DWF
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

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.

MATERIA

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.

POLIEDRA

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.