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donnawomanfemme
Roma, Editrice coop. UTOPIA, 1986-
The paradigm of the prevention, 2003, n. 4
MASI Paola
The paradigm of the prevention. Editorial note, pp.
2-4
MATERIA
STELLA Rosetta
The fury and grace of prophecy, pp. 5-11
PITCH Tamar
Citizenship and prevention, pp. 12-25
CORSI Rita
Infinite future and infinite present, pp. 26-34
PIOVANO Emanuela
The preventive war c'est moi, pp. 35-39
BONACCHI Gabriella
The personal is non-political: prevention and profiling,
pp. 40-49
MASI Paola
The machine of science, pp. 50-57
EUSTACHIO Marilù
La metamorfosi e la maschera, pp. 58-65
POLIEDRA
BLAETTER Christine (edited by GIARDINI Federica)
Seriality as fact and act, pp. 66-71
SELECTA
FORTINI Laura
L'opacità del genere o della necessità di disarticolare l'Occidente,
pp. 72-79
ALESI Donatella
Guardando avanti o indietro, pp. 80-85
Reviews, pp. 86-91
Abstracts, pp. 192-94
Authors, pp. 95
MASI Paola, The paradigm of the prevention. Editorial note, pp. 2-4
The passage from pre-emptive to preventive war marks the 2003 version of the conflict with Iraq. But prevention is also a praxis and a paradigm useful to keep at bay all the "peaceful" inhabitants of the Western economic system.
It is the paradigm of our contemporary society, obsessed by the fear of risks and by the will to control: one is a good citizen if one, individually and privately, prevents all possible mishaps in life. The social causes of fear and insecurity are cancelled in a process which depoliticises both the personal and the political.
Furthermore, prevention
is a gendered practise, both because it is women - more women than men - who
take care of it and because they are its "privileged" targets.
STELLA Rosetta, The fury and grace of prophecy, pp. 5-11
Commenting a passage from John's Gospel (XXI,18) about being lead where one would not wish to go, in the perspective of today's preventive obsession, the author sees in the protagonism of the many kamikaze who kill themselves in killing - the suicide bombers, several of them women - the unforeseeable and uncontrollable event which escapes any controlling attempt.
The anxiety to
control destiny which marks our Western society and its culture of overbearing
power, also signals its decline; but in a crisis prophecy becomes possible if
one is able to look at things differently …
PITCH Tamar, Citizenship and prevention, pp. 12-25
The main hypothesis of this article is that privatised, individualised, prevention is today used to connote social citizenship: the good citizen is the one who takes precautions against all the possible risks of his/her life, and does so him/herself.
Prevention is assumed to combine and hold together the various definitions given to contemporary society, from the risk society to the society of surveillance. Plus, prevention is seen as a sexualised practice, as it is prevalently women who are to take care of it, and it is based on a definition of everybody as victim.
Privatised prevention
obscures and annuls the social causes of risks and fears, thus abolishing the
social, and with it the past. It delineates a flat scenario, where isolated
and lonely individuals fight for their own safety and security.
CORSI Rita, Infinite future and infinite present, pp. 26-34
Referring to Simone Weil's idea of the relationship with time as one of the main concerns of the human being, the author thinks over the peculiarities about this relationship in the contemporary age.
Several aspects of our society (the diffusion and the assumption of drugs, but even the obsession regarding the prevention of illness, unexpected events, terrorist attacks and so on) show our difficulty in finding in the present time the opportunity to satisfy the human need of infinity that Simon Weil defines part of the human nature.
Consequently the
only idea of infinity we can imagine is the one meaning an endless duration
of time, forgetting that infinity is first of all a peculiar quality of being
and therefore a dimension of the present where we live.
PIOVANO Emanuela, The preventive war c'est moi, pp. 35-39
The author retraces some differences and analogies between Spielberg's film Minority Report and Cocteau's film Le Téstament d'Orphée, in order to find out how Philip Dick's science fiction can inspire representations at different levels.
And how, above
all, poetry as well as films sketch the preventive attitude as an internal mood
belonging to everyone, as if it were something pre-existing consciousness, struggling
to become (or abandon) consciousness as well.
BONACCHI Gabriella, The personal is non-political: prevention and profiling,
pp. 40-49
As the title suggests, the essay claims the main role of "profiling" for present investigation in different fields. Profiling is the result and the promoting factor of a precise historical process: the present non-political substance of the personal sphere. To explain this process, the author takes a look at the role of science in the criminal justice system.
It focuses on the up-to-date technologies police rely on to apprehend criminal perpetrators and to link them through trace evidence to the crime scenes. A basic premise of the argument is the importance of physical evidence, involving a kind of soon to come (though not yet fully developed) predominance of DNA.
Finally, the author
asks two main questions: does the importance of physical evidence belong to
the paradigm of bio-politics? and is Bush's preventive war a part of it?
MASI Paola, The machine of science, pp. 50-57
A double level of analysis - a record of personal experiences and a reflection on feminist critiques of the dominant scientific paradigms - are proposed to question the construction of scientific knowledge and practice.
The prevention of diseases, the medical protocols and the development of bio-technologies are investigated to underline the ambiguities and metaphorical meanings of the present techno-scientific project.
The contemporary
version of the old reduction of scientific knowledge to a 'law of nature' has
strong epistemological similarities with the shift of politics into bio-politics:
against this process the authors proposes a ("patient") re-signification
of the complex personal and social experiences with science and politics.
BLAETTER Christine (edited by GIARDINI Federica), Seriality as fact and act, pp. 66-71
These reflections build upon Young's concept of 'gender as seriality' by embracing Sartre's distinction between series and groups as social col-lectives (in Critique de la raison dialectique). It is an attempt to go beyond Young's pragmatic conception to outline a concept of series on a epistemological level.
After examinong
Young's concept of series, which leeds her to propose seriality as a fact, the
author conceptualises seriality as a specific principle, in a gendered perspective,
taking into account Gilles Deleuze's multiple system of series (in Différence
et répétition and Logique du sens), where seriality as an act
can be pointed out. The notion of seriality makes possible to think ways of
order while preventing normalisation and exclusion.