spikenard

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Reading and Time: A dialectic between academic expectation and academic frustration

Karen Bartlett

Why are the lives of African women worthless? It’s a question that Denis Mukwege asks every day that he works with the raped and mutilated women of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

As a young doctor he treated women in far-flung villages who would otherwise have had little chance of survival. He had wanted to deliver babies. Instead, he saw things he had never expected: the women who came to him had untreatable conditions, caused by torture and rape. There were old women, young girls, babies. The villages he visited had been devastated by planned outbreaks of sexual violence; the men murdered and the women made outcasts for ever. He saw his country plundered in an endless conflict, and his own life turned upside down by stories too horrible for nightmares.

Dr Mukwege found that he was now working in the worst place in the world for women — and virtually no one was interested in their plight.

For the 13 years of war that have plagued his country, he has never stopped treating the stream of raped women who have walked hundreds of miles to his base at Bukavo’s Panzi hospital in the South Kivu province of the DRC.

“I am not a saint,” Dr Mukwege says. He is often embarrassed by the praise heaped upon him. Walking through Panzi hospital, he sees a poster celebrating the UN Human Rights award he won in 2008, and tears it down. Mukwege is a special man, though — not only because his surgical skills are saving the women from traumatic conditions that would otherwise kill them, but also because he is taking the women on the next stage of their journey by helping them to build a unique place of recovery: the “City of Joy”.

On a plot close to the hospital, dozens of workers are measuring, hammering and mixing cement in the final stages of constructing homes, classrooms and workshops for up to 100 women survivors at a time. When it opens in the spring the City of Joy will be a refuge for women; a town in its own right where they can heal, rebuild and learn new skills to take out into the world again.

The City of Joy also reflects the circumstances of its creation. Sheltered in the hills of Bukavu, the sounds of the call to prayer echo from the nearby UN camp housing Pakistani peacekeeping soldiers, while squatters and refugees jostle for space in the shacks next door.

Unusually, men and women are working on the construction together and one woman rushes forward to announce that for the first time in her life she is wearing trousers. Another asks Dr Mukwege for work as a cleaner. He tells her that she should have higher ambitions, and that women should aim for the same kind of qualified work as men. As he speaks, a large group of workers gather around to listen, balancing plastic containers of cement on their heads. At Dr Mukwege’s urging, the woman agrees to visit his office to discuss further education.

“You see the women working on this building,” Mukwege points out, “They are saying: I protest. I won’t take what is happening to me any more. I want freedom. The war goes on, but their attitudes are changing, and it is the start of a revolution.”

Christine Schuler Deschryver, an imposing Congolese activist and the new director of the City of Joy, is visiting the site with Eve Ensler, the writer of The Vagina Monologues. They agree that the women of DRC are transforming themselves from victims into survivors. “There’s an underlying movement of Congolese women who are ready to take their power,” says Ensler, whose V-Day movement to end violence against women has been instrumental in the concept and funding of the project. “They are no longer just passive recipients of violence, and the City of Joy is a cementing of that.”

The women of the DRC do need a place of hope, and a vision for the future. Twelve months ago Dr Mukwege went to the UN with a sense of optimism that the worst of the violence had passed. One year later in Bukavu, that optimism has vanished.

Although his office is full of awards from the humanitarian community, neither gold-plated trophies, nor talks with the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, have prevented another outbreak of fighting that brings around 15 new women a day to the clinic.

“It’s getting worse,” Mukwege says, peering over his glasses in between brief consultations with the women who line up on the low wall outside, and then present themselves at his desk unannounced. “We are now seeing cases again of women who have been raped for 24 hours, 48 hours. If the fighting continues there is no solution for our women.”

Since the mid-1990s more than five million people have been killed in a conflict fuelled by warring militias, ethnic tensions and opportunistic neighbouring countries fighting over the country’s gold reserves and vast mineral wealth. Women have paid the highest price. According to the UN, sexual violence is higher in the DRC than in any other country.

