both Ursula Hirschmann and Braidotti – means positioning oneself within the historical contradictions of the European identity and experiencing “the political need to turn them into spaces of critical resistance to hegemonic identities of all kind” (Braidotti 1994: 8). Despite the fact that the subject of feminist nomadism does fall into the trap of triumphalism when she exalts “the joyful nomadic force,” the position that Braidotti proposes – of resistance to our past – is a primary stage in the criticism of European cultural heritage. According to Agnes Heller, it is true that Europeans are old, but at the same time Europe is young, given that “a European culture as such has never existed but it could develop in the future” (Heller 1992: 25). It is from this point of view, a projection towards the future, that I will now draw a conclusion. I would like to take a position beyond the alternative of those that completely negate the possibility or the sense of a European identity and those that formalize it within a community based on values and attitudes expressing a single kind of European spirit. My approach is rather to research forms of identity which are problematic, critical, and linked to a “non-sovereign” subject (Bhabha 1990), where these are not based on exclusion or on a contrast in regard to others, but are capable of recognizing differences within ourselves, our worlds and the world. This presupposes maintaining the tension between knowledge and practice, politics and culture, ideas and emotions, as well as searching incessantly for their links. In addition, it means being aware of the foundational character of intersubjectivity as a horizon for new identities, open to receiving the “newborn” in the Arendtian sense, from the new generations to “foreigners” in multiple meanings, without losing a sense of one’s self and the direction of one’s own itinerary.

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The title of this essay refers to two kinds of detachment: in the first place, to the kind that is necessary in order to recognize the aporiae, nemesis, and tricks which the fate of Europe has played on the identities linked with it; in the second, to the kind that is indispensable to capturing the tension within the self and between the self and the other. This last point is aimed at reminding that identities and masks (personae) are linked, and also that acting one or more parts on a stage composed of concentric circles – the city, the country, Europe, the world – cannot be separated from an attitude which is ironic at least in part towards the performance and one’s role. To express the hope that future identities are ironic means hoping that they will be strong enough to oscillate, move, and change, and that they will not have to base themselves on rigidities and exclusions – as did identities born in times of economic scarcity and cultural contraposition. It also means hoping that they will always allow irony to be shown towards themselves and towards the illusions of grandeur and the hegemonic expectations of the old subject.

Chapter 5 THE LAST IDENTIFICATION: WHY SOME OF US WOULD LIKE TO CALL OURSELVES EUROPEANS AND WHAT WE MEAN BY THIS

It was a naive Europe of hope Never again, never again – it swore …the belied Europe where Koenigsberg was Kaliningrad. Era un’Europa ingenua di speranza Mai più, mai più – giurava ….l’Europa mentita dove Koenigsberg fu Kaliningrad. Giovanni Giudici, Eresia della sera (1999). “Europe is absent,” wrote W.H. Auden in a poem of 1936, at exactly the same time as the civil war was starting in Spain – the prologue to the European civil war of a few years later. Today, the absence of Europe is perceptible once more, although this time it is taking a different form. The void of its absence could be taken at that time to indicate a third way, towards a future open to new forms of human relationships and love, as the poets in the Spanish civil war expressed in their poems. It was thus possible for utopians to transform the absence of Europe into a dream of peace and justice. But this dream has been shattered by the Cold War and a division of the continent as extreme as ever, by which Europe came to be restricted to its West, experiencing a caesura more political than geographical, and more ideological than cultural (Matvejevic 1998). Following the European

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wars of the last ten years, Europe’s absence has come to mean impotence and a lack of initiative, with a sense of uncertainty about its own territory, and confusion and subordination in relation to the United States. These wars have shown that we still live under the repercussions of the checkmate of the European Defense Community in the 1950s (Frank 1998), which was the defeat of a project of an independent European military force. Europe, which after 1989 might have finally become such in a full sense, is still in fact elusive. After the “naive Europe of hope” and the “belied Europe” of ideology and oppression, as the poet says in his Elegy of the Evening, can there be any Europe at all for us? In particular, what is a Europe meaningful at the level of subjectivity and intersubjectivity? Who Identifies with Whom? A First Meaning of “Last” I agree with many interpreters that, in order to treat the absence of Europe, the task should not be one of a quest for identity (Niethammer 2000a; Perniola 2000). Certainly it should not be for an identity understood as harmony (Dumoulin 1998), and not even for an identity understood in its basic sense as a coincidence with itself, with ourselves (Fethi Benslama, in Penser l’Europe 1993). Europe is by definition supposed to be never identical with itself (Balibar, in Penser l’Europe 1993), and therefore the paradox of its identity is, in the best of cases, an allusion to the future: “European self-reflection is already the index of its non-self-identity. It constitutes a self-knowledge, yes, but also a sign of a Europe to come, a Europe which must be chosen” (Burgess 1997b). If we want to call ourselves Europeans, for reasons I will try to explore, we should be aware that this cannot mean adopting any old form of identity. I have already indicated that a crucial step is to substitute “identity” with “identification” (Bhabha 1990). In fact, one of the biggest risks is that of reifying identity, in other words treating it as though it were a thing, as is implied in expressions such as “having/ assuming/abandoning an identity.” These expressions must be understood as possessive metaphors that make the identification processes rigid rather than flexible as they are in reality. Through such processes, individual subjects constitute themselves on the basis of common interests, ideologies and memories and recognize themselves as part of a group cause. The relationship between the individual and the collectivity is crucial in this matter: “l’identité pose la question de

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la relation entre l’individu et la collectivité” (Pfetsch 1999); “une identité implique la reconnaissance d’une appartenance à une communauté” (Dumoulin 1998). Use of the idea of identification allows one to highlight the relationship between the individual and various collectivities – and therefore the relationship between and the nature of historical subjects – avoiding, or at least reducing, the risk of reification implicit in the term “identity.” Furthermore, it can bring to light the differing degrees of investment placed in identity in different historical periods (for example, in the process of constituting a social movement in its earliest phases, statu nascenti, or during the period of decline of a collective identity). Decades ago, Freud already preferred to use the term “identification.” I do not, however, wish to suggest any form of taboo regarding the term “identity,” both because the heated debate that has been going on for years cannot be resolved in a nominalistic manner, and because this term represented a great deal, in a progressive sense, for the political movements of the 1960s and 1970s, in spite of the exaggerations and degenerations. At any rate, use of the term “identification” seems pertinent for the historian’s work, since it emphasizes both the dynamic element and the factor of personal choice. The processes of identification can be more or less intense, more or less partial, more or less dressed up with fanaticism. They are part of a broader process of subjectivation, by which one becomes the subject of one’s own life in a given time and place, gaining the ability to formulate decisions, strategies, alliances and loyalties. The idea of property implicit in the reification cannot be overcome by simply excluding words such as “having” or “possessing” from the language; it reappears, in fact, in expressions like “to take part” or “to belong” in relation to the experience of a feeling of belonging. In these last cases, however, the direction is inverted: it is not the subject that possesses something defined as an identity, but rather it is the subject who is possessed in one way or another. The question of property has to do with deep feelings, and therefore it cannot be eliminated so easily, nor can it be ignored. Here too, though, it would seem more promising to try to configure these phenomena as processes of investing affection – or, as I prefer to say, of affective investment – where “possession” and “belonging” take on a more fluid and complex meaning, that is, as intersubjective relationships related to psychological dynamics rather than states which are defined once and for all in isolated subjects.

