From Novels to the Figures, Themes and Strategies of a Political Practice. Part One. 'Interest in Reality'. For every woman's Autobiography. PART ONE. “INTEREST IN REALITY”. FOR EVERY WOMAN’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Niccolai Silvia

2024-01-01

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Abstract

1. From Literature to Politics. 1.1. In search of the just mediation: literary examples of different freedom strategies, some successful, others less so. 2. Failures: when a woman’s desire for symbolic existence does not meet reality. The three examples proposed by The Yellow Catalogue. The Emancipated Woman. 2.1. The Hysteric. 2.2. The Dreamer. 3. How can women avoid failures in their path to liberty? Firstly, by exercising the negative strength of «creating a void». Lessons from Gertrude Stein. 3.1. Ida. The awareness of not being part of the dominant order produces symbolic competence. 3.2. Secondly: by learning to bargain and to negotiate with reality. Jane Austen and Ivy Compton-Burnett, teachers of politics. 3.3. The Symbolic Mothers’ winning card: a realism capable of turning reality upside down. 4. If thinking means describing. The anti-theoretical choice of the Thought of the Symbolic at the basis of its political use of literature. 4.1. Dodging the Modern to see the value of a fact. 4.2.The metaphor of the market: the maternal symbolic order as unintentional order. 5. Gertrude’s gift: “A difference is a difference”, not an essence.