Conservative estimates report that more than half a million women have been raped overall, with an average of more than 40 a day in South Kivu. A new offensive by the DRC army and UN forces in March to rid the area of Rwandan FDLR fighters set off a fresh wave of killing and human rights abuses. In the first nine months of 2009, more than 7,000 rape cases were recorded in Kivu. A Human Rights Watch report on the offensive states: “Most of the women and girls were gang raped, some so violently that they later died.”

“The indifference the world has shown to the Congo is repulsive,” says Dr Mukwege. “This is an economic war driven by rape. People say that it is complicated, but how hard can it be to send a few thousand troops to stop a relatively small number of fighters who have killed millions?”

In a recent visit to the area Hillary Clinton listened to victims’ stories with tears in her eyes, but the aid she promised has yet to materialise, and the Secretary of State warned Dr Mukwege that she “could not work miracles”.

The surgical work that Dr Mukwege performs in reconstructing raped women is highly specialised but, as he points out, it is the nature of their ordeal that has made it so. Ruth was 13 when she arrived at his clinic. When one of the groups of armed rebels came to her village they rounded up her family, raping both Ruth and her mother before proceeding to kill both her parents in front of her.

Like many girls, Ruth was held in the forest as a sex slave where she was tied to a tree and raped by passing soldiers for several days at a time. Months passed, but eventually Ruth was released and allowed to begin the arduous journey to Panzi hospital. She was pregnant.

“It was tragic,” Dr Mukwege says. “The baby was stillborn. But her internal injuries were too severe to repair. As her doctor I am pleased that I could restore urinary continence and fit her with a colostomy. But she does not have a vagina, she will never have a period. In her own eyes she is no longer a woman.”

Dr Mukwege is the man who puts women back together, performing up to ten operations a day in a hospital that has only one ultrasound machine and survives on charitable funding.

The most inoperable are often little girls, some of whom remain incontinent. “When I come to work on reconstruction, there is nothing left to work on.” Mukwege throws up his hands to symbolise the hopelessness of some of his cases. “This is not rape as people in the West understand it. This is a weapon of war, a deliberate strategy designed to destroy our communities by leaving our women disabled and ostracised from their families and neighbours.”

Until work began on the City of Joy, even the women who made their way to Panzi found that they had few options for the future. “I was valueless,” said Erisa, another young victim. “I escaped and went back to my village, but my neighbours said I smelt. I couldn’t work. They said I was a Rwandan rebel prostitute. I was pregnant by my rapist, but it was a great shame.”

Now she lives with her little girl and a community of other survivors in a half-built house close to the site of the City of Joy. The women sleep on wooden boards and rags, and exist on what they can make from selling home-made soap and clothes pieced together on sewing machines donated by V-Day.

All the girls were taken from their homes and held as sex slaves in the bush. One young woman, Nyamgoma, takes off her sock to show a mutilated leg, cut away by the rebels who tried to stop her escaping. She is in constant pain but cannot afford an operation — even so, she says that she is pleased to be with other women survivors. Their group is called “I Will Not Kill Myself Today”.

On a drive out of town the City of Joy team visits the “Green Survivor Mommas” — a group of older women who meet to learn agricultural skills and farm a small plot with cabbage, sweet potatoes and goats. The scene seems tranquil, but in the forested hills beyond rebel fighters are holding other women hostage. A motorcade sweeps past, ferrying dignitaries to a meeting with President Kabila to discuss the security situation. It is a war in which horror, beauty and politics occupy the same space.

“Women in the Congo have been humiliated, and men have been destroyed too,” Dr Mukwege says. “How you can watch your mother being tortured and raped and not see her with different eyes? This is not about feminism, this is a crisis for humanity.” In particular, he believes, the international community should exert greater pressure on Rwanda to control the FDLR fighters. In the UK, campaign groups including Congo Now and V-Day UK hope to make the DRC’s conflict minerals as unacceptable as blood diamonds.

