Autonomy and the Need for Love: Carla Lonzi, Vai pure

Lea Melandri

This text was originally published in: Lea Melandri (author and editor), Una visceralità indicibile (Milan: F. Angeli, 2000), 43 – 50.

My reading of Carla Lonzi’s writings has been purposefully partial, since I was interested in underlining the ways in which they anticipated two subsequent developments of feminism: the “practice of the subconscious” and the “thought of the difference.” This is why I focused mostly on the theoretical stances of her reflections. I would like to remind readers, however, how Carla Lonzi’s personal merit, to be credited as well to the Rivolta group, is that of having connected the great interpretive philosophical systems (Marxism, Hegelianism, psychoanalysis) with the practice of autocoscienza (self-consciousness), the attention to the developments of the individual life, the individual experience, filtered by collective listening. When the same provocative issues, discussed in her 1971 essays, emerge from her autobiographic (or autocoscienza (self-consciousness) centered) writings, such as Vai pure (Feel Free to Go), and Taci, anzi parla. Diario di una femminista1 (Shut up. Actually, Talk. Diary of a Feminist), their contradictions are easier to understand. The complexity of emotional life, its contrasting impulses, once offered through the narration of the self, often show beyond the writer’s intentions.

From this point of view, the dialogue between Carla Lonzi and Pietro Consagra, in Vai pure2, is very interesting.

The long (four-day) discussion, as the author says in the preface, touched “the irreconcilable positions of two individuals who embody two different cultures.” In the end, after tirelessly trying to produce “together,” through dialogue, “autocoscienza” (self-consciousness) and “change,” it seems that separating is the only option. Once applied to an autobiographical episode, to a relation of love, themes such as “difference,” “autonomy” and “authenticity”—which are related to gender conflict—appear more nuanced and questionable than in theoretical writings. The “need for autonomy” and the “need for love” appear closely connected, and often the latter prevails, so that women “vanish, become shadows behind men.” True love would then seem to be, first and foremost, “love for my autonomy, not love for my dependence and my service.” But it is obvious, although implicit, that women are equally tempted by the desire for dependence and devotion to the other. The possibility of balancing autonomy and affective life is a “novel” yet to be written.

The “different cultures” or “sensibilities” represented by men and women are those which have characterized their historical paths, the roles they have been allocated. The only new element is that, as soon as this comes to awareness, the man is forced to confess his “privilege,” and the woman the “quality of her feelings” once they have unfairly vanished into oblivion after spurring the other’s growth. Man’s “privilege” is having centered his own life on social productivity-artworks (in the artist’s case) but, more generally, public success-thus subordinating to this priority everything else, every relation: starting by his relation to the woman, reduced to maternal and intuitive functions, both materially as well as symbolically. From women men expect company and encouragement in their moments of loneliness and in their job. Consagra admits this: “With you, I led the most interesting life I ever had experienced from an emotional, intellectual and complete point of view, [but] I needed someone by my side during my social life as well, in my work, in my worries. It was there that I missed you [. . .] I couldn’t stand being alone while I was with a woman who didn’t help me at times when I desperately needed help: company and encouragement when I felt lonely, or when I was traveling for my exhibitions, or in my studio.”

Lonzi restates this: “We have lunch with the constant feeling you have to get back to your studio, you come home in the evening with the feeling you have to recharge, and in the morning off you go to the studio. [During vacations] you devote your afternoon rest to me, [before and] after that it’s just work. [. . .] Our whole life is structured on work, all of it, it’s not like after that we are together; we are never together for the sake of being together. The vital moment of activity and awareness, the promised land [for you] is work.”

On the other hand, to the woman the priority is “the authenticity of relations, the sole end of a woman’s life.” The “culture of relations” is what differentiates the female sensibility, and its downside seems to be having always operated within the closed boundaries of intimacy, as a spur to man’s individuality and social success, without any acknowledgment whatsoever. “Relation,” to Lonzi, essentially means mutual knowledge and the fully aware transformation of the self it prompts. It is the woman who maintains this need.

“Since the woman is dialogue, paradise for her is being able to carry on such dialogue with somebody. [. . .] Women feel very strongly everything that happens to every being [. . .] while men are induced to ignore these bonds, precisely because they need to feel that they are sole protagonists. [. . .] The images men have of themselves are outside the relation, while women see themselves within it. Hence the latter are pretty aware of their need for the other, while the former [. . .] only see their own growth.”