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Processes of identification are historical processes, in the sense that they follow, overlap and modify one another. I have in mind my own experience, which is held in common with what is often referred to as the 1968 generation (see Chapter Three). In this experience, the identification processes that took place during the 1960s and 1970s included forms of self-consciousness and self-recognition that went beyond and against possible forms of European identification, at least on a conscious level. Beginning with local and regional identification and often refusing the idea of nationality, that generation’s processes of identity investment arrived at subjective figures based on class and political orientation, but also – in a more innovative way – on gender and generation. That meant, for example, not feeling Italian, given the aversion to the nationalistic rhetoric first of the fascists and later of the Christian Democrats. It did mean, on the other hand, basing identification on belonging to sites much smaller than the nation, such as a city or a university – often elective places rather than places of birth. It also meant identifying oneself with anti-imperialist and internationalist movements, in whose eyes Europe appeared exclusively as a subject of colonialism, accomplice to the United States, which was in turn referred to as the gendarme of world imperialism. Calling oneself European would have been the same as identifying oneself with the neocolonialist project, and accepting the meaning of “European” as white. It also meant creating and identifying with those segments of the left and the new left that referred explicitly to the working classes as the privileged subject of social and political change (a more or less dilated proletariat depending on the various interpretations of the term). The identification processes eventually led many members of that generation to recognize themselves implicitly as young and explicitly as women or as gays, and to base alliances and primary collective identities on this self-recognition. These processes implied a continual redrawing of the individual and collective subjects’ self-representations. Europe was excluded, except for a few references – such as the discourse on the similarity between the revolt against the bureaucracies of Eastern Europe and that against the capitalism of Western Europe (Arendt 1972) – and a few particular moments, for example, when minorities of the 1968 student movement recognized the importance of the events of Prague in that year, even though in a contradictory and incomplete fashion. Edgar Morin has written of the slow process of his becoming aware of

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the European dimension of politics: “longtemps, je fus ‘anti-européen’ ” (Morin 1987: 9). For workerism – a widespread attitude in the new left of the 1970s – relationships with the working classes of various countries, including the United States which were considered just as important if not more than Europe in this respect, were of primary importance. As for feminism, it only took on a full European dimension after 1989; previously the exchanges between French, Italian, British, German, Dutch, Scandinavian and Spanish women (to name a few of the international networks, which in the 1980s often shifted from feminist politics in its strict sense to academic, publishing and organizational activities) took place in an exclusively Western European theatre. In this overlapping of turbulent itineraries of political and existential engagement, which tried to find a “meaning” capable of bringing the individual and various possible collectivities together, identifications mixed and hybrids emerged. A young woman struggling for the emancipation of the proletariat or of her own gender, for example, encompassed various possible identifications which manifested themselves at different times or in various constellations of values. These processes were neither suggested nor imposed by conditions inherited at birth, even though they were strongly conditioned by living in a certain place at a certain time. With the exception of the gender movements, such processes were influenced by a strong pan-politicism, traces of which can still be seen in the publications and the attitude of the remaining exponents of the new left. Those formations always gave pride of place to political motivations, even in the formation of individual subjectivity, including its artistic and existential manifestations. Even as strong a component as religiosity was seen primarily in a political light when taken as a founding element of identity, and only in a second instance was it seen as justification for social action. Feminism alone was able to avoid being weighed down by the panpolitical bias. Those processes of political identification belong, for the most part, to the past, given the decline of the collective subjects that they referred to. Other identifications which had been either buried or denied (national belonging, for example) or which had been subterranean and semiconscious (such as an interest for the environment) have appeared. Another important example in this sense is that many members of that generation have discovered new forms of belonging, for instance to Jewish culture, only after the experience of identification

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with the working class and/or with women. Words like “belonging,” “loyalty” and “allegiance” have therefore taken on new meanings and new adjectives. Even what I defined in the title as “the last identification” has been able to appear. The adjective “last” in this expression has many possible meanings: the first is that of the most recent, the Latin novissimus, the last to be born. Indeed only recently have intellectuals, but also a general public with more or less cultural baggage, begun to talk again about Europeanness, after having – for decades – nearly completely forgotten the debates on the idea of Europe and its utopian potential. What brought the 1968 generation to begin developing, slowly and unsteadily, a European identification? I feel that the following are at least a few of the reasons for this “last” identification: the discovery of the cultural dimension of public action, beyond or independently of strictly political engagement, and the discovery, through works of cultural history, of the utopian dimension of the idea of Europe, which had been strong in the period between the two world wars (Passerini 1999) with a potential which was then annihilated (though rediscoverable) by World War 2. One can add here the lasting desire for internationalism combined with an awareness of the need to proceed one step at a time, and to find intermediate forms between the kinds of belonging possible today and those of the future alluded to in the metaphor “citizens of the world”; add to this a feeling of reconciliation with the generation of the Resistance and in particular a reevaluation of the liberal-socialist branch represented in Italy by Piero Gobetti and the Rosselli brothers, a branch with a very strong sense of European culture and Europeanness (Communism, with the exception of a few of Lenin’s catch words and Trotskism in general, was never Europeanist). This new, tentative identification could literally be the last for us, but not for future generations. One of the reasons for expressing and elaborating it is precisely the need for each generation to take a position on crucial issues and to hand over a position to later generations as a term for comparison. Other identifications with Europe are possible; new generations will have other ways of founding, understanding and giving meaning to their investments in identification, just as there have been others in the past that we no longer find valid. Our very identification with Europe remains to be defined. An example may be useful to make this task more concrete. Surveys and studies show that a gender gap exists in public support for

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the European Union and that it emerges particularly in countries where the European Union is perceived as depriving women of their social and political achievements, such as Denmark and Greece (Liebert 1997). This consideration, as well as that on the “other” democratic deficit, namely, the one concerning women in the EU (Mushaben 1994), indicate that there is a specific need to connect possible new identifications as Europeans with the type of social and political identities based on gender (but the argument could be extended, I believe, to age- or generation-based and ethnic identities) which have emerged, through many transformations, since the 1970s. There are reasons for believing that identity understood in the sense of the women’s movement, that is, based on specificities that include the body and individuality together with the acceptance of differences, could provide a basis for an identity investment in favour of Europe. We should not be in a hurry to propose materializations of this identity, images or representations that codify it. These could hardly escape being contrived, because we are at the end of a process, and possibly at the beginning of another. So far there has been too little time for the latter in a question such as symbolic order, which requires a great deal of time. We drag millennium-long conflicts along with us, these weigh on us, and the symbols connected with them are often simultaneously obsolete and compelling. Take, for example, the conflicts over the creation of a flag – symbol of identity – for the European Council at the beginning of the 1950s, officially adopted later by the Community in May 1986 (Lager 1994) and inherited by the European Union. In the negotiations, which lasted more than five years, several proposals were thrown out: the federalist movement’s green E on a white field because it could be confused with the initial letter of “England,” the setting sun as symbol of the West because it was deemed less than promising, and the Pan-European movement’s cross because it was historically opposed to Turkey’s crescent moon. If these reasons seem partially ridiculous, we could point out that in the bureaucratic or institutional creation of symbols, irrelevance and the ridiculous often lie in waiting. The choice of blue was justified in a similar manner (it was the only colour left after Africa had been given black, Asia yellow, America red and Australia green), as were the stars (after considering various other possibilities, the number twelve was chosen to represent both unity and difference). In spite of their irrelevance, the three reasons listed above for rejecting the various symbols reflect ancient and deep conflicts, and their reappearance