Working at the heart of such issues is dangerous, but although he is often threatened, Mukwege says that his religious convictions and his wife, Madeleine, give him the support to keep going. “Having four daughters and a wife is like having a female backbone,” he says, spreading his fingers to indicate a spine. Of his wife he shyly adds, “she is beautiful, and we are still lovebirds”. His children call him “doctor without borders” because he treats patients who turn up at their house at all hours.

“Women in Africa already have the answers,” Mukwege says, “I am just here to help them on their way. Life will start for these women when we have peace and they realise what they have lost. When they see that they don’t have a community any more. They don’t have a family any more. What they once had doesn’t exist any more. Then the hardest part of my job will begin.”

Back at the City of Joy, Eve Ensler and Christine Schuler Deschryver are admiring the work of the group I Will Not Kill Myself Today and sharing stories. In a lighter moment they tease each other about who is the brawniest when one of the women steps forward, grins, and flexes her formidable arms: “Look at my muscles,” she says, “I am so strong.”

For more information about the City of Joy, visit www.vday.org

it does what it does
as if it had a what to do

Hegel’s philosophy is a philosophy of the absolute. To philosophise the absolute, to conceptualise or theorise it, is not exactly the same as thinking the absolute. At the level of philosophy I think that Hegel succeeds absolutely but today I am only interested in how this theoretical success is not the same as successfully thinking something (to designate a word for god is not to think god). Lately I’ve become more and more interested in the difference between the formal and the informal and how thinking is not fully formalisable; that every time we formalise we leave somewhich behind; that the power of abstraction is exactly the same as the weakness of simplification.

Now often when we set out to think somewhich we end up theorising somewhich instead. As the difference between thinking and theory is not often keenly felt I’m going to put forward an argument that can be understood in terms of emotion. The emotion of surprise – the plausibility of its occurrence and the strict necessity of its absence – will today be invoked to demonstrate the failure of Hegel to think the absolute. Since Hegel’s ambition to think the absolute is an unbounded ambition I hope that this demonstration will have some exemplarity (though, of necessity, not a pure exemplarity which would be to repeat the mistake that I seek to expose in the first place).

Hegel is not the first thinker to attempt to think the absolute. To attempt to think the absolute has always been a tendency within philosophy, sometimes it has been celebrated as the greatness of philosophy and sometimes it has been a naive by product of simply trying to use language. The attempt to think the absolute has been celebrated as the greatness of philosophy when it has been felt that, in trying to think Being or God, one is trying to do something more important than trying to think whatever was less painfully abstract (as if difficulty was its own merit – get the fuck in here Nietzsche and hoover up this martyrdom!). The attempt to think the absolute has been a naive by product of simply trying to use language because all language involves abstraction and the absolute is in some sense only the unquestioned operation of such abstraction. An operation that can all too easily pass unremarked for the operation of a pure abstraction: an absolute abstraction, the absolute.

How does one think the absolute, how does one think infinity? The short answer is one doesn’t. The longer answer is that one invents a special kind of thought, the theoretical thought, in order to think you can do so. Theory is invented to make what seems impossible for thought seem possible after all. I’m going to explain this in terms of Being, even though I could do so with numbers or with god or with many other permutations of the same gesture, the absolute gesture.

Lets look at the theory of Being because we are working backwards from the phenomenon of the philosophical inheritance in which the theoretical level has already been in operation for millenia (or thought that it was in operation). (The theory of) Being is to be understood in contradistinction to beings, beings are things and things partake in Being but are not the same as Being. Being is not a thing. Being is infinite and absolute but beings are finite and particular.

This is the theory of Being but we have not gotten far into the theoretical nature of Being yet. To get into the theoretical nature of Being we must leave the theoretical sphere and excavate the prior sphere of thought that was necessarily involved in this (somewhat dubious) achievement, that is we must ask how one attempts to think Being. Now we have finite experiences and a capacity for understanding that is (crudely speaking) the ability to generalise and simplify those finite experiences. We experience many beings but not an infinite number of beings.

