Articles for DWF
Books reviewed by DWF
Articles for DWF
Thinking/telling. Hannah Arendt, 1986, n. 3, pp. 36-44
The article takes its departure from Hannah Arendt's biography of Rahel Varnhagen. which remained unfinished and was published long after it was initially drafted. The first question that comes to mind is obvious: when Arendt writes the life of another woman, does she in any way "write herself"?
An answer is provided by a brief outline of the central ideas of Arendt's philosophy: her particular conception of individuality as an expression of singularness visible in the multiple relationship with others; the difference between zoe and bios, between natural life and the birth-to-life of an individual, the idea of man not as the author but as the actor of his own life; the need to speak about life through the examples of lives.
From this derives a clearly defined notion of history as the antithesis of totality, and of the story as a more reliable mirror of reality. And from this, above all, derives the meaning that to "write biography" assumes in Arendt's thought as a whole, namely, to capture singularness in its relationship with plurality, to stress the value of birth as beginning, and to narrate.
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Birth Time, 1993, n. 20, pp. 33-48
This essay originally appeared in "Les Cahiers du Grif" n. 30, 1985; translating and publishing it now is a choice dictated by the conviction that it can help analyse the present crisis of the Western world, and more particularly of Italian society.
Collin addresses the crisis of the industrial ideology of work, with its attendant division between work-time and leisure-time; she makes uses of some fundamental categories of Hannah Arendt's thought and invites women to rethink the problem of gender relations. "We must face the old problem with the new data. Data which offer an opportunity for a solution of the old problem".
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Plurality, difference, identity, 1995, n. 26-27, pp. 80-94
Already published in "Presences" (1991), this essay examines two great trends of feminist thought, roughly definable as "essentialist" and "unitarianist"; according to the author, neither can satisfactorily account for the relationships between the sexes.
In re-thinking the problem of sexual difference, Collin looks at Hannah Arendt's thought - especially with regard to the Jewish question - and comes to the conclusion that "in our present situation (without wanting to decide whether that is because of nature or of a social construction) woman' has a sense, although in a polysemic rather than in a unique way. This sense, although not definable, can either be swallowed up in the chaos of contemporary non-sense, or on the contrary it can open up new possibilities of sense".
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Politics and Poetics, 1996, n. 32, pp. 90-100
Feminism (taking the term in its widest meaning) needs to work on the symbolic order. Otherways, Collin argues, even women's achievements in the social order will be at risk, because they will not produce a new foundation for a shared understanding of the world. The author discusses the possible criteria for a feminist critique which would empower the works of art of women, past and present.
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Antigoné. The young, the mother, the death, 2005, n. 1
The author reads Sophocle's tragedy e some of its contemporary commentaries - Jacques Lacan, Patrick Guyomard, Judith Butler - regarding generational differences e transmission: if Lacan thesis about the guilty desire of the mother is a too fast diagnosis, Butler's resolution in a "whole symbolic with no natural reference" isn't persuasive yet. Collin, according to the attempt of Guyomard, claims for the rediscovery of new e contemporary modes of asymmetry in parenthood.
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Books reviewed by DWF
COLLIN Françoise - FORCINA Marisa, La differenza dei sessi nella filosofia.
Nodi teorici e problemi politici, Lecce, Milella, 1997
rev. by F.G., 1998, n. 39-40, pp. 139-140