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could impinge on a number of people’s feelings (Hersant 2002). At the same time, we cannot expect objects produced in this manner to command immediate emotional value. That will depend on many factors, and it is quite possible that the symbols of new European identification are taking shape elsewhere, in places that are not immediately visible. A Second Meaning of “Last.” Discontinuity of History and finis Europae The second meaning of “last” when applied to European identification is connected to the recent revival of the idea of Europe as the land of the West, of the evening, of the setting sun; the discourse on the finis Europae, which was already present during the years between the two world wars in the form of a debate on the crisis of civilization, is reinterpreted today with a new, cunning attitude towards nostalgia. I find that the discipline of philosophy has made some important contributions in this sense, providing critical re-readings of some philosophies of the past, in particular of Nietzsche and Husserl. While philosophy is not my field of competence, I recognize in it procedures and intentions similar to those of my own research. Personally, I am trying to trace the elements determining identity in Europe in both the recent and remote past, whether coming from the “left” or the “right,” reconstructing historically what people have believed that being European has meant through history. The intention is to pass through these determining elements and to abandon them, drawing awareness from them along the way, not as examples, but as terms of comparison. In this historical itinerary I am firmly intentioned to give up continuity. It is impossible to impose a direct derivation and linear path from the Greeks to Maastricht (Nemo 1997) without forcing the issue to the point of being counterproductive. It is better to think of Europe primarily as a space where certain processes can be perceived and which, therefore, extends itself to different places in different periods, since from one phenomenon to another and from one historical thought to another (to be understood as premises, even ex negativo, for the positions that we are seeking) there is an abyss and a leap, to use Kierkegaard’s terms, both in the short and in the long term. Thus the points gathered through historical research – to be used in establishing at least a partial consonance or radical distances – are punctuated by rupture and by things “other” than themselves, that contradict them; they are not fixed points. They must, however, be

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re-examined in order to distinguish what is to be accepted and what to be refused when constructing a future image. Among the philosophical interpretations I found the rereadings of Nietzsche suggested by Faye (1996) and by Cacciari (1994) to be particularly useful. Faye reminds us that in the 1950s equivalence was established – even among historians of the European idea such as Bernard Voyenne (1964) – between the Europeanism of Hitler and that of Nietzsche, with its strong component of anti-semitism. Today, however, we can see that in the Nachlass, the posthumous fragments written by Nietzsche in June 1885, after he had finished writing the fourth part of Zarathustra (published independently at the author’s expense), ideas which strongly contrast anti-semitism are expressed. In Faye’s interpretation, the closer Nietzsche moves towards Europe, the more anti-nationalist and opposed to anti-semitism he becomes. For him the “good Europeans,” the “dear Europeans,” distinguish themselves from “les hommes de patrie” who are nationalist. The “wissen übereuropäisch” – which for Nietzsche characterizes the good European – is understood by Faye as meaning an extra-European knowledge, “un savoir extra-européen,” and not, as others do, as “supra-européen” (Faye 1996: 203). However, Faye is not convinced of the equivalence between the good European and the Shadow, one of the figures which Zarathustra meets in the fourth section of Also Sprach Zarathustra. On the contrary, the critical edition of Nietzsche by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari establishes this equivalence beyond any doubt, and this enriches the notion of a good European. One of the figures that Zarathustra meets in his search for the superior man (höheren Menschen, not the übermensch), called Schatten, the Shadow, or Nachfolger, the follower (of Zarathustra), is defined in the text as “slight, dark, hollow and spent” (English quotations from Hollingdale [1969: 284, 314–19] and German ones from Nietzsche [1988b: 329, 337]). The Shadow suggests that Zarathustra call him “good European” and presents himself as forever travelling like the eternal Wandering Jew – “except that I am neither eternal nor a Jew” – “always going but without a goal and without a home.” In the Colli-Montinari edition, footnotes identify the Shadow with the good European, with decisive quotations from annotations made in Nietzsche’s own hand, where Zarathustra’s double is described as “der Unstäte, Heimatlose, Wanderer – der sein Volk verlernt hat zu lieben, weil er viele Völker liebt, der gute Europäer,” (unstable, without a fatherland, wanderer – who has

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forgotten how to love his own people because he loves many people). In other notes he is defined as a disenchanted survivor, a weak pleasure seeker, clownish and without aim. Furthermore, when the Shadow sings his post-convivial song (“Among the Daughters of the Desert”), he refers several times to Europe and to his being European. Among other things he reminisces that in the desert he was “farthest away from cloudy, damp, melancholy Old Europe”; at the beginning of the song he notes the unusualness for him of a state of tranquility: “I/ for the first time,/ A European under palm-trees,/ Am permitted to sit,” and reminds us, sarcastically, that his usual state is doubt and restlessness: “I call in question,/ – since I come from Europe,/ Which is more skeptical than/ Any little old wife.” The final two verses of the song insist on the theme of his identity: “And here I stand now,/ As European,/ I cannot do otherwise, so help me God!/ Amen!”. Thus appears a figure who has ironically overturned his own Eurocentrism, transforming the expansionist colonial tendency in wandering aimlessly, becoming merely a shadow of himself, a carnival clown. His laughter has allowed him to erase the idea of hierarchical superiority, the claims to universalism. He has no nostalgia and mocks continuity. He constantly roams a territory which is a land of lack, of absence and doubt. Of course, it is impossible to propose a positive interpretation of the Shadow tout court, but it is precisely his ambivalence that makes him so precious as a referential image, a critique of the pompous versions that give a triumphalistic idea of the inheritance of European culture. The vision of Europe proposed by Cacciari (1994) is in part inspired by Nietzsche’s vision. Europe is the land of values in decline, of their uprooting, but there is more: it is the West in itself, that is, the setting sun of the same energy that imposed those values through its own will. At the end of its itinerary Europe does not appear to surpass those values, but rather to “simply” desecrate them, thus demystifying the claim that they are being surpassed. The West – in the sense of sunset – of those values coincides with that of the will to overcome, and gives rise to the hybrid European man in his farcical appearance, deriding the intellectual’s restlessness. The West truly fulfills its history when it poses the problem of its own West. Europe must desire itself as the West of its own history. The European mind carries within itself its own decline, both as a promise and as the greatest danger (Cacciari 1994: 71, 157). Cacciari then moves on to a rereading of Heidegger, in order to insist on the idea of decline or sunset: to de-

