Methodological issues

Before tackling this comparison, certain clarifications concerning the method are required, in terms of the time periods studied, the type of documents used and the interpretive perspective adopted.

Firstly, the time limits of the research. The PCI’s autobiographical practices took place predominantly in the decade following the Second World War, while the feminist activities occurred in the 1970s. One could therefore object that this research puts together two incongruous experiences, separated by the great historical watershed moment of 1968, and therefore runs the risk of comparing the incomparable.

The basic facts offer an initial response to this objection. After 1956, the autobiographical duties expected of PCI activists gradually ebbed away (Boarelli Reference Boarelli2007). The start and end points of this work are therefore constrained by history. This situation, however, has at least one advantage: it allows the communist and feminist use of autobiography to be examined at the moments when each movement was at the height of its power.

For the communists this means positioning the autobiographical discipline in the context of the vast attempt by the PCI to educate its activists politically. This was launched concurrently with the creation of the ‘new party’ in 1944 and declined, along with the widespread use of autobiography, in 1956 (Possieri Reference Possieri2007, 111). This helps to provide a better grasp not only of the negative aspect of this practice, in other words the desire to control the activists, but also the positive side, the active formation of a communist subjectivity. The issue was no longer relevant during the 1970s, when the party imported officials trained elsewhere, who therefore had no need to attend party schools (Sebastiani Reference Sebastiani1983, 119) or produce a fully communist biography.

Feminist autobiographical practice began with the exercises in self-consciousness that took shape in the early 1970s and continued, with less impact, throughout the second half of the decade (Rossi-Doria Reference Rossi-Doria2007, 243–265). In this case, I decided to consider the feminist examination of the self in its Milan-based guise. Milan was the epicentre of the extensive Italian neo-feminism movement due to its geographical position and superior economic strength (Hellman Reference Hellman1987). In addition, it was the place where neo-feminists attempted to give a theoretical framework to female self-enunciation, which left its mark on the feminist debate in Italy.Footnote ¹

I have therefore attempted to carry out an exercise of ‘constructive comparatism’ (Detienne Reference Detienne2008, XIII). The comparability is constructed in this case through a preliminary outline of what I mean by ‘autobiography’, in order to both group together and clearly differentiate the two historical phenomena in question. With this in mind, I have used the definition of Philippe Lejeune, who sees autobiography as defined by the common identity of the author, narrator and protagonist (Reference Lejeune1996, 15–26), in other words the continuation of the same proper noun from the paratext, that occupied by the author, to the text, where the narrator and protagonist are found.

The three functions described by the French scholar are not static positions, but rather relationships of power within the text itself. What happens, therefore, if the author’s position suppresses that of the narrator and the protagonist until they are virtually wiped out? Or if, on the contrary, the protagonist and narrator dominate the figure of the author? The first of these is the most interesting to consider. Does a purely authorial autobiography exist, where the protagonist and narrator vanish entirely in favour of the author? This seems like a meaningless question, alluding to an impossible object, a paratext without a text, located in some sort of non-Euclidean textual space.

Yet this bizarre textual formation does exist, in the form of a banal identity document that provides the subject’s personal details. This kind of text also has a specific autobiographical power: it says that I is I. It represents the minimum model to which every autobiography can be reduced; a statement of identity from the three terms that make it possible.

At the other extreme is the prevalence of the narrator and protagonist over the author. Here, once he or she has crossed the threshold of the paratext, the author simply becomes the condition that allows a story to take place, with a narrator and protagonist at its centre. All the texts we consider to be autobiographies are grouped around this end of the spectrum. These texts are essentially no more than narrative developments of the primary driving force of the autobiographical story, the intransitive affirmation of the self and the proper noun. Autobiography is therefore suspended between the identification of the subject and the checking of their personal details and the subject putting themselves into narrative form and novels.

