A collection of essays on the mysteries of the body from one of Italy’s leading postwar communist intellectuals.

Politician, translator, and journalist Rossana Rossanda was the most important female left-wing intellectual in post-war Italy. Central to the Italian Communist Party’s cultural wing during the 1950s and ’60s, she left an indelible mark on the life of the mind. The essays in this volume, however, bring together Rossanda’s reflections on the body—how it ages, how it is gendered, what it means to examine one’s own body. The product of a decades-long dialogue with the Italian women’s movement (above all with Lea Melandri, a vital feminist writer who provides an afterword to the current volume), these essays represent an honest and raw meeting between communist and feminist thought. Ranging from reflections on her own hands through to Chinese cinema, from figures such as the Russian cross-dressing soldier Nadezhda Durova to the Jacobin revolutionary Theroigne de Mericourt, here we see Rossanda’s fierce intellect and extraordinary breadth of knowledge applied to the body as a central question of human experience.

Rossana Rossanda (1924–2020) was one of the leading communist intellectuals in postwar Italy and a founding editor of the newspaper il manifesto. Her political memoir, The Comrade from Milan, was published by Verso Books in 2010. Lea Melandri is a leading Italian feminist thinker. She teaches at Milan’s Free University for Women. Richard Braude is a translator and writer living in Palermo, Italy.

1. Self-Defence of a Political I
2. A Hussar Called Hope
3. Théroigne de Méricourt: Neither Commoner nor Lady
4. Depth and History
5. On the Threshold of Mystery
6. Raise the Red Lantern
7. This Body that Inhabits Me
Afterword: Friendship, a Calming Deposit of the Self