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cline is to interrogate all the representations of the West, to carry them to their conclusion, to fulfill them. Europe is free to not desire its decline – and this is the crucial difference in respect to Oswald Spengler – to not second it, to not participate in it, to struggle for its own values or for the desecration of all values as its own new value, but in this way its task, according to which “decline” means re-turning to the very foundations, is forgotten (Cacciari 1994: 166–67). Similar tones could be heard at the meeting held in Strasbourg in 1992 (with the participation of various intellectuals, animated by Denis Guénoun, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy and Daniel Payot) on the question of the European frontier, taking a rereading of Husserl as starting point (Penser l’Europe 1993). The call for participation referred to Husserl’s lecture, given in Vienna in 1935, where the philosopher proposed a surprisingly positive image of Europe in connection with philosophy, since both have a common origin in ancient Greece. In the course of the colloquium, Derrida replied that Europe today derives from Auschwitz as well as from Greece, Christianity, and the Revolutions of 1789 and 1917; therefore the question of what can be called Europe must be asked from the viewpoint of the experience of cancelling names and destroying memory represented by Auschwitz. For Derrida this implies “rompre avec l’idée d’une unité européenne comme unité d’une histoire comprise entre son commencement et sa fin,” to break with the idea of a European unity understood as the unity of a history enclosed between its beginning and its end, thus indicating once more that the notion of the discontinuity of history must be introduced. In the same meeting, Etienne Balibar insisted on the need to “think” the limits of Europe, to “think” its frontiers and to proceed beyond the confines, also in the imaginary, of the myths of progress and civilization. An observation which has recently been suggested in connection with Husserl’s idea of Europe is that, as well as the essentialism and positivity which it posits, it presents ethical priority as an ideal of renewal; viewed in this light the movement of freedom emerging from ancient Greece was not automatically realized by European culture, but has steadily become a task aiming at an ethic culture of all humanity (Sinigaglia 1999). In these interpretations and revisitations, a residue of Eurocentric essentialism can still be found, but there is also a search for Europe’s limits, in the form of an invitation to give up universal claims. A connecting thread of these philosophical undertakings, different as they are, is the idea that the finitude of Europe should at last be recognized

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and stated firmly, dissolving its claim to universality. Europe should accept its own particularity, reaching the frontier, and its own finitude, giving up resolutely the claim to embody the universal. Cacciari insists that it is precisely that which is absolutely distinct which always needs an “other” or a distance from an other in order to be “safe.” If Europe could “remember” its distinction in this way, its being apart, then perhaps it would succeed in expressing through its metamorphoses an idea of peace free from all fascination with conciliation or synthesis, and free from assimilating arbitrary pretensions (Cacciari 1994: 27). The commitment foreshadowed in these philosophical considerations moves in the direction of an overturning of the idea of culture as colonization, which, according to the research by Richard Waswo, is the founding story of Western and European civilization (Waswo 1997): this civilization comes from elsewhere, being brought by exiles from the East to the West, as in the master narrative about Aeneas. Besides retracing the steps of that myth, a line of thought could be developed according to which the capacity to inherit, and to be born again, is linked with the acceptance of the other, of that from whom one inherits (Yves Duroux in Penser l’Europe 1993). One guiding line should be the intention to operate a constructive criticism, and avoid the too easy way of throwing away rather than reworking the historical forms of European identity. A useful suggestion in this direction is given by those who have criticized the cultural constructs of the continents, and particularly the geographical framework which used to lead up to a cartographic celebration of European power. A new and critical meta-geography will combat residual Eurocentrism (as well as new forms of centrism, such as Afro-centrism), without completely abandoning the notion of continent, and aiming instead at a spatial imaginary with no special primacies, thus engaging in a thorough critique but avoiding nominalistic deconstruction: Europe, for example, may not be a continent, but it does effectively label an area that can be defined as a cultural region (Lewis and Wigen 1997). The Third Meaning of “Last” (At Last, Emotions – and Imagination) The dimension of emotion, which includes desire and love, can be considered “last” not in the sense of its genesis, given that it originates and gives birth, but in referring to the order in which it is accepted

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and studied by the socio-historical disciplines in comparison with other dimensions. In my view, it is particularly relevant for the questions we have been considering. Paying attention to emotional aspects does not in any way contradict the intellectual and political construction necessary for a European identity. In this way, I recognize the validity of the analysis that establishes a tension between a normative and a socio-psychological type of identity (Cerutti 1996); although different from mine, it is a converging way of approaching the same question. Recently, the emotional impact that the name of Europe can have, became clear as I was listening to a colleague from Sofia, Ivaylo Znepolski (1999), giving a talk about what he called “le désir d’identité européenne” on the part of Eastern Europeans. I interpret this expression not as meaning their desire to be or become European, since they already are European, but as a desire to be fully recognized as such – that is to say, an aspiration to be called Europeans in a full sense, and not to be considered as second-rate Europeans, as Slavenka Drakulic (1997) has expressed so powerfully in her writing. This desire was shared in the past by people of different countries, especially those countries which were often treated as peripheries of Europe in one way or other, from Greece to Britain. At the beginning of World War 2, in September 1939, the Greek intellectual Georgios Theotokas expressed this desire in an eloquent way: Nobody should ask me for opinions or theories. I know nothing, I am nothing, just a grain of sand in the storm. I feel only one thing, that I love Europe, as much as anyone can love Europe as a whole, like a big homeland, intact, indivisible and torn apart right to the flesh. I believe in Europe, her unity, her endless capacities for regeneration and renaissance… I believe in the end of the nightmare, in the salvation of the big continental organism, which for years now has lost the capacity to breath freely. I believe and I am waiting at the threshold of this new and painful age which has just begun and has already enveloped us entirely into its dark veils (Passerini 1999: 312).

In this he referred to a European space of memory and narration: “Oxford, the castles along the Loire, Florence, Venice, Dalmatia, Istanbul.” Five years later, in 1944, he wrote again about a “new Europe” as a “broad horizon of human amalgamations” (Thetokas 1996).

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In the same period, more precisely in 1943, Frank Thompson, a British intellectual who was to die fighting with the partisans in Bulgaria, wrote the following words: How wonderful it would be to call Europe one’s fatherland, and think of Krakow, Munich, Rome, Arles, Madrid as one’s own cities! I am not yet educated to a broader nationalism, but for a United States of Europe I could feel a patriotism far transcending my love for England. Differences between European peoples, though great, are not fundamental. What differences there are serve only to make the people mutually attractive. Not only is this Union the only alternative to disaster. It is immeasurably more agreeable than any way of life we have known to date (Passerini 1999: 312 quoting from F. Thompson 1947).

These words are historically dated: the authors use the language of nationalism (with their reference to a fatherland, though larger than the nation), the stereotyped metaphors of organicism for lands, the images of cities and landscapes treated with nostalgia as places for intellectual and existential pleasure. We cannot identify with these projections unless they are transformed and reformulated, and I do not believe that we are ready yet to find adequate words. While the old words for expressing love for Europe and the desire to be European are no longer usable, we have not yet found any new ones, because the process of detachment and re-attachment has to be taken much further. The root of this difficulty is that Europe’s identity crisis reflects a discursive crisis (Burgess 1997a), which affects language deeply, and language is crucial in the expression of sentiments. However, something that I would like to reinterpret or reformulate resonates in these declarations of love and desire – acknowledging the break which has taken place between them and us. I am not claiming a direct continuity from that time to ours. However, I do recognize through their words, which I could not utter myself, a feeling, an emotion, and a desire, in a situation in which Europe was torn apart and its name used in unrecognizable and unacceptable ways. Moreover, the distance is increased by the fact that part of the European space has been devastated by recent wars, and some of its regions are severely degraded by various types of pollution, including wild touristic consumption. In Theotokas’s and Thompson’s words a central element of emotion is given by mentioning the name of Europe, and the names in Europe – of places, cities, territories – as recognizable bases for imagi-

