The headlines of the newspapers, like most of the comments on the speech in the Houses of President Mattarella, recorded the unusual, surprising emphasis on the word dignity, which occurs 18 times. But I was struck by its immediate trivialization. Instead of raising some questions about the meaning of the so insistent use of a term full of history and value, the commentators have all veered towards more familiar semantic shores: they have translated dignity with right, and thus the long series of figures and themes evoked by President has been transformed into an enumeration of social rights, certainly stated in the somewhat obsolete language of Catholic-democratic culture.
In short, a solemn iteration becomes an injection of social and ethical inspiration in a present dominated by inequalities and by poverty. But can dignity really be translated into rights by invoking the echo of old distances that are now largely outdated? In fact, the lesson that emerges is that the term dignity comes from a culture, noble yes, but now exhausted while it can only be revived by entering (translating itself) into the modern culture of rights. No! I don't believe at all that the use of the term dignity is a tribute to tradition or worse an archaicizing residue. I certainly do not intend to practice the exegesis of the president's speech, it would not be appropriate. I would just like to point out a few issues that make that linear translation problematic.
Dignity is a term, inherited from humanistic civilization, with which some women's movements and groups (in which I too participated) have tried to escape the dilemmas, the real contradictions that the disjointed proliferation of individual rights produces in our societies by now fully post traditional.
In effect, the grip of religious dictates on social and individual behavior has completely relaxed and secularization has made giant strides; the ethical norms deriving from hierarchical systems have been undermined by the principle of the equality of individuals. For example, in the family where the principle of marital and paternal authority has been suppressed; there are no more institutions that are inaccessible to some subjects (such as the judiciary and the army to women). In short, secularization and the disappearance of the hierarchy and traditional authority have imposed themselves.
Certainly some minorities require to be recognized and affirmed civil rights still in some respects denied. But from the perspective of the women's revolution, it is problematic to think of women's freedom in terms of rights. As long as the women's liberation process concerns the fight against all forms of patriarchal domination, oppression and subordination inherited from the past, it seems completely obvious to resort to the form of modernity against tradition and decline the tension towards freedom in terms of rights : right to work, to equality with men, right to equality in all areas.
But what happens when the emancipatory process consumes, erodes symbols, structures and forms of tradition and women's freedom is confronted only with itself, in the midst of unfolding modernity? It happens that the equivalence between rights and freedom shows the rope, undermining the pervasiveness of the culture of rights: this has already been experienced with abortion (that is, with the recognition of a specificity of female citizenship) for which the freedom of choice guaranteed by law 194 is not declined in terms of rights but of self-determination.
Never as from the perspective of women has the paradigm of subjective law that has become dominant in the economy as in politics or ethics appears not only inadequate but a generator of dilemmas: we have them before our eyes with the exchange of the conception of freedom as a positive affirmation of integrity and of the dignity of the person with the mercantile idea of freedom as the absence of constraints in having one's self on the market. To the point of invoking it to justify the aberrant practice of surrogacy or to reduce prostitution to sex work, to a job like any other.
The atomistic model which is the basis of the grammar of rights does not contemplate any link of dependence e responsibility between people and therefore does not take into consideration forms of relationship in which the subjects involved are not equally free, equal and autonomous (for example adults-children, doctor-patient), while the new forms of power that are asserting themselves are not reducible to a property relationship. Thus the procreative power does not configure, or at least should not configure, a juridically guaranteed subjective right to motherhood or paternity.
We are witnessing contradictory developments typical of one system crisis: positive growth in the spheres of freedom of individuals but growing difficulty in organizing this freedom, with the risk of a dangerous return of reactionary tendencies ready to authoritarianly restore normative constraints.
Evoking dignity seems to me a call to more aware visions of the complexity that marks the path of progress.
°°°The author has long been a university professor of the history of political doctrines, a parliamentarian of the Democratic Party and one of the founders of the feminist movement "If not now, when?"
