Name: Frida Sandström – From “informe” to “deculturizzazione”. Carla Lonzi’s critique of art and sexuality
Start: 2025-03-11T13:00:00+01:00
End: 2025-03-11T15:00:00+01:00
Location: Stockholms Universitet Frescati

$Frida Sandstr\u00f6m \u2013 From \u201cinforme\u201d to \u201cdeculturizzazione\u201d. Carla Lonzi\u2019s critique of art and sexuality$

Welcome to the Seminar in Feminist Continental Philosophy in Stockholm on March 11, when Frida Sandström (University of Copenhagen) will give a talk titled ”From ‘informe’ to ‘deculturizzazione’. Carla Lonzi’s critique of art and sexuality 1970”.
Time: 13:00-15:00 (1:00-3:00 pm CET)
Location: Stockholms universitet, Gula villan, room: Minerva
Abstract:
This paper will take its starting point in the undiscussed Italian notion of decultura – alienated culture – as a way of historicizing the feminist notion of deculturalisazzione (deculturalization), coined by Italian art critic and separatist feminist Carla Lonzi (b. 1931) in 1970. Deculturalisazzione was introduced by Lonzi in the seminal, anti-dialectical essay “Let’s Spit on Hegel,” published along with the manifesto for the separatist feminist group Rivolta Femminile that Lonzi co-foundedthe same year. The notion thus gained a central role for the understanding of Rivolta’s practice of autocoscienza (consciousness raising). Departing from a close reading of the essay, I will show how Lonzi describes the practice of deculturizzazione similar to how Geroge Bataille much briefer described ‘informe’ thirty years prior, in 1929. If both Lonzi and Bataille object a Hegelian philosophy of history as it operated in politics and science at the time, Batailles abstract proposal gains a practical form in Lonzi’s description of deculturalizzazione as a pre-conceptual activity that emerges before or even against a critical judgment. Lonzi’s relation to Bataille is underdeveloped in research, although her incessant montages of transcripts reveal an interest in the informe as a collective creative practice. To understand Bataille’s notion as it operated in postwar Italy, and especially in Italian autonomus separatist feminism, we need to rethink the role of surrealism in anti-Stalinist contexts of Italian Hegel dissidents. In this transhistorical analysis I will also turn to Antonin Artaud’s notion of the double as an inhuman reality echoes the decultured experience of the sexually repressed (1938) and the role that Artaud played for the generation after Lonzi, in the practice and thinking for sexual liberation undertaken by figures such as Mario Mieli (1952-1983).
Welcome!
Lisa Folkmarson Käll, Fanny Söderbäck & Ina Hallström