THEn a time in which the world seems to have returned to the point where only strength counts and war also affects Europe, it exists need to start hearing a different voice again, one that escapes the logic of violence. In Obscene thought (Tlon, 2025), a book born from the urgency of responding to the threat of war, Annarosa Buttarelli – philosopher and scholar of the thought of difference in the wake of the feminist Carla Lonzi (whose works he edited) – explains that this voice can only be that of women, who have always been strangers to war and capable of “truly thinking”, taking root “in an obscene terrain, that of experience nourished by feeling”.
What is the “obscene thought”?
It is the – scandalous – one of women who think. I used the word obscene philologically, which comes from the Greek ob (which means “outside”) and skenè (“scene”) and means being confined outside the enlightened scene of dominant thought, from which age-old misogyny has expelled us. Since the beginning of European culture, women have been identified as non-thinking animals, according to the idea of sexual difference imagined by Aristotle – who was the winner in the construction of Western philosophy – and by other philosophers.
In the book you explain that this being off stage allowed women to develop alternative thinking.
It allowed us to remain distant from the established power. Carla Lonzi, one of the mothers of Italian feminism, said: “Let’s take advantage of the absence”. Absence of women from male culture, from male institutions, from male history, those that even today in universities we are used to considering as culture, institutions and history as such.
Some of the voices that have given impetus to female reflection, clockwise: María Zambrano, Giulia Sissa, Carla Lonzi and Virginia Wolf. Illustration by Eloïse Heinzer
Yet, there have always been women thinkers.
Feminist studies have demonstrated this: since the beginning of European history, in classical Greece, there were women of thought who engaged in dialogue with men, in a proactive and conflictual way. Like Axiothea of Fliunte who in the 4th century BC managed to enter the Platonic academy, disguising herself as a man, to oppose the Aristotelian lesson according to which slavery was natural. Assiotea worked, unheard, to deconstruct the fallacious Aristotelian logic.
Why fallacious? Isn’t it the origin of Western logic?
Yes, it is. But today the logical errors, and therefore the lack of scientific nature, of male philosophies are increasingly evident. Giulia Sissa wrote about it in a beautiful book, Aristotle’s Error (Carocci). One of his mistakes, for example, was to define humanity only as masculine. But then Aristotle also spoke of women as part of humanity and therefore contradicted himself without even realizing it: hence the fallacy.
In the book you explain that male thought is abstract and universal, while that of women is always rooted in experience. What does it mean?
The great philosopher María Zambrano said that we must “really think”. It means that authentic thought is that which takes root in a terrain considered obscene by the dominant philosophy, that of living experience that grows on feeling.
The cover of the book “Pensiero obscene” by Annarosa Buttarelli. Tlon Editions112 pages, €13
Is it this living experience that allows women to denounce the errors of male philosophies?
Yes. An excellent example of this is the conflictual dialogue between Princess Elizabeth of the Palatinate and Descartes, who was already a famous philosopher at that time. Descartes was writing a treatise to “dominate” the passions. In an exchange of letters, Elizabeth, who also had great respect for him as a philosopher, objected to him, starting from her living experience, that it is precisely passions that dominate political life: a very important lesson for today too. Descartes’ idea, however, was that the body should have no influence on the mind, considered, as pure free rationality, as the maximum expression of man. But Elizabeth replied that the mind and body are not so distinct, because otherwise the fainting would not be explained.
And what did the great philosopher reply?
That he knew nothing about politics because he lived a retired life, as a good thinker. Today we know that she was right, also about the fact that mind and body are not separate. Yet, Descartes had an enormous influence on philosophy.
Do you believe that in this period, in which force and violence seem to once again become the arbiters of relations between peoples, the obscene thoughts of women can offer an alternative?
Behind the arms race and behind the politics of force there is the influence of the idealistic thought that shaped Western culture. Hegel’s idea still applies – which fortunately we feminists have spat on, to quote the title of Carla Lonzi’s book – according to which to reach “a higher destiny”, a higher stage of humanity, “the heart of the world must burst”. His idea was that to overcome the old structures and customs the vital organ of the world had to be destroyed, all the rules had to be overturned. Now it seems that this is exactly what is happening: they are making the heart of the world explode, that is, the heart of everyone and all of us who do not go to war. Women’s thinking is exactly an alternative to this logic. It is no coincidence that in the 20th century, awareness of obscene thinking began with Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, in which the writer explained to her pacifist friends that the only way to avoid war was to think as an outsider. Off stage, in fact.
And what can we do today?
Reject the logic of violence that calls violence. And remember what María Zambrano, another of the thinkers I talk about in the book, said: that even in peace there are dangers. For example, seeing it only as the absence of war. It is something more, much more: it is a way of life, a way of inhabiting the planet, a way of being humanity… Zambrano wrote the text The dangers of peace in 1990, his last testimony in the face of the horror of the Persian Gulf war. A “state of peace” will never be achieved until there is a revolution in the general mindset. I learned from her that peace must be prepared and practiced.
As?
Through justice, which was born as a female practice. Let’s think about what happened when Solomon wanted to cut up the child to give half to each of the two women who claimed to be his mother. The real mother gave up the child so as not to see him quartered. This is a paradoxical practice of justice. And then peace must be prepared by practicing conflict.
The conflict? Isn’t that a contradiction?
No, this is also a paradox, because women are able to think and act above all paradoxically. We continue to unbearably superimpose “conflict” on “war”. But war is the denial of the other, conflict is a relationship practice. Which forces us to acknowledge our differences but also to seek common ground. The philosophers of obscene thought are masters of this.