In order to come up with infinite Being it is not enough to abstract from our finite experience of beings. In order to come up with infinite Being we must abstract from our finite experience of beings and add to this generalisation of past experience the component of thought that makes it theoretical – we must build into the finite abstraction an openness to new experience. We must transform the finite abstraction into a hungry generalisation, a generalisation that will consume all new finite experiences. This generalisation no longer operates merely as an abstraction from past experience but as an abstraction from past experience and from future possible experience. The theoretical sphere is achieved through an abstraction from presupposed possibility. An abstraction from possibility that is open to possibility not as genuine openness or genuine possibility but as the pre-control of possibility.

The pre-control of possibility is a device of thought. The device is itself thinkable and it mediates the infinity that is itself impossible to think but to think the mediation of infinity is not to think infinity itself. The infinite is seemingly made thinkable by theory but theory also becomes that which prevents the thinkability of the infinite. It becomes the final obstacle that cannot be crossed in the form of the mediation that cannot be that which it mediates.

To think Being is not really to think beings. The hungry generalisation of Being means that everywhere I look I will find more beings to think within the already established theory of Being but the theory does not allow me to think these finite beings in the way that looking around for them does. When I think World I do not actually think the world itself (which is impossible for reasons more mundane than that of a priori necessity but no less profoundly impossible because of that).

Hegel realises this on some level. Hegel states that to think zoo is not to think the animals in the zoo. When we think zoo we obviously know that animals will be involved but we don’t know exactly what types of animals are going to be at the zoo or what individual animals will be filed under the heading of each species. The pre-control of possibility means that all the animals are placed into the space that has already been prepared for them to fill.

To claim to think the absolute is to fail to grasp the limitations of theoretical thought. It is a failure to allow openness to really be open or possibility to really be possible. It is to require a strict absence of surprise – no matter what is encountered it must be slotted into the ongoing attempt to think the absolute as if nothing had actually occurred. As if everything was completely normal, always boring, and nothing ever really happened.

Hegel can never be surprised because Hegel can never allow himself to be surprised…but emotions are not within anyones’ power to forbid. Surprise just occurs, not only does surprise just occur but it is likely to occur. Surprise is plausible but subject to a strict but necessarily nominal exclusion. Hegel cannot allow himself to ever be surprised but he cannot prevent himself from feeling surprised, only from showing how he feels. Surprise is plausible so Hegel can only act unsurprised when surprise actually does occur, Hegel can try to adopt a poker face but a poker face is all it is. If Hegel admits surprise then that is to admit that the absolute is not being thought, that the absolute is only being conceptualised and in a necessarily limited manner.

Hegel’s face never betrays the slightest surprise at the zoo, not even when he passes the platypus.

Addenda:

1. Vega’s Emotional Fallacy

MIA

Did ya think of something to say?

VINCENT

Actually, there’s something I’ve wanted to ask you about, but you seem like a nice person, and I didn’t want to offend you.

MIA

Oooohhhh, this doesn’t sound like mindless, boring, getting-to-know-you chit-chat. This sounds like you actually have something to say.

VINCENT

Only if you promise not to get offended.

MIA

You can’t promise something like that. I have no idea what you’re gonna ask. You could ask me what you’re gonna ask me, and my natural response could be to be offended. Then, through no fault of my own, I woulda broken my promise.

VINCENT

Then let’s just forget it.

2. The Platypus Surprise

Everyone knows that when the platypus was discovered by naturalists it didn’t fit neatly into convenient categorisations of animal types as it’s an “egg-laying, venomous, duck-billed, beaver-tailed, otter-footed mammal”(wikiplatypus). The first naturalists encountering the Platypus must have thought something along the lines of “Aha! Just another species of…no wait…I have no fucking idea what this is.”

As recently as 1997 it was suggested that it should have its own category of animal type, the Plotypoda, that contains just itself and its fossil forebears. Now to give the platypus its own genre makes sense from an evolutionary point of view where one is interested in reconstructing the complex inter relations in the prior lineage of existent life but from a contemporary perspective there seems little point in having a whole genre heading with only one entry.

- Have you ever transcended space and time?

- Yes. No. Time not space. No. I don’t know what you’re talking about.