In this sense, the pairing of the two focal points of my research makes sense, as they are located at the two extremes of contemporary autobiographical expression. Indeed, the communist autobiography predominantly leaned towards self-verification for disciplinary purposes, closer to a curriculum vitaeFootnote ² than an autobiography. The feminist autobiography, meanwhile, moved in the opposite direction: self-narrativisation, which, as we will see, went so far as to be paradoxical. Italian communism and neo-feminism are therefore good case studies for the different ways autobiographical discourse can be used, allowing it to be viewed against the backdrop of the constant growth of social control in the twentieth century and the subjective strategies found to circumvent it. The former is expressed mostly in communist autobiography, the latter in feminist autobiography.

Some theoretical clarifications on the documents used and on the way the sample used for analysis was assembled are also required. Analysing communist and neo-feminist autobiography means working on ego-documents. However, these do not interest me either for their potential to reveal an intimate self or as a record of the social world that the individuals helped to shape (Fulbrook and Rublack Reference Fulbrook and Rublack2010, 271). Instead, I have concentrated on the political technology of the self (Foucault Reference Foucault1988) as applied by communism and feminism through autobiography. A similar decision defined the criteria used to decide whether the autobiographies analysed were included or excluded from the sample. The technological orientation of my analysis meant concentrating on materials where the performative dimension was more marked than the constative (Austin Reference Austin1962). In other words, self-narration interests me in its operational aspects, as a linguistic act through which the subject narrating themselves produces their communist or feminist self. My sample therefore does not include ‘final’ autobiographies, in which the narrator takes a conclusive and commemorative position, examining an existential event or political world. These are texts where the narrative becomes absorbed in its meaning and the technological and exterior dimension of the autobiography is lost in favour of the expressive and interior dimension of the subject who, through the narrative, rediscovers the meaning of their life, or lack of it.

This approach to assembling the field of investigation led to certain autobiographies written by women, both communists and feminists, being excluded. For example, the memories of Camilla Ravera (Reference Ravera1973) and Teresa Noce (Reference Noce1974) have both been omitted. There is no true technological dimension to these pieces of writing; instead they are part of the series of ‘success stories’ that the ruling communist class produced during the 1970s to reaffirm the legitimacy of its political actions (Groppo Reference Groppo2002). Works that were written beyond the time limit of the 1970s have not been included either: those of the ‘red girls’ (Bonfiglioli Reference Bonfiglioli2014) Rossanda, Castellina, Ombra and Guidetti Serra, all written in the 2000s, or the autographical stories of those who lived through the feminist era (Passerini Reference Passerini1988; Pellegrini Reference Pellegrini2012; Schiavo Reference Schiavo2013). In all these works, the sphere of memory dominates that of the technology of the self. The years have passed, and the authors no longer use writing as a way of transforming their identity, instead tracing a combination of personal and political disappointments and successes.

The choice of a ‘technological’ perspective for the analysis also helps to explain the reason for including autobiographies written by male communist activists in the sample. Given that self-narration is not being examined as a form of expression, but rather as a discursive practice, gender was not a criterion for selecting materials, but instead is an analytical problem within the textual field under consideration. In other words, the point is not how the gender affects the autobiographical materials in the sample, but the reverse, how the autobiographical mechanism itself produces gender effects. However, this issue is not tackled within this article, due to space restrictions and because my main interest is in outlining my perception of the basic functioning of the communist and feminist autobiographical mechanism.

Within these limitations, I will attempt to show that the technologies of autobiographical enunciation in question function through the mechanism of the paradoxical injunction (Watzlawick, Beavin and Jackson Reference Watzlawick, Beavin and Jackson1967). The difference between the autobiographical practices of the PCI and those of neo-feminism are explained by the different ways this injunction was exploited. The communist paradoxical injunction took the form of standards enacted by the party, and so the autobiography is based around the issue of the rules and their violation. As a result, the authorial function dominates those of the narrator and protagonist. Indeed, the author, from a discursive point of view, represents the rules, guaranteeing the movement from the sphere of narrative to that of social and legal truth, the dominant aspect of the communist self-narration.

