I recently read Feminism or death by Francoise d'Eaubonne and I was underwhelmed. She proposes anti-natalism to solve overpopulation. Besides the fact that overpopulation is a myth of the rich to blame ecological collapse on the poor, I am suspicious of the usefulness of her demand (a suspicion of utility that I can thank Bataille for, who also opposes Malthusian economics of lack). We know that the planet has witnessed climate change at the turn of every geological epoch and that it will absolutely outlive this one. It has never been about saving the planet but saving ourselves. and when women's role is already to preserve the species through reproduction, d'Eaubonne's anti-natalism has only repackaged that duty.
but the other feminists quoted in Feminism or death have more to offer. I was intrigued by this quote attributed to Carla Lonzi, "the feminist movement is not international; it's planetary." Except I was met with zero results when I searched for "Let's Spit on Hegel" on my university library's website. I managed to find it in the collection Italian Feminist Thought by Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp, but it was strange that not even an article or a review came up. "Let's Spit on Hegel" says more in 20 pages than d'Eaubonne could in 200. Here I offer two forms of uselessness for women to embrace with the support of Lonzi:
1. at the level of the individual
"woman is a complete individual. what must be changed is not the way she is, but the way she sees herself."
It hit me a while ago that hating myself is what men want. and this came back to me -- and I hope you will forgive me for citing a reel -- when the instagram account @paris.mwendwa posted that "women hating themselves makes the world go round." not only at the level of tolerating abuse in relationships but even at the health of the economy. consumerism offers to the obsessive neurotic man a false mastery over his desires.1 for women -- the target demographic of the beauty industry -- consumption means maintaining the desire of men.
"We will perform all the subjective gestures which will enable us to conquer a space around us. And by this we do not mean identification. Identification has a compulsive male quality. it strips the bloom from an existence and subjects it to the demand of a rationality which would control, day by day, the sense of success or failure."
I wrote in my last blog about what Luce Irigaray says about men's exclusive access to identification. Or, "acting"; an "activity" that results from men's identification with the father in order to inherit the phallic Law (the incest taboo) of which disobedience would mean castration. When men are said to be active or that they are acting, it is always about power ("Man fucks woman; subject verb object," quoting d'Eaubonne quoting Catharine A. MacKinnon). I want to suggest a useless subjectivity for women, one that is neither active (using) or passive (used). a relation with the other that does not control, "identify" with the other by conquering it with knowledge and reason.
2. at the level of the political
"but there is no doubt in their minds that the proletariat is the historical force of the future. By fighting someone else’s battle, the young once again allow themselves to become subordinated, which is, of course, what has always been desired of them. Women, on the other hand, have the experience of two hundred years of feminism, and this gives them some advantage over the young. They tried first during the French and then during the Russian revolutions to combine their problematic with that of men at a political level, but they were simply granted the status of aggregate. Women now declare that the proletariat is revolutionary in its confrontation with capitalism, but reformist in facing the patriarchal system."
even the revolutionaries that promise the most progress -- the most useful organization of labour -- do not share the interests of women. after scolding Clara Zetkin for discussing women's issues with workers, he told her that "our communist women should … educate [the young], to carry them from the world of individual maternity to the world of social maternity … in this area a revolution is coming which corresponds to the proletarian revolution."2 women's liberation is only an afterthought of the revolution, if we are even calling "social maternity" a liberation. this equality that is a secondary consequence of communism isn't enough; asking only for equality between men and women is like asking for equality between bourgeoisie and proletariat, rich and poor. being a useful woman means self-repression for some greater good even under capitalism, feudalism, and communism.
I have criticized d'Eaubonne up until now, but she shares with Lonzi this distrust of male communists to which I'm entirely sympathetic. it can be so disillusioning to realize that feminism is the absolute last priority of male leftists who think that, by virtue of the "leftist" title, they must hold the most progressive ideas on everything without ever really examining their complicity in the patriarchy. Suggest that there wouldn't be a porn industry in communism and watch yourself become the most radical and naïve in the room.
--
"may we no longer be considered those who continue the species."3
An anti-natalism of the Lonzi-type requires no higher justification by climate change or overpopulation. Refuse motherhood to be useless to men, to the Hegelian/masculine progression of history contingent on its dialectics of power. or, if we must be useful, be it the way that Lyotard describes: "'use me' is a statement of vertiginous simplicity, it is not mystical, but materialist. let me be your surface and your tissues, you may be my orifices and my palms and my membranes, we could lose ourselves, leave the power and the squalid justification of the dialectic of redemption, we will be dead. and not: let me die by your hand, as Masoch said."
I have a couple more writings on political uselessness. in evolution and me, I take an evolutionary approach to women's uselessness. in modern art is fun, it is not so much about women but art (Carla Lonzi was an art critic, too).