But such a precise definition of contrapositive fields is what engenders contradictions: for Lonzi, it seems, the point is merely being aware of a privilege (on men’s side) and of an unrecognized worth (on women’s side). But when her interlocutor confirms this is how he sees things, and that his life needs a woman’s encouragement and the values she embodies, she underlines yet another, different, distance. The image of the feminine as a “garden” where “peace” “love” and “happiness” blossom is “the projection of men’s needs,” and idealization of the mother-son relationship, and the temptation of reducing women to the maternal role.

“The woman—Consagra says—is the good part of humanity, the one related to love, to human relations; the artist feels it to be closer to what he wants to create with his work. [. . .] He feels that this garden of the life of peace and poetry, is better inhabited by the woman than by the man.”

And Carla: “Since I am a woman, and not a natural phenomenon, and since I live this from within, I can assure you that this way of seeing women is nothing but your own projection. [. . .] You project your need on the woman, who is herself helpless against other people’s projections and actually gratified by the best projections she can attract. [. . .] You give her the illusion of changing, from having no function at all, to having the highest possible function, the function society assigns to art. But from my point of view it’s just a hoax . . . This whole garden thing comes from an idealization of the mother-son relationship, which itself is an omnipresent male image, always ready to be projected on women.”

If such a comforting image is a “mirage” for the woman, her new autocoscienza (self-consciousness) leads her to be more aware of what, in herself, is in contrast with the man’s dreams. First and foremost, behind her love and attention lies an “issue” she won’t talk about; behind the role she has been imposed lies “a different individual.” And finally there is the fatigue and the extreme alertness required to defend oneself from “[men’s] constant attempts of symbolic interpretations [of women], which nonetheless keep coming out.”

How, then, can one find a balance between the positive affirmation
—as a value per se, as a sign of feminine difference, autonomy and authenticity—and qualities and competences that the dominant sex has always
accorded to women only as functions of its own well-being? Couldn’t this reappropriation be nothing more than the acknowledgment of the persistence and rootedness of the “dream of complementarity”? The dialogue between “different sensibilities” is also the sign of mutual indispensability, the need to go forward together, even towards transformations that cause the confusion of violence and love to resurface. The most explicit signal of a contradiction, albeit not a fully conscious one, in Lonzi’s argument, is that once again it is the man who should “testify” and “acknowledge” this historical female quality.

“ . . . the man has the whole world [. . .] where this sort of investigation [of inner life] doesn’t work, where other skills are needed, other values. Then the woman somehow expects the man to testify to this in that world, since in their one-to-one relation it is her who has revealed to him what intimacy is. This is her value, which the man privately feasts on: she imagines that he must testify to this somehow. And she feels that this could be her only way of existing in a world that functions with entirely different values. [. . .] If you [Pietro] aren’t my witness, then who could testify about me without having heard my words?”

It is apparent, here, that Carla Lonzi’s main effort was keeping together the need to build a less subservient feminine individuality, and the need for love. The insistence on dialogue, on “mutual analysis,” seen as something specifically and authentically belonging to the feminine position against men’s deceits-since they apparently produce themselves, as sole protagonists of the political scene-then appears in all of its ambiguity, as the need to build together a new awareness of themselves and the ensuing transformations. Complementarity would then lose its signs of submission and dominance, implying instead a newly found freedom and reciprocity among the sexes.

“My diary reveals what your presence has meant to me over those years, while from your book one could never understand what I meant to you, my presence is hardly there. [. . .] All this construction of the male personality as self-produced, is abstract, untrue, unreal. This self-production is false, it doesn’t exist. There is always a relation, a dialogue [. . .] as long as there is no dialogue between two consciousnesses, one of them doesn’t exist, and the other one feels like it is the absolute consciousness of the situation. [. . .] My cultural aim is [. . .] to be acknowledged as a consciousness. And, as such, as a stakeholder in our common process.”

But experience would later reveal “the impossibility” of this dream, and the fracture in the couple’s relationship once this is seen with a new awareness of the history of sexes. Only at this point other aspects of the problem appear:

– if the woman insists on asking for her existence to be acknowledged by the man, maybe it is because she can’t “fully feel it” herself;

– dialogue, seen as a constant, tiresome struggle against the male world, seems to be an involvement in “male dramas,” in “male pathos,” resulting in a “lack of self-awareness”;

– the acknowledgment of different ways of seeing and feeling the world ultimately results not in the harmonious reconcilement of the sexes, but in the temporary need for distance.