The feminist paradoxical injunction, meanwhile, operates in the form of testimony. The truth of the story does not depend on it corresponding to the set of personal data the author collects about themselves. Instead, it is expressed in the authenticity of the protagonist’s experience and the way this is shaped by the narrator. Neo-feminism, as we will see, pushes this policy of self-narration to radical results.

Set out in this way, the opposition between the communist and feminist autobiographical strategies is what Weber would define as an ideal type. In other words, the reconstructions of these two self-narration mechanisms have been produced following the rhetorical logic of the example, which incorporates the relevant features of a category of phenomena, but in a distorted manner. From this point of view, an example can neither be true nor false, but instead is either pertinent or irrelevant. And its value is not found in its descriptive accuracy, but in its potential to ‘measure’ phenomena using interesting and innovative metrics (Sadri Reference Sadri1992, 20–21). Overall, the comparison of communist and feminist autobiography may perhaps be exaggerated in its features, but the exaggeration helps to open up new ways of interpreting these phenomena.

Finally, a few clarifications on the research materials. For the communist sources I examined the autobiographies in the Commissione Quadri sub-series of the archive of the Bologna Federation of the PCI, held by the Fondazione Gramsci Emilia-Romagna in Bologna.Footnote ³ To date I have extracted 63 individual files, belonging to eight women and 55 men. In four cases there was no autobiography, and I only found the precompiled biographical form. Eleven files contained two different autobiographies for the same activist, three contained three different autobiographies, and one contained four. Twenty-four autobiographies are undated. The others were composed between 1949 and 1959. The oldest activist was born in 1897, the youngest in 1933. The documents are still in the process of being recorded in an inventory, and it is therefore impossible to give their reference details within the archive. For privacy reasons, all sensitive data from the autobiographies cited have been removed, and the original names have been replaced by pseudonyms.

The documentation relating to feminism is taken from the Maddalena (Lea) Melandri archive, held by the Fondazione Elvira Badaracco in Milan. My research concentrated on the sub-series entitled Quaderni di appunti, and specifically on personal diaries written between 1966 and 1976 containing dream transcripts, self-analysis, travel notes and self-consciousness reports. This archive was chosen due to its radicalism and the consistency with which Melandri dealt with the problem of expressing oneself in the first person, from a feminist point of view. It is a piece of writing that allows an in-depth examination of the relationship between the feminist enunciation of the self, paradoxical injunction and testimony.

Communist forms of autobiography

The autobiographical framing of activists as an organisational technique was not invented by the PCI. It stemmed from the Bolshevisation of the party in the 1920s, the effects of which were seen in Italy only after the Second World War. It was when the PCI re-emerged from the hiding place to which Fascism had confined it and opened up to mass recruitment that the Soviet tool of autobiography could be employed.

The Bolshevik-inspired party structure involved a series of institutional occasions when members had to focus attention on themselves, both in oral and written form, including self-criticism and autobiography (Studer Reference Studer2003). The former was noted by Stalin himself as one of the four key elements of the ‘Leninist method’: the act of recognising one’s own mistakes in order to improve oneself politically.Footnote ⁴ The latter was requested in written form as far back as 1921 to screen those who wanted to join the party (Kharkhodin Reference Kharkhodin1999, 170-171), and was to be repeated when moving to a new position within it.

It was the Communist International (Comintern) that led to self-criticism and autobiographical framing being spread abroad. Indeed, its members, on arrival in the Soviet Union, were obliged to sign up to the Bolshevik party and, like local activists, were subjected to obligatory self-criticism and self-narration (Unfried Reference Unfried2002). The Communist University of the National Minorities of the West and the International Leninist School also played a fundamental role in exporting these practices.Footnote ⁵ As a result, by 1937, the French Communist Party’s Activist Committee held 6,000 autobiographies of its members (Pennetier and Pudal Reference Pennetier and Pudal2002, 136). With Palmiro Togliatti’s return in 1944, the PCI also moved in the same direction.