There was some interesting talk on the subject of disagreement during the week. One of the visiting speakers made the point that in order to disagree with something you have to understand it.

One could hardly practice academic philosophy without disagreeing with other philosophers and since we spend so much time disagreeing with each other, certain norms of disagreement have developed in the academy. These norms attempt, for better or for worse, to divide acceptable disagreement from unacceptable disagreement. What makes disagreement acceptable includes the satisfaction of what could be termed an epistemological requirement. This requirement can be understood as a burden placed on the person who disagrees to demonstrate that they know what it is that they disagree with and why it is that they disagree with it (which is not a bad tip for what you have to do when writing a philosophy paper).

Understanding and agreement are interlinked. To understand an argument means to accept that a particular conclusion is supposed to follow from particular premises and how this particular following is supposed to take place. The understanding of an argument always involves an acceptance of how it is supposed to work and this acceptance, no matter how transitory, is a type of agreement. If we can’t accept how an argument is (at the very least) supposed to work then we can’t really claim to understand it. If we just can’t imagine how an argument is even supposed to work then it remains opaque to us and we don’t understand it. Dis-agreement is in this sense the negation of a previous agreement.

Knowing, understanding, and hence some kind of acceptance or agreement of what it is that you disagree with is the only way you can defend your disagreement against others in an academic setting. Academic research is required to be defensible in this way but I don’t think that the epistemological requirement for predicating disagreement on agreement can be generalised outside of the academic context for ethical and political reasons.

Democratic systems can take many different forms and some are more democratic than others. Each form of democratic system stipulates its own criteria for what will count as a legitimately produced political decision. Each system for legitimation is self satisfying. This self legitimisation is not beyond questioning from outside the system but from within the system itself it cannot legitimately deny its own process of legitimisation. This means that a particular democratic system cannot cannot reject disagreement as illegitimate for failing to uphold some kind of epistemological requirement without denying its own definition of democratic legitimacy.

In practical terms this means that when the Irish polis disagreed with the proposal of the Nice Treaty referendum there is no resources within the stipulated democratic system for treating this as the wrong answer or an illegitimate response. Democracy, or any political system, implies a political immunity from an epistemological requirement for disagreement. This is not to say that we can’t disagree with the legitimation processes of a particular political system (I feel strongly that we ought to) but we cannot do so while claiming to operate within that political system.

Derrida writes of the democracy-yet-to-come and this is a democratic ideal that is never fully approximated in any particular democratic system. I think that Derrida would say that to be democractic we cannot content ourselves with the self satisfying legitimation of a system that never fully embodies democracy. We must orient ourselves towards the impossible ideal of democracy and within such an orientation we can criticise the legitimation of a decision within a particular democratic system as being undemocratic from some more ideal sense of what it means to be democratic. However this is not exactly the same as saying that the rejection of the first Nice Treaty referendum in Ireland was the wrong answer. Saying that the disagreement was wrong – on whatever grounds – is still far closer to being undemocratic than it is to being more democratic. Nor is Derrida’s notion of the democracy yet to come beyond the scope of strategic and rhetorical employment – in much the same way that majestic ideals have always been employed for less than majestic purposes.

From what little I know of Habermas I suspect that an affinity could be found in his work for the project of building some kind of epistemolgical requirement into the very structure of a particular democratic system. I am on uncertain ground here but I suspect that this could be understood as an attempt to place a barrier between the demos and the participation of the demos in democracy, a barrier that will divide the demos into the acceptable demos and the unnacceptable demos, a relationship to the demos that is itself undemocratic. Obviously I could be completely wrong in all of this but sometimes one feels compelled to act in spite of a certain degree of ignorance and it can be important to do so rather than to not act at all.

This blogpost is already massive so I’ll postpone a consideration of disagreement in relation to ethics for now (though the point has already been made implicitly to some extent).