“Every time two people living together have this sort of crisis, we always feel this kind of paralysis between two thinking individuals with different times, different desires and different awareness who are both trying to propose what they have to the other party. This is when you start to feel that the bond should perhaps be loosened a bit.”

The conclusion that “there is no man for me [. . .] there is no relation with a continuity over time and a shared direction [. . .] Feel free to go,” has thus found a highly conscious definition. The common direction, if any, cannot be found though the reversal of complementarity, or through complicated equivalences, but by questioning every form of dualism, starting from sexual roles and from coercive and deforming competencies that have forced men and women to live split within themselves and to seek their integrity in a double.

Carla Lonzi’s and Rivolta Femminile’s writings have undoubtedly succeeded in breaking with many commonplace convictions, with many long-standing acquiescences to the dominance of a single sex, but they haven’t yet raised awareness of how this can be fully incorporated within sexual and affective life. What at those times wasn’t apparent (and perhaps couldn’t be) are the contradictions left unsolved by these stark positions:

– Sexuality and motherhood: if it was important to discuss the restriction of the woman within the reproductive role, the shift towards the side of sexuality ends up proposing, again, a new form of biological determinism: one replaces the uterus, the center of the biological processes, with the clitoris as “the physiological center of the female orgasm.” Having left behind the superposition and the woman-mother confusion, the road should be open to new questions: how important is the maternal-filial relationship for adult love and sexuality? What kind of fantasy has confused sexual intercourse and birth? And, on the other hand, how many elements that have to do with sexuality enter the relationship of the mother with her son or with her daughter? 

– Autonomy and the need for love. The attention to the relation with the other has been the historical and symbolic function of the woman, as the depositary of love, in charge of the growth and the preparation for the social adventure of the singularities; this causes a rupture when she attempts to redefine history and culture as they have been imposed by men, when she escapes the private sphere. But since this awareness originates from the relation of love, as a request to both modify oneself and the other, it also becomes a way to strengthen the bond and reconfirm mutual indispensability. This explains the need for the man to publicly acknowledge his debt, in terms of “self-awareness” towards the woman.

– Authenticity and deceit. To free oneself from the bridles of the “love dream,” it is wholly rejected as pertaining to the man, without recognizing the active part that the woman has played in spurring that illusion and, more importantly, without reconstructing the originating event (the birth) that preceded it. We must remember, however, that Lonzi has personally demonstrated-through her narrative of herself, through her writing of self-awareness-what she has omitted in her theorizations, probably to make them more incisive.

– The need to rescue the woman from her historical “disadvantage” leads to a quest for “equivalences” (which, as we have seen, results in idealizing and overestimating man’s position, and to subsequently build one’s own in analogy to that) and, almost consequentially, for differences (seen as “something more” or “something different”).

What follows is an outline of some observations I published in an article on L’erba voglio, “Piccolo pene, ascolta”3 (Little penis, listen), as an answer to Rivolta’s theses:

– overestimating man’s privilege, granting too much importance to physiology and to the quest for equivalences, seems to confirm Freud’s theses, rather than taking distance from them (specifically in terms of “penis envy”);

– the importance of psychoanalysis in this debate can hardly be ignored, especially for what concerns sexuality and the formation of individuals; this is true, more specifically, of Freud’s analyses of the mother-daughter relation (see “Dora’s case”), which would later inform the feminist practice;

– the necessity to recross psychoanalysis in no way implies a critical reading of it, for instance, of those aspects of both Freud’s and Jung’s thought which seem to consolidate sexual dualism, by appealing to biological principles-in the former case-or to bearing structures in the collective subconscious (“archetypes”)—in the latter-seen as fixed and ahistorical;

– a possible way out of the traditional biology/history, nature/culture, etc. dichotomy could be outlined by Elvio Fachinelli’s proposed interpretation of Freud’s discoveries. Fachinelli speaks of a sort of human nexology, defined as the investigation “of a specific field of human research [. . .] which is undoubtedly connected to biology and history, but which nonetheless isn’t reducible to either.” Such are the “nexuses,” the “peculiar relations” through which every individual develops since after one’s birth, “and through which one is formed as an individual”4;

– feminism has either considered psychoanalysis a polemical challenge, or has wholly rejected it. This refers, in particular, to Shulamith Firestone5, whose application of sociological schemata to psychoanalysis reveals perhaps an excess of confidence in socio-cultural factors;