Upon joining, activists filled out a questionnaire, the Biografia del militante, which was accompanied by a request to produce a free-form autobiography. The Biografia del militante was divided into three sections and acted as a reference for writing the autobiography. The first part was dedicated to the activist’s personal details. The second, meanwhile, focused on their political activities. The questions that activists had to answer here covered a wide range of issues, from their current activities in the party and trade union to their past in the Resistance and under Fascism. Special attention was given to any breaks in their communist activism, which aroused suspicions about their attitude. The names of companions who could guarantee the truthfulness of the information provided were then requested. Finally, there were some forward-looking requests: what were the activist’s strong points, and how could they be of use to the party? An overview of the activist’s past was therefore combined with a look at their future potential.

The third and final section, dedicated to the ‘persecution suffered’ under Fascism, returned to looking backwards. The aim was to ascertain whether the activist had denounced companions or been betrayed by anyone and, if convicted of anything, whether they had requested a pardon. This was therefore a way of measuring their political strength in the face of Fascism. The last question, ‘have you ever acted in a way that contradicts the party line?’ was intended to root out any disagreements with the party. It obviously assumed a negative response, ensuring the activist’s life story fitted the administrative, moral and ideological requirements of the party line, and moving from a focus on specific personal details to the universal orientation of communist politics.

The data-driven imprinting of the Biografia del militante was responsible for the basic level of the free-form autobiography:

This provides a sort of record of his life, but corresponds to the ‘degree zero’ of communist autobiography. The documentary precision of the writing reproduces the line of questioning in the questionnaire, without providing any additional information.

However, this ‘degree zero’ can be interpreted in ways that take the desire for accuracy in unexpected directions:

Here the chronology dissolves into a series of place names. The activist’s autobiographical precision pushes her to end without any references to the party, instead providing further details about her father and his work, once again in relation to his geographical position. The same writing strategy was also adopted in more elaborate linguistic forms:

The authors of these three autobiographies have different educational backgrounds: one completed five years at primary school, one went to business school and completed a course in stenography and one held a degree in economics and business. However, the form of autobiography used is the same; each writer documents their life history in minute detail. The protagonist is missing here, destroyed in the series of spatial, temporal and social data that can be traced directly to the author. The narrator is similarly transparent, the neutral compiler of an administrative document.

However, some people interpreted the autobiography in a way that complicated the underlying information-based structure:

Later in the same text we find the following passage:

Here the positions of the narrator and the protagonist are clearly separated. The former extracts the sense of the story, giving it a fundamentally educational bent, summarised in three aspects loaded with meaning: social background, the objective story and subjective choices. The latter, meanwhile, is described with vibrancy worthy of a novel. During the long nights of military boredom, he spends his time discussing big political issues with a socialist friend. The autobiographical structure is further refined by the addition to the interplay between narrator and protagonist of the recognition of the role the party played in the activist’s life.

In this case, it is the position of the narrator that is reshaped. The narrator’s ability to extract a positive sense from the story is made to rely on the operations of the party and its political teaching. Indeed, this autobiography was written at the end of a training course organised by the PCI. As well as the scrutiny of data and the differentiation between narrator/meaning and protagonist/personal story, a third entity is now present: the party. The party ensures that the meaning produced by the autobiographical narrator is correct and acts as an instrument of truth. Drawing on the communist lexicon, this embeds an attitude of self-criticism in the autobiography, directing the narration of the latter to the requirements of the former. The subject of the text thus rewrites his life history as a series of errors that appear as such thanks to the party’s role as an instrument of truth.

Self-criticism, however, is not simply a recognition of one’s mistakes. The activist’s increased ‘political maturity’ coincides with achieving ‘better results’. Self-criticism therefore goes hand-in-hand with the need to make party activists more ‘active’, expressed both by Togliatti (Reference Togliatti1984) in his speech in Florence on 3 October 1944 and by Pietro Secchia (Reference Secchia1948) in his speech to the 6th Congress of the PCI in January 1948. The latter clearly defined the ways of achieving this, stating that the superior organisation should summon the inferior body frequently to request a summary of their work. The activists in the latter should not concentrate on the individual aspects of their operations, but instead grasp their overall meaning, which, through the democratic centralism clause, coincides with that prescribed by the superior organisation. And the activists will become more active as a result (Secchia Reference Secchia1948, 33–34).Footnote ¹¹

Using self-criticism in this way to increase activists’ activity represents the specific quality of party autobiography. The shortcomings of the past and their recognition inspire the force of the activist’s communist present,Footnote ¹² guaranteed by their belonging to the party. The void therefore generates fullness, and becoming active is identified with taking on one’s own passivity.