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nation and emotion, as signs of identification which go beyond the affective investment for the places where we are born or live or go through. I would like to share Frank Thompson’s directness and simplicity in saying that he chose to identify with Europe because it was “the only continent I really know quite well” (quoted in Passerini 1999: 313), with no need to find a justification in a supposed superiority of Europe in relationship to other continents. His attitude was the result of an emotional elaboration which went beyond his national or regional origin, and which could inspire others to accept – without any hubris of omnipotence – a geographical and cultural territory: I choose Europe because I came here or I found myself here and I have learnt to know it. Such a choice is in part inherited from the circumstances and in part made voluntarily. This is an immense subject and I will mention here only two of the connected aspects: the question of European space and that of the possible social subjects of the desire to be European. With regard to the first, I have in mind both a discursive space and a material one. It should be clear by now that I am not interested in fixing any borders, just the opposite: I am interested in widening this space. In quoting intellectuals and writers who felt European from the 1940s we have swept the continent from Krakow to Arles, from Dalmatia to Istanbul and, if we were to take the space referred to by Nietzsche as a reference, we would take in from Andalusia to Poland, from Strindberg’s Sweden to Byron’s England and Dostoevsky’s Russia (Faye 1996: 192). Therefore, it is primarily a literary space, a space of words, of communication, that unites different times and places, the “Europe of novel” of Milan Kundera (1993), but it is also a territorial space where it is possible to intervene concretely, an urban and rural landscape. Architects and urban planners have recently made contributions to the imagery of a European space, once again not in terms of defining borders, but as a potential for the realization of an architecture which should be no longer based on power, as it was in the past. Their words echo those of the philosophers. Their effort is to imagine an architecture that does not represent nations and empires or the dynastic aspirations of individual rulers or bureaucratic institutions, and which, on the contrary, is capable of outlining the specific inner characteristics of each small unit – this is clear in considerations based on recent works by several major architects practicing in the South and East of Europe (Kultermann 1994: 294).

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Another expert in architecture, Vittorio Gregotti, reminds us that Eurocentrism is partly induced or supported by ignorance and that what has been often taken as eminently European – the city – originated in Mesopotamia during the fourth millennium BCE; this reflects the multiple origins of European culture – not only from the GreekMycenaean civilization but also the Egyptian, Phoenician, Hittite and Mesopotamian ones. If Europe has in the past had a colonizing relationship with the world, it can now abandon that attitude and define itself within its own limits, starting from its own internal conditions. Gregotti’s vision of a European space is based on a criticism of the old type of utopia, namely, that “utopian will to control on the basis of egalitarianism which can have authoritarian degenerations,” and on the pre-figuration of a new utopia as a political program to reduce violence and “make use of diversity” (Gregotti 1999: 172). The new utopia “can establish a critical resistance to market relationships, a resistance which is necessary for the creation of spaces where specific inventions can take place and professional skill take forms leading to interrogation and dialogue,” thereby accepting the responsibility of sites and their history (Gregotti 1999: 177). I believe that this level of imagination does not project a utopia into the far future, but, rather, that it concerns the present, in as far as it has to do with various types of language and linguistic relationships. Once again, philosophy comes to our aid. Useful suggestions in order to envisage the question of space have been advanced by Ricoeur (1992), with his reflections on the ethics of “linguistic hospitality,” inspired by the art of transference implicit in the ethos of translation, and of “narrative hospitality,” which means taking responsibility for the story of the other in exchanging memories at the narrative level. These two suggestions can help us in reformulating the question of identity and identification, and in taking into account the dimension of discursive spaces. Our goal is to make Europe a discursive space in a true sense, where we can call ourselves Europeans and express forms of love which are not exclusive in spite of being specific towards lands and people. The role of emotions, through the mediation of language, thus becomes crucial – although not immediately, but as a horizon of self-recognition and intersubjective exchange. This way of moral and intellectual thinking, which includes sentiment, has much to do with imagination. Ricoeur’s proposal is an explicit way of exercising the political imagination, and is especially interesting because it conjugates the aspect of narrativity and discursiveness with an ethical approach.

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I would like to add that here too historical work can make its own contribution. This is why over the last few years I have embarked on research which attempts to historically criticize forms of Eurocentrism in the field of sentiments, and particularly the equation between Europeanness and the capacity for courtly/romantic love, which used to be considered as indicator of the highest level of love relationships which any civilization could reach. More specifically, I have tried to explore the relationships between political forms of identity and cultural attitudes in the field of emotions in Europe. Therefore I have been engaged in understanding the relationship between the formation of identity in the European context, on the one hand, and the idea of courtly and romantic love, on the other. This type of love was understood as a sentiment which included distance even in the case of physical closeness, and a feeling of impossibility even when it was shared. Very often, in the last two and a half centuries, the claim has been put forward that the sense of belonging to Europe was characterized by this type of love, considered as unique of the relationships between the genders in this continent and of the type of civilization developed in Europe in the modern era. This love, stemming from the private and personal sphere, was therefore given a public function and used as a distinctive characteristic of one civilization over the others (Passerini 1999). Here I would reiterate my position on the usefulness of retracing past forms of European identity within the methodological context of historical discontinuity. The second question has to do with the social position of the subject who can articulate these considerations: is it only composed of some members of one or two generations, a few intellectuals scattered here and there? And what about the masses? An autobiographical reflection suggests that this term and notion – which were used as a positive point of reference in the 1960s and 1970s – has again taken on a negative and ambivalent meaning, very much along the lines of what Ortega y Gasset wrote in his Revolt of the Masses: the formation of the mass-man was seen by him as a direct threat to Europeanness, although also as a stimulus to the creation of a united Europe. Now we are told that a defensive European identity is in the course of formation, not always explicitly, against migrants, multiculturalism, and the loss of prestige that recent transformations led to for Europe. This defensive identity assumes violence both in a metaphorical and in a practical sense, and especially a cultural sense: the violence of assimilation. There could be violence implicit in calling oneself Euro-

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pean when Europe dominated the world – but at the same time people and philosophies which suggested a critical meaning of Europe and European existed even then and we can find inspiration in them in order to counteract the new defensive identity formations. The connections between Europe and violence can be – through a painful and long travail of memory and history referring to these antecedents – dismantled and uprooted. It is quite likely that a minority of people will take refuge in that defensive identity, but not that the public at large will do the same; we are informed by socio-political analysts that the mood and emotional attitude which prevails among the general public is neither Euroenthusiastic nor Euro-sceptic, but shows a tepid and steady support for the process of European unity (Perez-Diaz 1998, using Eurobarometer 1995). The results of the Euro-barometer point out that only five to nine per cent of those asked feel a sense of belonging to Europe (Pfetsch 1999: 264). In this situation, the mass media and the intellectuals have a part to play in the formation of a reference community for what Perez-Diaz calls “the critical mass,” a public made up of citizens with a relatively high level of civic competence and willingness necessary to intervene directly in public debates (Perez-Diaz 1999b). He too talks about Europe as an imaginary space which offers horizons for the life projects of its younger generations, and he sees the European Union as tending more towards “an order of liberty” or a civil association than towards a political association such as a state with an assertive leadership and robust foreign policy. In this perspective, the outstanding objective should be the establishment of a common legal framework and internal security arrangements and the defence of European economic interests. In other terms, Perez-Diaz proposes to switch the emphasis from strictly political and bureaucratic aspects to civil, economic and legal ones. Perhaps we can extend this suggestion, and hypothesize that in order to meet the “masses,” or more modestly, other possible Europeans of different social and professional strata than intellectuals, the political terrain is not the best; other areas look more promising, including the daily cultural, that is, emotional and existential, dimensions. In conclusion, the sense of this investigation into the “last” identification is not simply to begin with myself, following a procedure suggested by the women’s movement, searching for the continuity and discontinuity between past and present positions and between the individual and the collectivity through a critique of one’s own experi-

