Luisa Muraro

Works

• 1991The Symbolic Order of the Mother

  Argues that philosophy begins not with doubt but with gratitude to the mother who taught us to speak, and that this relation is the basis of women’s authority.

Position

Muraro developed Italian difference feminism into a philosophy of the symbolic. She started from Irigaray’s critique of a culture in which the feminine appears only as the other of the masculine, and from the practice of the Milan bookshop, which named Carla Lonzi’s Rivolta Femminile and autocoscienza as its starting point: relations between women, including the acknowledged disparity in which one woman entrusts herself to another with more experience (affidamento), create an authority that depends neither on male institutions nor on rights. In “The Symbolic Order of the Mother” she answered Descartes’ beginning in doubt with another beginning: knowing how to love the mother, from whom one received life and language, and acknowledging the debt to her. This order is not a biological claim but a relation to origin and language that patriarchal culture has suppressed and that women can restore among themselves. Her studies of medieval women mystics read their theology in the mother tongue as a form of this freedom. Her work shaped Diotima, in which Adriana Cavarero also took part, and the Duoda centre in Barcelona. Critics, among them equality feminists, objected that the emphasis on the mother risks essentialism and that a politics of relations neglects rights and institutions; the title of the Milan collective’s book, “Don’t Think You Have Any Rights”, already stated the opposite view.

Life & context

Luisa Muraro was born on 14 June 1940 in Montecchio Maggiore near Vicenza. She studied philosophy at the Università Cattolica in Milan and in the late 1960s published essays on Ferdinand de Saussure. In the 1970s she left her university career for a time to teach in schools and took part, with the psychoanalyst Elvio Fachinelli and others, in an experiment in non-authoritarian education (“L’erba voglio”, 1973). From 1970 she was active in the Milan women’s movement; in 1975 she co-founded the Libreria delle donne di Milano with Lia Cigarini and others, and in 1983 the women’s philosophical community Diotima at the University of Verona, where she taught theoretical philosophy for many years. She translated works by Luce Irigaray, among them “Speculum” (1975), into Italian, wrote on the witch trials (“La signora del gioco”, 1976) and on a medieval heresy around Guglielma of Milan (“Guglielma e Maifreda”, 1985), and was one of the authors of the bookshop’s collective book “Don’t Think You Have Any Rights” (1987). After “The Symbolic Order of the Mother” (1991) she wrote on women mystics such as Marguerite Porete, on God and on authority. She died on 13 June 2026.

Further main works

• The Lady of the Game (La signora del gioco, 1976)
• Guglielma and Maifreda (Guglielma e Maifreda, 1985)
• Don’t Think You Have Any Rights (Non credere di avere dei diritti, with the Libreria delle donne di Milano, 1987)
• Mother Tongue, Divine Science (Lingua materna, scienza divina, 1995)
• Authority (Autorità, 2013)