Given this structure, the convergence of the PCI with the structure of the Church and the Order of Jesus was inevitable.Footnote ¹³ However, the autobiographical and organisational structure in question can be summarised by reducing it to its most basic form, encapsulated in the command ‘be active’.

This is a paradoxical injunction (Watzlawick, Beavin and Jackson Reference Watzlawick, Beavin and Jackson1967) on a par with ‘be spontaneous’ or ‘be yourself’. Basically, it is a command that is not possible to fulfil. If one is active it necessarily implies being independent, and therefore disobeying the rule. If one follows it, one is not being active, because one is obeying. Naturally, a paradoxical prescription only works within a relationship of subordination. It turns the power relationship into a discursive asymmetry, in which the subordinated subject cannot control the sense of its interpretation of the command to which it is subjected. This interpretation depends on the superior organisation; in other words, in our case, the party as reader of the autobiographical text.

The forms of autobiography, both simple and complex, presented above all attempt, unsatisfactorily, to tackle the paradoxical prescription to which they are subjected. In the texts where narrator and protagonist are subordinate to the authorial requirement, i.e. the personal details it demands, the letter of the command is followed, but not the spirit. The autobiographical injunction to describe oneself in detail is obeyed, but the overall meaning is not drawn from it. This act always runs the risk of failing to match the expectations of the superior organisation and, as a result, the activist does not really manage to become more active. In the forms where the interplay between narrator and protagonist is more developed, the spirit of the instruction is followed, but not the letter. They search for the overall sense of their story, in order to become more active, but this process risks going beyond the command that demanded it. The protagonist and narrator thus jeopardise the rights of the author.

‘Bureaucratism’ as the domain of the authorial function, and ‘protagonism’,Footnote ¹⁴ the potential insubordination of the narrator and protagonist, are the inescapable conditions of this form of writing. The autobiographical act is defined by the uncertain distancing of oneself from these conditions. Naturally, this does not mean that the subjects of this writing are completely passive in nature. Instead they develop these conditions constructively, without ever obtaining an entirely satisfactory form of self-enunciation.

Feminist forms of autobiography

Along with interest in the body (Bracke Reference Bracke2015), the practice of self-narration is one of the elements that defined the identity of Italian neo-feminism (Passerini Reference Passerini1991, 167–168). However, its profile was rather different from communist autobiography, not least because there was no institution directing its use. Indeed, Italian neo-feminism also specifically distanced itself from communist politics on its formation (Hellman Reference Hellman1987).

Self-narration took on a strategic value, from a political viewpoint, in the form of practising self-consciousness. This was imported from radical American feminism, although it also had roots in the meetings held by young members of Catholic associations in Italy (Passerini Reference Passerini1991, 143). These two origins are further complicated, from a theoretical point of view, by the encounter with French women from Psy et Po. This was particularly influential on Milanese feminism, going beyond the practice of self-consciousness towards exploring the subconscious (Melandri Reference Melandri2000) and leading to a stronger interest in analytical research (Martucci Reference Martucci2008, 12–29).

Self-consciousness groups and those dedicated to psychoanalytical self-examination were spaces of autobiographical exchange. Within them the desire for narration took root, not only as a means of expression, but as a tool for recognising oneself through the narrative of others (Cavarero Reference Cavarero2000, 91). This produced a chaoticFootnote ¹⁵ profusion of women’s writing, with numerous styles, aims and forms of expression adopted, and often impossible to trace, because they were published independently or circulated in photocopied form. However, they all shared a desire to return women and their personal stories to the pages of history, where they had been hidden from view (Melchiori Reference Melchiori2015, 78–79).

