Luisa Muraro was a great revolutionary.
Your life as a woman - but also that of many men - after meeting her and her language could no longer be the same. “A passage into something else and an opening to infinity that leads not beyond and beyond, but right here, where and how we are, where and how we did not know we were and where we were.”.
A revolution similar to that which occurs for every creature when - after the great effort of babbling - thanks to her mother and to the one Luisa admired as “maternal competence”, the creature encounters the word and therefore itself and the world, only to then get lost in it. Unless one has the great fortune of encountering someone who teaches you how to speak and how to be in the world again, bringing you back into the proximity of the mother, the first teacher, and her symbolic order.
A very fine scholar of language, Muraro has always preferred to express herself in the simple and precise words of everyday experience, sometimes violent in their nakedness and essentiality, restoring value to the language of the simple so close to bodies and material reality. The language of the peasants of her Montecchio. Or to give a moving example, that of Sibilla and Pierina, burned at the stake as witches by the Inquisition tribunal of Milan, the inaugural episode of the witch hunt that Luisa recounted in her splendid “The Lady of the Game”.
Saying more with less, precise and free from superstructures, so similar to the female experience of do your best with the little you have, and never give in to the temptation to feel sorry for yourself for the material and symbolic misery into which men have forced us, because Muraro's other lesson was this: to escape the temptation to take the victim's role and engage in equal recrimination, giving himself authority “in discovering in myself, in others, in historical reality, the greatness of women and affirming it here and now, immediately, with the means we have, raising the sky and broadening the horizon.”. Asking God without mediation, creating within itself the void of that lack that allows desire to run, a lesson from Marguerite Porete and the other mystics and beguines whom Luisa approached with such passion and study. A God who needs you to exist, as another great mystic who lived in the twentieth century, Etty Hillesum, taught us.
You do it once and you never forget it, the victim mentality no longer tempts you.
Luisa Muraro will be greatly missed by her fellow feminists because in the “battlefield,” as she herself defined feminism, the voice of thought on sexual difference seems to have grown fainter today. Sexual indifferentism, intersectionality, and the permanent subordination of the search for freedom to other, supposedly superior, causes seem to have relativized its transformative power.
But on the battlefield, we must accept our presence and fight. The practice of sexual difference means being reborn once and for all into one's own authentic language and not giving up speaking it at every opportunity and wherever we find ourselves.
For a few years Luisa had not spoken and on the few public occasions she limited herself to listening with her eyes closed. She had announced that she would go on vacation and she kept her promise.
Just a few weeks ago he left us Lia Cigarini, his lifelong companion. In my imagination, it would have been Lia, a girl forever, with her poorly concealed fragilities, who would not survive the loss of her "Luisino." I never thought it would be Luisa, with her harsh and unbearable nature, who would succumb to the pain of loss. I was wrong.
I want to remember her in certain crazy and carefree dinners in the kitchen-cave of our mutual friend Nadia, Lost too soon. Her terrible rebuke for boasting about something good I'd done has forever scarred me: "It wasn't you! It was the Holy Spirit!".
She was very fond of Chanel No. 5.
Today, June 14th, would have been his 86th birthday.
Marina Terragni
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