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ence. The idea, though, is also contributing to create a common ground for exchange with all of those who want neither to be assimilated nor remain alien to European culture. It will be up to them to decide to what extent and in what way to call themselves European, after an encounter on this common ground. On this ground progress has been made and remains to be made toward the abandonment of the European identity’s internal and external hierarchies, such as the longstanding distinctions between centre and periphery, between East and West, between the Mediterranean and the North (all examples of internal hierarchies), or the contrast between Europe and Asia or between Europe and America. The new investment in Europeanness does not claim the immediate right to self-recognition, but rather proposes and from exchange with others awaits recognition of that which is specific and that which is shared. It does not begin, therefore, with an opposition to others, as in the old models of identity, but with a desire to call oneself European, charging the term with meanings based on one’s own needs and experiences, turning to others in order to develop and enrich it. The considerations that I have tried to develop are not contradicted by economic and demographic forecasts. If these foresee that in the next century the best Europeans can hope for is to constitute a nice, decent periphery of the world, with little power but some good ideas (Therborn 1997), we can be perfectly satisfied with this perspective, which suits and encourages the type of identification with Europe I am looking and hoping for.

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SUBJECT INDEX

SUBJECT INDEX

absence 17, 18, 22, 46, 96, 97, 105 accumulated memory 50 Adorno, T.W. 82 Aeneas 107 Africa 34, 80, 88, 93, 102 Aguilar, P. 25, 26 Alexander, S. 9 Algeria 21, 29 Algerian Liberation Front 21 Algerian War 21 America 88, 102, 114 North 6, 89 South America 20 Amin, S. 31 Amsterdam 84 Andalusia 110 Anders, D. 51 Anderson, P. 72, 79 Anguissola, S. 39 anti-Americanism 89 anti-fascist 20, 22, 77, 78 Annales 2 anthropology 30, 32, 34 anti-authoritarianism 66 anti-imperialism 66 architecture 65, 110, 111 Archives of Memory 6 Arendt, H. 20, 50, 73, 94, 99 Argentina 42 Ariadne 33 Arles 109, 110

Arvidsson, A. 12 Asad, T. 89 Asia 80, 88, 93, 102, 114 Associazione 48 Astier, C. 88 Athena 26 Athens 26 Atlantic 87 Atwood 47 Auden, W.H. 96 Augé, M. 17 Augustine 16, 17 Auschwitz 24, 106 Australia 42, 102 autobiography 1, 5, 47 autonomy 2, 34, 35, 55, 72 Baczko, B. 60 Balibar, E. 97, 106 Banville 47 Barret-Ducrocq, F. 88 Barthes, R. 50 Bastille 68 Bataille, G. 68 Baudet, H. 88 Bellassai, S. 52 Benhabib, S. 71 Benjamin, J. 40 Benjamin, W. 18 Berger Gluck, S. 28 Berkeley 54, 56, 71

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THE PRIMACY OF INTERSUBJECTIVITY

Berlin 84 Berlin Wall 24 Bhabha, H. 81, 94, 97 Bhasin, K. Bimbi, F. 49 Bion, W.R. 31 Birmingham, University of 5 Blair, Tony 73 Blanchot, M. 68 Bloch, E. 65, 66 Blumenberg, H. 5 Bobbio, N. 82 Boltanski, L. 72, 73 Bonansea, G. 16 Bonneville, G. 88 Borgo San Dalmazzo 22 Bosco, A. 78 Bosnia 42 Boyarin, J. 27 Brah, A. 49 Braidotti, R. 36, 48, 93, 94 Braunstein, P. 55, 73 Braunstein, Ph. 55 Brecht 84 Briand, A. 78 Britain 49, 78, 91, 108 Bulgaria 109 Burgess, J.P. 97, 109 Butler, J. 36 Byatt, A.S. 12 Byron 110 Cacciari, M. 104-107 Calvi, G. 34 Campo, C. 12, 27 Canada 42, 80 cancellation of memory 18, 19, 29, 30 Capecchi, S. 52 capitalism 72, 73, 99 Capussotti, E. 6 Cascardi, A.J. 35 Catholic 22, 23 Cavarero, A. 36 Centro delle Donne 6 Cerutti, F. 108 Cesaro, A.N. 50 Chabod, F. 78

Charybdis 41 Chauri Chaura 31 Chiapello, E. 72 Chiarloni, A. 23 China 80, 83 Chodorow, N. 40 Christian Democrats 99 Christianity 66, 82, 106 Cioran, E.M. 66 Ciuffreda, G. 65 civilization 107, 112 Clare, M. 5 classes 2, 99, 100 Clendinnen, I. 19 Clinton, President 73 Coetzee 47 Cold War 20, 72, 96 collective history 1 identity 6, 97, 98, 99 imagination 4, 67 memory 2, 8, 21, 23-26, 82 remembrance 26 representations 2 self-representation 7 silence 23 subjectivity 2, 3, 48, 49, 53, 70 unconscious 4 Colli, G. 104 colonialism 20, 30, 99 communication 67-70, 74, 88, 110 Communism 68, 101 community 67-71 concentration camps 23 conceptual triangle 56, 74 Confessions 16 conflicts 7, 16, 29, 41, 42, 55, 87, 94, 102 confrontation 11, 24, 31, 41, 43, 89 consumer goods 12 consumer society 12 consumerism 19, 71 continuity 49, 50, 71, 73, 103, 105, 109, 113 Convegno Volta 77 Copenhagen 80 Corsi, D. 34 Coudenhove-Kalergi 78

SUBJECT INDEX

Crilly, A. 22 Cucchi, M. 77, 86, 91 Cuneo 22, 23 Curcio, C. 78 Dalmatia 108, 110 Davin, A. 22 De Grève 88 De Lauretis, T. 48 De Martino, E. 89, 90 De Rougemont, D. 78 De Stefano, C. 12 Declaration on European Identity 80, 81 deconstruction 46 Denmark 102 Derrida, J. 36, 92, 93, 106 Diderot 83 Diez del Corral, L. 91 discontinuity 49, 51, 71, 85, 88, 103, 106, 112, 113 discourse 11, 45-47, 52, 72, 81, 89, 92, 103 discursive space 4, 110, 111 Dixon, J. 89 Djebar, A. 27, 28 Donnelly, D.F. 61 Dostoevsky 110 Drakulic, S. 108 Dreyfus-Armand, G. 55 Duby, G. 55 Dumont, L. 55 Dumoulin, M. 97, 98 Durkheim 2 Duroselle, J.-B. 78 Duroux, Y. 107 Edkins, J. 37, 42 ego-histoire 3 ego-historical 9 Egyptian 111 Einaudi J.-L. 21, 22 eleventh century 55 emancipation 35, 82, 100 Emilia-Romagna 44 England 102, 110 Enlightenment 81, 82 Erba, L. 91, 92