One means of getting closer to this textual space and attempting to put feminist autobiographical practices into some sort of order is by studying the experience of Sottosopra. This publication was produced between 1973 and 1976 by a group from Via Cherubini in Milan, as a tool to collect together the Experiences of Italian feminist groups, as the subtitle from the first two editions from 1973 and 1974 spelled out.Footnote ¹⁶ The publication not only devoted space to feminist experiences across Italy, but also included a particularly wide range of forms of expression in its women’s writing. It contained poetry, political documents, transcriptions of meetings of feminist groups, theoretical articles, open letters, songs, translations and writing from women describing their condition.

Leaving aside the ideological and theoretical documents, the autobiographical inclination of the materials is clearly apparent. In particular, the 1974 edition of Sottosopra contains a collection of office stories, whose protagonists are female office workers, oppressed by their male colleagues and bosses. One, which tells the story of a young woman moving from one job to the next, without any satisfaction, is particularly sad:

We learn from the story that after two years the protagonist requests a part-time role, gets married, and then feels guilty because she works fewer hours than her husband. The story ends with a rhetorical question: ‘when will it end?’

This feeling of unhappiness is also expressed in the other tales, such as Liliana’s ‘story from ten years ago, which still pains me inside’. In her description, the offices, this time in a large company, are a place of sexual alienation with nowhere to escape to:

Another woman, also a secretary, described the same meaningless atmosphere:

These events are full of existential desolation, and together they paint a portrait of gloomy daily life for women, similar to that described by Elio Pagliarani (Reference Pagliarani2016) in his poem La ragazza Carla. Unlike the communist autobiographies, there is no strict documentary monitoring of the self, and the author does not act as a key figure to which the narrator and protagonist must be subservient. Instead, the narrator and protagonist are given free rein to play and move between the story and its meaning. As a result, they produce the extraordinarily vivid list that summarises the moral and anatomical possibilities of women in a company – ‘pussies, tits, arses’ and so on – and the bitter final conclusion on the destiny of women – ‘we women who were on hand were lusted after and at the same time scorned’.

At the heart of all this is the different positioning of the two autobiographies in question. The communist mechanism triggers self-narration in the context of the rules and compliance with the command they imply. The feminist mechanism, meanwhile, ties autobiography to the act of testimony, which is located outside the rules (Ricoeur Reference Ricoeur1994, 107). Communist self-narration is designed to be exemplary in nature, a specific example that embodies the superiority of the communist model. The feminist self-expression, meanwhile, chooses the witness’ individual truth over compliance with certain standards or, rather, it uses this truth as its own standard. This allows it to present the combative tones merited by the challenge the witness makes to the rules.Footnote ¹⁷

Naturally, this does not mean that offering testimony and a desire to fight the rules are absent in the communist autobiographies. However, these elements were kept in check by the need for the activists to present themselves as exemplary subjects under the communist standards, which were broad and widespread in nature.Footnote ¹⁸ Indeed, they developed not only in the organisational and political field, in the various forms of democratic centralism and through the strategy of progressive democracy, but also in the cognitive field, through references to Marxism and the rules of history.

The testimonial style of the self-narration meant it was suited to discursive development, and this pushed Italian neo-feminism to the limit of the possibilities of autobiographical enunciation. Indeed, the feminist self-narration in Sottosopra defined itself as the act of saying something that had never been said before, or, to be more precise, the desire to say what previously had not been said with sufficient force because it was difficult to say, and therefore needed to be re-said. The unspoken entity behind the feminists’ words was the oppression and violence to which women were subjected during thousands of years of male dominance. This silence in the history books created the conditions for feminist autobiographical enunciation and the negative force with which the act of recounting oneself collides.

