L’altra metà del silenzio. Una riflessione a partire da María Zambrano.

Abstract

This essay is about the silences of women. In the first section, I discuss the limits of the philosophy of emancipation which takes its roots in the age of Enlightenment and emphasizes women’s silence purely as a result of discrimination and oppression without ever considering the complexity of the issue of women’s freedom — which is not only a matter of rights, but also a matter of symbolic order. In the second section, I refer to the Belgian philosopher Françoise Collin, who suggested that hegemonic historiography (including feminist historiography) is not able to do justice to the contribution of anonymous and silent people to the word. In the third section I analyze the essays of María Zambrano dedicated to the novel Misericordia of Benito Pérez Galdós in order to show how women’s silence(s) can sometimes be a strategic and creative way of action.