Lets Spit on Hegel – Carla Lonzi (1970)

Defining the Enemy, Patriarchy, Time Interrupted, Women

Carla Lonzi, leading member of the Italian feminist collective Rivolta Femminile, 1970 pamphlet against patriarchal thought, history, and time. In this text Lonzi attacks Hegel (and Marx’s) notions of antagonism, progress, and historical development and calls for a subaltern history of women through the recovery of her perishable traces.


We consider incomplete any history which is based on nonperishable traces. 

The future of the world does not lie in moving continually forwards along a path mapped out by man’s desire for overcoming difficulties. 

Not being trapped within the master-slave dialectic, we become conscious of ourselves; we are the Unexpected Subject.