– affective dependence is always construed as the key aspect in the feminine condition: dissatisfaction, insecurity, the “wish to be loved of an absolute love.” Dependence encompasses both submission and domination: it implies becoming indispensable to the other in order to prevent the possibility of losing him. The risk of being abandoned is to be avoided, so that “dependence is a matter of survival, a matter of life and death.” Affective survival is imposed at the expense of sexual satisfaction;

– the analysis of dependence always acknowledges psychoanalytical and sociological perspectives. Always central to such investigation is the role of families, in which women enter as the children-wives, mothers-and daughters of their husband. This is true both of the family of origin and of the subsequent one. The joint effects of frustration and compensation will make difficult the liberation from the imposed roles (this refers to Lietta Harrison’s La donna sposata6 (The married woman));

– a thorough focus upon these problems—dependence, survival, need for love: all related to the original relation to the mother—isn’t sought by those feminist groups who put in the center the power issues. This is particularly true of Lotta femminista, whose aim was the organization of “women’s anger,” as well as of Carla Lonzi’s “revolt”: but if one doesn’t take into account the contradictions implied by these needs, feminism risks “the assimilation of the man, the same division between private life and political engagement.” The feminist struggle against men becomes, in some cases, “paradoxically enough, the highest appraisal of virility,” “and once again focuses all the attention on male values: the power that men have attained as something that women should take hold of”;

– the political practice of women should go through individual histories looking for signs of a common condition, and working for change within everyday life.

The article already hints at the subsequent developments of my research, both individual and collective. The sexual issue in terms of sexuality as well as of affective life (need for love, dependence, indispensability to the other)—necessarily refers to psychoanalysis, which in turn must be re-read with the awareness that history’s protagonists have been men, their laws, their perspectives on the world. Derived from this is a critique of biological (Freud) and psychic (Jung) determinism, in order to arrive at an analysis of the interconnections between nature and culture as they inextricably appear in
an individual’s development (Fachinelli). But feminism, mainly concerned with collecting the “anger” of women forcibly deprived of their power, their work and their energy, or with organizing the “revolt” of those who have been forced to adapt to someone else’s pleasure ignoring their own, couldn’t face this experiential subject, rooted as it is in the body, in childhood, in psychic life, without jeopardizing its ability to draw sharp boundaries and “difference” divisions, contradictorily confusing awareness and surrender, self-sacrifice and self-exaltation, and therefore risking immobility and apoliticality.

It was clear that this issue had to be faced in the field it most evidently appears in: private life. Otherwise, the result would only have been the analogical acceptation of the male model, albeit turned to the advantage of women. Focusing on the slavery of women necessarily leads to a high appreciation of virility, whose sole wrongdoing would then be its “imposition” as a form of domination on the other sex. Even if we “spit on man’s culture” and persist in questioning it, it is from there that we acquired our models of success, both in symbolic as well as in sexual terms.

The novelty in early feminism was to see that intimate life—personal and bodily history, etc.—bears the “signs of history.” But, when seen from the perspective of man’s millennial domination, the experience of women (even that of individuals) is reduced to an image of “marginality”: “lack,” “slavery,” “insignificance.” This doesn’t consider the fact that personal life has been able to ignore, for such a long time, the relations binding it to public life, just because the original event is framed, magnified and deformed while individuals-male or female-are still immersed in intense bodily sensations, related to the anxiety of their own smallness and defenselessness in respect to the women who have generated them and who grant them their life. A new dimensionalization, underlining the role of the original event within history, can only happen, if it does, much later. This small lag is the root of the inconsistency of subsequent behaviors, which will have to combine needs, necessities and free movement, tenderness and anger, dependence and autonomy.

1. Carla Lonzi, Taci, anzi parla. Diario di una femminista (Milan: Scritti di Rivolta Femmi-nile, 1978).

2. Carla Lonzi, Vai pure. Dialogo con Pietro Consagra (Milan: Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1980).

3. Lea Melandri, “Piccolo pene, ascolta,” in L’erba voglio, no. 7 (1972).

4. Elvio Fachinelli, Il bambino dalle uova d’oro (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1974).

5. Shulamith Firestone, La dialettica dei sessi (Bologna: Guaraldi, 1971).

6. Lietta Harrison, La donna sposata (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1972).

Translated from Italian by Vincenzo Latronico