“I Recognize Myself in an Identification Elsewhere”: Disentangling Carla Lonzi from the Thought of Sexual Difference

Abstract This article confronts the idea—especially widespread in the field of political philosophy, amongst Italian philosophers associated with feminism of difference, and in general narratives of 1970s Italian feminism—that Carla Lonzi was an anticipator of the Italian thought of sexual difference. Contra seminal texts like Non credere di avere dei diritti (1987) and scholars affiliated with the Libreria delle Donne di Milano and the Diotima philosophical collective, I illustrate how Lonzi was extraneous to the theoretical foundations and practices of “femminismo della differenza.” Notions of the symbolic mother, practices of disparity and ‘entrustment’, concerns with bringing into existence a female symbolic order—which would ground the development of the thought of sexual difference—were either absent in Lonzi’s writings or contested by her. While Lonzi’s work has increasingly been used to advance essentialist, gender-critical arguments by philosophers close to feminism of difference (for whom her work seemingly provides support against the very existence of non-binary, queer, and trans lives), I show how her approach to sexual difference departed significantly from such interpretations and can rather be more convincingly understood through Simone de Beauvoir.