[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_99

Let’s spit on Hegel, Carla Lonzi, 1981

Carla Lonzi’s feminism is uncompromising: provocative, radical, and lyrical. In her notebook of reflections, Lonzi confesses: “Feminism presented itself to me as the possible outlet between the symbolic alternatives of the female condition, prostitution, and seclusion: managing to live without selling one’s body and without giving it up. Without losing oneself and without saving oneself”. On the one hand, the renunciation of the body as not one’s own, the resignation to being the object of others’ desire. On the other, the total denial of one’s sexualization, to the point of denying one’s sexuality itself.

You don’t need to have been a prostitute or taken vows to have experienced these two extremes; many women enter and exit these phases several times throughout their lives in a desperate search for balance and serenity, as if it were a matter of negotiating the right compromise in a dualism, between one’s self and one’s body, without considering the relationship with others and the influence that others – men, society, the world – have on us.

“Let’s spit on Hegel” is a war cry expressed in philosophical banter. Carla Lonzi hides dagger words between the folds of a long phenomenological sheet. She chooses to express herself with the language of the Great Men, the language of those who created Thought, the language of Philosophy, but not to build a dialogue, no. To refuse any conciliation.

For Lonzi, spitting on Hegel is despising the highest symbol of an entire culture; it is not recognizing its authority, not submitting to rules written by a few men for other men. Spitting is a violent gesture: you do not respect the boundary that separates bodies and intimacies; you do not recognize the humanity of the other; instead, you give them the most visceral part of yourself, your excess.

When I was a child, my family forced me to go to Sunday Mass to confess and to take Communion. I say “forced me” because I hated priests, the Church, and all their absurd rules, so my family forced me to take the sacraments against my will, blackmailing me with corporal punishment, restrictions on my freedom, and induced feelings of guilt. I remember that the only gesture that allowed me to bear this violence was spitting on the effigies of the Saints and of Christ when no one was looking. Before the service or immediately after, I would pass by the statues of the Saints or their icons and spit on them. Sometimes pretending to eat the host, I hid it in my pocket, and then, once home, I would crush it with my shoe, spitting all the saliva I had on it and reducing it to a brown mush. It was an act of catharsis and revenge at the same time, an outlet linked to the frustration of not having power over my life.

But it was also a meaningful answer that I gave to myself: by spitting, I was telling the Saints, Christ, my family, and the entire Ecclesiastical Institution that I was not bending, that I did not recognize any of them, that I was not one of them, that I would never be, and, above all, that I was not afraid of them, of their hell and not even of all their devils.

Spitting on Hegel is saying no to a school of thought that has dominated the Western world for centuries, with its heavens and hells, producing an aesthetic and a universe of values that still serves as our Home, Church, and Museum. And women, after having been perpetually left out of this colossal building project, should now knock on the doors of Knowledge with their hats in their hands, hoping to be welcomed and listened to. For Carla Lonzi, the answer is never.

Rather than spitting on Hegel, we should directly drive a bulldozer and pulverize the entire Cultural Pantheon. But in the meantime, let's learn to spit."Equality is what is offered to the colonized in terms of laws and rights. It is what is imposed on them in terms of culture. It is the principle by which the hegemon continues to condition the non-hegemon.