131

ethnocentrism 70, etnocentric 89, 90 Eurocentric 7, 8, 87, 93, 106 Eurocentrism 4, 8, 10, 19, 70, 80, 82, 105, 107, 111, 112 Europe 6, 8, 10, 19, 20, 22, 29, 30, 42, 49, 60, 77-92, 94-97, 99-114 European Community 80 Defense Community 97 Federalist Movement 84 identification 99, 101, 103 identity 4, 77-83, 85-89, 91, 93, 94, 107, 108, 112, 114 ideology 82 Union 7, 60, 79, 81, 83, 92, 102, 113 European-centrism 89 Euro-sceptic 90, 92, 113 Evolution 31, 32, 37, 82 Fachinelli, E. 58-60, 74 fascist 22, 77, 99 Fassbinder 39 Faye, J.-P. 104, 110 Federal Union 78 feminism 34, 41-43, 47, 49-53, 100 feminist 4, 5, 9, 33, 36, 38, 43, 45, 48, 49, 51-53, 57, 62, 94, 100 Femmes pour l’Europe 84 Ferrari, A. 39 Ferrer, E. 39 Ferretti, M. 24 fertility 34, 35 Fethi Benslama 97 fifteenth century 42 fifth century BCE 26 Fink, C. 72 Firestone, S. 64 flag 102 Flax, J. 40, 48 Florence 108 Fonseca, I. 19 forgetting 8, 15-20, 24, 26, 27, 30 forgotten war, the 22 see Korean War Fortini, F. 59 Fosse Ardeatine 23

132

THE PRIMACY OF INTERSUBJECTIVITY

Foucault 4, 11, 36-38 Foucher, M. 88 Fourier, C. 59 fourth millennium BCE 111 France 65, 91 Franco 25, 26 Frankfurt School 67 Fraser, N. 40, 41 Fraser, R. 64 Freud, S. 36, 41, 98 Gadamer, H.G. 83, 84 Gagnier, R. 48 Gellhorn, M. 17 gender studies 34 genocide 19, 20 Gentileschi, A. 39 Geppert 3 Geremek, B. 10, 82 Germany 24, 29 East 23, 87 West 23, 87 Giovanardi, S. 77, 86, 91 Giudici, G. 96 Gobetti, P. 101 Goebbels 78 Goody, J. 87 Great Freedom Struggle 31 Greece 29, 91, 102, 106, 108 Greek civil war 11 Greek-Mycenaean 111 Gregotti, V. 111 Guénoun, D. 106 Guha, R. 8 Gulag archipelago 82 Guzzoni, U. 36 Gypsy 19, 20, 29, 42 see also Rom Haiti 42 Halbwach, M. 2 Haug, F. 5 Haughey, E. 42 Haupt, H.-G. 86 Hausen, K. 92 Havel, V. 10

Hazard, P. 84 Hegel 38, 40 Heidegger 105 Heller, A. 94 Henriques, J. 37 Hersant, Y. 103 Herzfeld, M. 91 Hess, R. 23 heteronomy 2 Hiroshima 19, 29 Hirschmann, U. 84, 85, 94 historiography 3, 29 history 1, 2, 5, 16, 18, 20, 30, 31, 34, 4547, 50, 57, 61, 64, 73, 90, 103, 106, 113 collective 1 history 50, 51 history of mentalities 88, 91 Hitler 104 Hittite 111 Hobsbawm, E. 18 Hoffman, A. 73 Hoggart, R. 82 Hollingdale, R.J. 104 Hollway, W. 4, 37 Horkheimer, M. 82 Husserl 103, 106 identification 82, 100, 102, 110, 111 European 99, 101, 103 identity 10, 12, 24, 25, 39, 41-43, 48, 49, 61, 71, 77, 79-81, 85, 88, 90, 92-95, 97-100, 102, 103, 105, 108, 109, 11114 collective 6, 97, 98, 99 European 4, 77-83, 85-89, 91, 93, 94, 107, 108, 112, 114 Gypsy 42 national 22 Il filo di Arianna 36 image(s) 15, 22, 25, 27, 39, 40, 44, 52,72, 88, 102, 104, 105, 106, 109 imagination 2, 9, 107, 111, collective 4, 67 India 31

SUBJECT INDEX

intersubjectivity 3-8, 11, 12, 27, 37, 53, 56, 57, 74, 94, 97 IOM 6 Ireland 22, 29 Irigaray, L. 38 irony 56, 66, 95 self-irony 40, 41, 53 Israel 16, 23, 29 Istanbul 108, 110 Italian communist Party 59 Italy 12, 29, 36, 49, 50, 52, 60, 65, 89, 92, 101 Ithaca 26 Jacoby, R. 61 Jaimes, M.A. 20 Jakobson, R. 87 Janigro, N. 65 Japan 80 Jew(s) 19, 20, 22, 23, 29, 85, 93, 104 Johnson, D. 5, 82 Kaelbe, H. 86 Kalingrad 96 Kauffmann, S. 22 Kerby, A.P. 47 Kessinger, K.R. 48 Khapaeva, D. 24 Kierkegaard 103 Klein, N.M. 4, 30, 37 knot(s) 33, 43, 45, 47, 48, 57 Koenigsberg 96 Korea 29 Korean War 22 forgotten war 22 Koslowski, P. 88 Kosovo 6, 7 Kracauer, S. 54 Krakow 109, 110 Kristeva, J. 40 Kuhn, A. 5 Kulick, D. 48 Kultermann, U. 110 Kundera, M. 88, 110 Kung San 34 Lacan 4, 37, 43

Lacoue-Labarthe, P. 106 Lager, C. 102 Laliotou, I. 11 Latin America 29, 80 Laurent, R. 39 Le Monde 20, 21 League of Nations 78 LeGuin, U. 62-64 Leigh, V. 40 Lenin 101 Leninism 70 Lenoble, J. 90 Leonini 12 Lewis, M.W. 107 liberation 44, 46, 64, 70, 72 sexual liberation 58, 70 Liebert, U. 102 linguistic hospitality 111 Liogens, W. 78 literary space 110 literature 5, 20, 23, 26, 37, 62 Loire 108 Loraux, N. 26 Losi, N. 6 Loup, M. 39 Lourenço, E. 91, 92 Lovell, T. 44 Löwy, M. 67 Luca Pires 91 Lund, E. 82 Lützler 88 Maastricht Treaty 78, 103 Madariaga, Salvador de 86 Màdera, R. 74, 90 Madrid 17, 109 Magazine Littéraire 60 Magris, C. 61 Mai, N. 7 Maingard, J. 39 Mama, A. 48 Mannheim 60 Marino, S. 50 Marx 12, 36 Marxism 61, 70 mask 39, 95 masquerade 39, 40