This lack of discourse has the same relationship with self-expression as trauma does with its narration in the first person. Both cases involve saying things that resist being put into spoken form and require the accepted boundaries of self-narration to be broken to be expressed properly (Gilmore Reference Gilmore2001). The need to tackle this problem explains the variety of expressive forms adopted by feminist writing. These are, essentially, the different routes found to overcome the resistance to speaking out caused by the historic trauma at the heart of the female condition. This need was the starting point for a self-enunciation strategy that radically developed the experience of simple offering testimony:

This text is taken from one of the notebooks in which Lea Melandri described her dreams. The date marked on the page is 25-26 December 1969 – the notes on her dreams are almost always preceded by a record of the date. Naturally, Melandri was not the only Italian feminist to transcribe her dreams; the practice was recorded in many other works (Martinelli Reference Martinelli1975; Lonzi Reference Lonzi1978). However, Lea Melandri dedicated her notebooks to dream recording and analysis from the mid-1960s onwards, following a pathway that fitted with her subsequent interest in exploring the subconscious.

This particular dream translates the sense of desolation in the office descriptions into a sensation of anguish, projected onto a fairy-tale backdrop. The fox is injured and the children appear to have been captured by the forest ranger. The king and the court that suddenly appear, and the wait for a verdict, project the story into a sort of fantasy courtroom. In this sense, the dream seems like the tortured staging of the testimonial style of feminist discourse, which awaits a verdict on (male) history without any chance to appeal.

However, this is not the key element that defines the radicalisation of the neo-feminist testimonial strategy. Instead it is the choice of the discursive material to enunciate, in other words the female dream, which is relevant. It expresses the most personal aspects of the personal and therefore the most political aspects of the political, making the Italian feminist movement’s choice of the first person all the more extreme.

This changes the perspective of the decision to speak the unspoken, from speaking the unspoken of history, to directly saying the unspeakable.Footnote ²⁰ Feminist narrative no longer narrated the historic past of male domination, but rather its ontological anteriority. In this movement, from the history of violence to the prehistory that established the conditions for it to occur, dreams became the vehicle for accessing that profound and ahistorical space, which took the form of the subconscious.

The feminist form of self-enunciation, consisting of providing testimony and of summarising dreams, thus appears to have distanced itself from the communist version, obsessed as it was with rules and their violation. However, despite the differing topics, here too the way to uncover the ontology of male violence was forged through a paradoxical injunction, which can be summarised in the formula ‘say the unspeakable!’ that led to feminists summarising their own dreams.

The tool used to create these political identities was therefore the same – the paradoxical injunction. The way it was made to work in terms of self-expression, however, was different. The communists concentrated on complying with commands. The problem was therefore revealing oneself to be active in one’s autobiography within the fundamentally passive nature of subordination to the rules of the party. Feminism, which attempted to say the unspeakable, did not do this through obligation. The women who wanted to recount the unspoken truth chose to do so. The contradiction, then, is not in the form of the command, but in its contents. The resulting torment is not the effect of an external inability to interpret the rules, but rather an internal inadequacy. How does one say the unspeakable? Do dreams and the subconscious express the unspeakable sufficiently well? Or should the unspeakable remain unsaid?

Lea Melandri’s notebooks provide some insight into this web of questions, which cannot be answered because they are trapped in a paradoxical injunction. In the series of her transcriptions, one page is marked with the date 7 September 1969. The page, however, has been left blank. She wanted to note down her dreams that day, but did not. Naturally, there are many different possible banal reasons for which she may not have done so – a lack of time, jobs that needed doing, or perhaps she simply forgot. However, this blank space (Ginzburg Reference Ginzburg2000, 109–126) can be interpreted as a clue to the underlying problem of all these dream reports. Once the unspeakable has been said, it is no longer unspeakable. The best way to say it is therefore to remain silent, and leave the page blank.

Just as passivity and protagonism were the conditions for communists’ writing about the self, so empty space and silence appear to be the best form of self-expression within the radical feminist strategy for enunciating the self. This silence does not just concern the topic of maternity and its belated resumption by the Milan Women’s Bookstore (Passerini Reference Passerini1994) and is not merely the result of the unravelling of the women’s movement from the late 1970s onwards. Instead it is the effect of the radicalism used by the best culturally equipped section of Italian neo-feminism to tackle the challenge of self-expression.