Abstract:

As Paola and I dashed through the hallway of the Alma Mater Intercultural Women's Center with materials for a grant renewal in hand, she exclaimed: "This is crazy! We just do, do, and do! We do whatever is expected of us, without ever asking ourselves: 'do we want to be doing it? should we be doing it?' " When I asked if she was referring to the grant she explained: "Well, projects give us funding and fame. We try to give this place continuity as a political subject and to be present on the territory. But in here? We' re in crisis! Just look! We're becoming a service agency, worse a court of miracles! We're forgetting where we came from!" - as she pointed to the line of immigrant women waiting for an appointment. Yet the names of the Alma Mater Center and the Almaterra Association of Native and Migrant Women were all a buzz that year in political circuits of the Center-Left precisely for their role in projects funded by and adhering to European policy programs promoting a "new welfare society." Could it be that the seductively alienating "expectations" Alma activists 'simply could not say no to' were not only those of migrant women with no other place to turn under Italy's right-wing turn? Could it be that the answer lay somewhere in between the gaze onto those waiting in the hall, the grant application in hand, and social democrats' accolades?

Taking as its theoretical background a set of conversations on globalization, new social movements, and radical democracy this dissertation thus seeks to contribute to understandings of the (im)possibilities of critical politics in the "global age," by inquiring into the strength of the neo-liberal where one would least expect. In fact, through the experience of "third sector" institutionalization of the Almaterra Association, a site of intercultural feminism and radical humanism born in 1989, it suggests that one of the driving forces of neo-liberalism has been precisely social democrats' pursuit of "renewal" via a Third Way project -- and that this project derives its social and cultural power from: (a) the attempt to commensurate discourses and imaginations of deep democracy, public welfare, and social cohesion both to market logics of risk-calculus, speculative investment and efficient productivity and to liberal fantasies of entrepreneurial emancipation and non-conflictual society, and from (b) the framing of this operation as the post-ideological and post-modern imperative of what I call realist pragmatism .

I suggest that Alma activists' self-fixated gaze on tensions that afford 'no way out' is symptomatic of fear and desire to acknowledge the imbrications of Italian and European social policy with neo-liberal fantasies and of the experience of this simultaneously alluring and repelling knowledge as containing both a promise of critical awareness and the risk of subjective collapse. More precisely, I suggest that frequent invocations of "crisis," "schizophrenia," "insanity" and their attendant pragmatics of "forgetting," like Paola's, name (however indirectly) the experience of contradiction as a condition of fascination with the "post-ideological" culture of post-modernity that the Center-Left has intercepted and tried to rationalize and socialize as a Third Way in governance "beyond left and right." And I work to show that this state of liminal suspension at the doorstep of critical (mis)recognition informs a posture of resistant complicity and complicit resistance that affords possibilities of critique on the far side of 'deception.'