133

134

THE PRIMACY OF INTERSUBJECTIVITY

massacre 21-23, 30 Matvejevic, P. 96 Mayne, R. 88 Mediterranean 80, 114 Melandri, L. 59, 74 Melucci, A. 69, 73 memory 1, 2, 4-11, 15-32, 50, 51, 61, 64, 82, 106, 108, 113 collective 2, 8, 21, 23-26, 82 oral 1, 4, 6 Menon, R. 28 Mesopotamia 111 Meyers, D.T. 40, 41 Middle Ages 34 Middle East 80 migration studies 11 Milan 90 millennium 61 Millet 39 Milosz, C. 88 Mitchell, J. 4, 53 modernity 18, 35, 81, 82, 89 Modleski, T. 44 Monnet, J. 79 Montinari, M. 104 Moreau Defarges, P. 84 Moretti, F. 88 Morimura, Y. 40 Morin, E. 99, 100 Moscow 87 Müller, H. 23, 24 multiculturalism 15, 85, 112 multilingualism 15 multiracialism 15 Munich 17, 109 Mushaben, J.M. 102 music 28 myth 3, 5, 70, 78, 81, 106, 107 Nacci, M. 89 Namer 30 Nancy J.-L. 68, 106 narration 15, 47, 48, 108 oral 15 written 15 narrative(s) 4, 6, 8, 29, 31, 37, 47, 107, 111

narrative hospitality 111 National Assembly 68 Nazi 19, 22-24, 77, 82 Nemo, P. 103 Neue Subjektivität 23, 24 New York 6, 64 Niethammer, L. 61, 81, 97 Nietzsche, F. 36, 93, 103-105, 110 nineteenth century 59 Nisa 34 No Gun Ri 22 Nono, L. 28 Nora, P. 3 Noteboom, C. 84 Nuremberg trials 19 oblivion 15-19, 21-24, 29-32 Odyssey 26 Oedipus 63 Oliver, K. 38, 40 opposition(al) 41, 43-46, 48, 59, 67, 71, 88, 114 oral oral history 50, 51 oral memory 1, 4, 6 oral narration 15 Ortega y Gasset, J. 86, 112 Ortoleva, P. 66, 67 Orvieto 53 Oxford 108 Palazzi, M. 34 Pallavicini, P. 52 Panijel, J. 21 Paolini, E. 78 Papcke, S. 85 Paris 21, 29, 39 particularity 71, 78, 80, 91, 107 Passerini, L. 1, 3, 4, 6, 10, 19, 47, 50, 55, 56, 64, 81, 91, 101, 108-10, 112 Patai, D. 28 Payot, D. 106 Pegg, C.H. 78 Pérez-Diaz, V. 25, 113 Perniola 97 Persram, N. 37, 42 Pfetsch, F.R. 98, 113

SUBJECT INDEX

philosophy 35, 36, 40, 83, 103, 106, 111 Phoenician 111 Picht, R. 79, 90 Piedmont 91 Pin-Fat, V. 37, 42 Pistone, S. 78, 92 Planté, C. 45 poem 23, 24, 27, 77, 78, 92, 96 poetry 23, 26, 29 Poland 110 politics 5, 7, 25, 26, 33, 42, 45, 48, 50, 51, 65, 72, 92, 94, 100 Pontalis 17 Porraimos 19, 20 Portelli, A. 23 portrait(s) 27, 39, 40 Portugal 91 Prague 17, 70, 99 prisoners, political 11 Prost, A. 21 Proust 17 psychoanalysis 23, 31, 32 psychoanalyst 17, 31, 32, 58 psychology 26 punks 72 Pustianaz, M. 52 Pye, C. 39 Quazza, G. 1 Radway, J. 44 recognition 40-42, 114 self-recognition 40, 50, 99, 111, 114 Red Sea 17 reflection 5, 20, 24, 27, 111, 112 self-reflection 16, 17, 40, 41, 97 Resistance 52, 101 Revelli, M. 20 Revelli, N. 23 revolution(s) 57, 59, 67, 70, 73, 106 Richards, M. 26 Ricoeur, P. 59.111 Riot-Sarcey, M. 45 Risi, N. 86 Rom 7, 19, 20 Romanticism 67 Rome 23, 77, 109

Rossanda, R. 59 Rosselli brothers 101 Rossi, E. 78 Rossi-Doria, A. 18 Rouch, H. 38 Rusconi, G.E. 86 Russia 24, 29, 88, 110 Salvatici, S. 6, 7 Samuel, R. 18 Sawada, T. 39 Sayre, R. 67 Scattigno, A. 34 Schachter, D.L. 30 Scott, J. 45, 46, 57 Scylla 41 secondary schools 92 Seine 21 Sereni, V. 77, 78, 81 seventeenth century 34 Shklar, J. 60 Shoah 20, 82 Shostak, M. 34 silence 8, 9, 15-30, 32, 51 collective 23 Silverman, K. 39 Sinai 17 Sinigaglia, C. 106 Sivan, E. 26 Smith, A.D. 85, 90 Smith, R.C. 9, 10 Smith, S. 47 soap 23, 24 sociology 5, 65 Sofia 87, 108 Sofri, A. 43 Soviet empire 87 Soviet regime 83 Soviet Union 24, 70, 72 Spain 25, 29, 84, 91 Spanish civil war 25, 26, 96 Spengler, O. 106 Spina, A. 12 Spinelli, A. 78 Spivak, G.C. 37, 89 Stalin 24, 28 Statera, G. 60

135

136

THE PRIMACY OF INTERSUBJECTIVITY

Steiner, G. 28 Strasbourg 106 Strindberg 110 subaltern studies 8, 28, 89 subjectivity 1-12, 33-54, 56-59, 70, 71, 74, 81, 85, 88, 97, 100 accumulated 2 collective 2, 3, 48, 49, 53, 70 erotic 48 female 48 feminine 48 lesbian 48 middle-class 48 particular 70 racialised 48 shared 2 Victorian 48 subordination 35, 43, 44, 97 Summerfield, P. 48 Sweden 110 Tanner, J. 70 terrorism 71 Theotokas, G. 108, 109 Therborn, G. 82, 114 Third International 59, 70 Thompson, F. 109, 110 Tilly, L. 45, 46 Torah 16 Torre, S. 53 Tota, A.L. 52 Touraine, A. 67 town planning 65 tradition 3, 7, 18, 20, 29, 34, 44, 49, 51, 78, 82, 83, 86, 90, 93 Tristan, A. 21 Trotskism 101 TrouillotM.-R. 29 Trubeckoj, N.S. 87 Turin 1, 56 University of 1 Turkey 102 Tuscany 34 twentieth century 18-20, 30, 48, 60, 67, 83

Ulysses 26 unification 79, 89, 90, 92 United States 22, 29, 60, 80, 88, 89, 97, 99, 100 Urals 87 USSR 80, 88 utopia 8-10, 56, 59-62, 64-67, 69, 70-74, 111 Valentino, C. 88 Valéry 93 Varda, A. 38, 39 Varikas, E. 20, 45-47 Vatican 23 Venice 108 Ventotene 78 Verona 36 Viale, Don R. 22, 23 Vienna 106 Vietnam War 22 Voglis 3, 11 Von Ribbentrop 78 Vonk, E. 51 Voyenne, B. 78, 104 wartime subjectivities 48 Waswo, R. 107 Weinrich, H. 15 westernophile 24 Westernocentric 7, 8 Wigen, K.E. 107 Willson, M. 48 Wilterdink, N. 85 Winter Palace 68 Winter, J. 26 women’s studies 28, 29, 34, 44 Women’s World 6 Woolf, V. 53 workerism 100 World War 1 18, 28, 78, 84 World War 2 20, 22, 72, 78, 101, 108 Worthington, K. 47 Yerushalmi, Y. 16, 17, 26 Yoneyama, L. 19

SUBJECT INDEX

Yoshida, K. 40 Young, M. 22 Yugoslavia 6, 87 yuppies 72

137

Znepolski, I. 108 “30 something” 52 1968 8, 10, 23, 52, 54-63, 65-74, 99, 101