From “informe” to “deculturizzazione”. Carla Lonzi’s critique of art and sexuality

During my time as a research fellow at DFK Paris, I will study the role of George Bataille’s notion of informe (1929) in the thinking and practice of Italian art critic and separatist feminist Carla Lonzi (b. 1931). In focus of the study will be a close reading of Lonzi’s seminal, anti-dialectical essay “Let’s Spit on Hegel” from 1970 and its role in the foundation of the separatist feminist group Rivolta Femminile the same year. The research will take its starting point in the undiscussed Italian notion of decultura – alienated culture – as a way of historicizing Lonzi’s notion of deculturalisazzione, central to Lonzi’s essay as well as to Rivolta’s practice of autocoscienza (consciousness raising). 
Lonzi describes the practice of deculturizzazione similar to how Bataille much briefer described ‘informe’ thirty years prior. If both Lonzi and Bataille object a Hegelian philosophy of history as it operated in politics and science at the time, Batailles abstract proposal gains a practical form in Lonzi’s description of deculturalizzazione as a pre-conceptual activity that emerges before or even against a critical judgment. Lonzi’s relation to Bataille is underdeveloped in research, although her incessant montages of transcripts reveal an interest in the informe as a collective creative practice. To understand Bataille’s notion as it operated in postwar Italy, and especially in Italian autonomus separatist feminism, we need to rethink the role of surrealism in anti-Stalinist contexts of Italian Hegel dissidents. In this transhistorical analysis I will also turn to Antonin Artaud’s notion of the double as an inhuman reality echoes the decultured experience of the sexually repressed. (1938) 
The research is undertaken at DFK is part of my thesis in progress, “Art criticism as Social Critique” and will develop into one of the concluding chapters in the prospect monography. It will also be presented as part of the conference Surréalismes Paris 2024, arranged by International Society for the Study of Surrealism (ISSS), October 28-31 2024.