1. The state of being without sense or trousers.

As previously mentioned I’ve been reading a few pages of Derrida’s work on Aporias. Sometimes it’s more fun to write your way through a bunch of ideas instead of just reading and re-reading other people doing the same thing:

There is a kind of aporia at work in the notion of the beyond. This is not immediately obvious because the notion of the beyond is curiously implicated in all aporia in the form of the unbeyondable. For aporia in the sense of an impasse is the limit and end of the beyond. This is a curious relationship to the beyond. The beyond is that which reveals the limit and the end of all else. Aporia is the unbeyondable and this is the only way of thinking the limit of the concept of beyond. The only way of thinking the beyond of the beyond is to think the unbeyondable which is named aporia.

In a theological mode it could be written that everything infinite is essentially aporetic. The infinite is that which is essentially unbeyondable. There is nothing easier in philosophy than indulging in theology but I’m more interested in asking more sensibly if there is a non-theological, that is a non-infinite, aporia.

To attempt to think aporia in a less explicitly theological mode is to try to think that which is persistently relevant without being permanently relevant; that which cannot be put out of play in the phenomenological reduction but remains in play for the forseeable future; that which recurs to thought and on which thought lingers and is to be dwelt upon (but probably not until death). This is how we start to think the aporetic less theologically.

Yet if we think the aporetic less theologically is it still aporetic at all? Would this not be an impasse that is not actually an impasse and an aporia that is not actually aporetic. This problem is only a real problem if we feel a requirement to treat concepts in a strictly formal manner. I think that there could be a role for experience in clearing all this up. The experience of an aporia does not mean that the possibility of going beyond this aporia in the future is denied, just that this possibility is not experienced as a present possibility of the future. The real experience of aporia is not incommensurable with a future possibilty of overcoming that aporia in a future beyond the future that is experienced as expectable.

Many rituals are ancient traditions and when we perform these ancient patterns it may seem that we are dancing with a corpse. Yet even the most ritualised act is, once more anew, produced in the activity. That is to say that the activity does not merely reproduce a ritual itself for itself. To the extent that ritual is part of life it cannot be purely ritual.

Ritual is not something performed by a puppet on a string, it is rather as if the puppet’s movement causes the strings hanging limply from their limbs to lift up and float above them: untethered in the air, in a trance of present history, only as if there were a puppeteer.

The ritual is given to me as a ritual but I give it back to the tradition from which it does not wholly derive. A tradition of ritual that is not wholly separable from my performance of the ritual. I give it back to that tradition through my performance, even though the performance is not purely votive and part of the ritual is always kept for myself. Not that I  choose to hold something back for myself or that there is something that could have been given that is not. So not by choice…but the ritual still remains mine.

Otherwise one is mugged by a ghost.

I came across this quotation this morning:

“Levinas, in a fundamental debate, reproaches Heidegger, as well as an entire tradition, for wrongly thinking death, in its very essence and in the first place, as annihilation.”

- Derrida, Aporias, pp. 13-14

Now I don’t know the technical details of the disagreement between Levinas and Heidegger to which Derrida here refers but it got me thinking about what is not annihilated in death. The first thing that comes to mind is the relationship to the person who is dead that continues after the event of the death. It is this odd relationship that structures grief.

The relationship to the dead is a strange relationship because in order for it to be a relationship there must be something that is being related to, there must be something to which the griever relates that is not annihilated in death. The history of the dead is not annihilated in death and neither is the habitus of our relationship to them. The relationship to what is not annihilated in death is also in some sense the object of the relationship itself – the intentional projection of our relatedness beyond ourselves makes it possible for grievers to relate to the externality of the relation itself. The misery of this self relation is part of what makes grief terrible but this is not to suggest that grief is only something terrible that we are trapped within. Grief is also beautiful in its solemn profundity, it is also an ode that we willingly gift to the dead. Our very willingness as givers constitutes the receiver that has not been annihilated in death.

The image comes to me of making a phone call to the person who has died. Their phone rings and the phone is picked up but they never speak.

When my mother died I often had dreams of her still being alive and happy, joking and chatting, but she would never hear me and would never speak to me. It was as if I were the ghost, not her.