The Desire for Form. A Genealogical reading

There is a renewed feminine desire for forms, today. In a recent past, the figuration of the “hysteric” expressed the feminine disorder seeking language and a different symbolic order, that is a proper “morphologic” (L. Irigaray, Speculum). Nowadays, this need of form tends to express itself mainly in the ways of a normation or institutionalization of women’s thought and presence. This is the way I read the latest work of Irigaray, where she ‘prescribes’ the caracteristics of feminine identity (Being Two), or the raising phenomenon of Women’s Studies in Italian universities. How is this need of forms coping with free desire? My own historical position provides some clues. I am ‘coming after’ the political and symbolical cut enacted by some women in the Seventies. I thus can refer to the authoritative words and works of those women, and then re-combine the need of form and the desire for freedom in a different way. Taking as an example the “Sliding tile puzzle” – a game in which moves are possibile because of the lack of an element – I propose to think about sexual difference as a dynamic of relational positions. Taking position is suspending the existing order ant its codified significations, in order to go back to experience and therefore create new combinations. This example makes possibile to keep together the political and practical dimension of the Italian version of sexual difference (Carla Lonzi, Diotima), the acquired skill in formalization of the new generations and creative thinking. In a discrete continuity with what has already been said.