spikenard

This is an attempt to think ethics in relation to Derrida without falling foul of the conflation with Levinas that Hagglund warns of.

The Neary case was exposed by a temporary nurse that came in to the hospital from the outside, a person who was not part of the normalised work practices of womb removal that Neary had created in the operating theatre. I’m interested in this role played by the outsider that seems to make the scandalisation of violence that has been normalised possible.

There has arguably always been a role for the outsider in ethical judgements – even if it is an outsiders perspective achieved by a former insider – if judgements rely on some critical distance that makes their operation possible. Now if one refuses to think about this distance that makes ethical judgement possible as being fixed – for example, an institutionally constituted juridical role or some apriori capacity for rational reflexion – then one begins to think the contingency of ethical distance.

The distance we are attempting to think is the phenomenon of this ethical distance, without an over determination of what exactly that distance is or how it is actually achieved in a given situation. All one admits is that an ethical perspective effectively exceeds the normalised structure being judged. This brings us into a proximity with Derrida’s différance: the structural relationship that exists between an uneconomic expenditure and the economy it exceeds. It is possible to state that the excess of Différance is involved in the ability to think differently that ethical judgement involves.

The excess is not fundamentally ethical – the excessive judgement is not necessarily better than the system it exceeds. We expect too much of ethics if we expect moral judgement to be “correct” by channelling some ideal conception of the good. It is not up to philosophers to tell people what to think and how to feel. to be moral in the sense I describe can be to be wrong – the catholic condemnation of contraception being a typical example. The type of excess involved in conservative ethics is especially interesting as it involves the experience of an excess of tradition that overpowers the present which is then rendered inconsequential. This is an interesting example of the general phenomenon of differantial excess. The differantial excess is also involved in the more straightforward overpowering of the normalised past structure in events such as the scandalisation of the Neary case.

There is an unethical aspect to ethics, a small aspect of infidelity, of deliberate refusal to understand something on its own terms that makes ethics possible.

Despentes is the author of baise moi and co-directed the adaption of her novel to film. Shes is a wonderfully scathing respondent in this interview over at the literary 3ammagazine. Here is the opening exchange:

3:AM: Virginie, I don’t want to talk about King Kong Theory right away, if that is OK with you – looking back, to Baise-moi, both the book and the adaptation, is there anything you feel you could or should have done differently?

VD: Both novel and movie are perfect. I would not change anything.

3:AM: Both are pretty much top-shelf in the canon of Bad Girls in Dirty Pictures – of course it was more than just an exploitation tale, right?

VD: It is so pathetic that we still talk about “bad girls in dirty pictures” movies. How would you call the movies with bad boys carrying big guns and flirting with girls? Regular cinema? Entertainment? So one gender has to justify “that was not just an exploitation tale” and the other gender just take the gun, the violence, the sex – the greatest thing in cinema industry – and no one ever asks any questions about that prerogative. Fine. Baise-moi has nothing to do with “bad girls”, it is a low budget, punk, violent movie. Forget the tits and cunts, for one second. The key words here should be: gun, death, fake blood. Not “pussy pussy pussy”. We did not know people would be so amazed about the “pussy pussy pussy” angle. I don’t care those two characters have cunts. They are archetypes: violent outcasts. Should not be always defined by them having cunts.

my dear, dear, dear*, friend has recently written indecently nice things about me on hir blog so in the spirit of our mutual appreciation i send you in hir direction towards the incredible piece of writing by sarah kane that s/he just craves to share. a sharing about a craving that is not about sharing.

i love the tension in this piece of writing between perfect love and desperation. perfect love is always ideal love. it is always platonic love. the ideality of platonic love means that it is always outside a real relationship. it is always somewhat uninvolved in the process of being in the midst of each other. it invariably objectifies and instrumentalises the other person for whom ideal love is proclaimed. it becomes love about someone not love with someone. love without relating. the perfection of platonic love – its ideality – prevents it from being love at all.

the desire of the self for the other when absolutely and perfectly conceived can only relate to itself because it puts the other person beyond the possibility of relation. it can never relate to the finite and imperfect other person. it can only relate to the perfect other, the theological other, the non-existent other, the person whom the other is not. to the stranger stranger-fie-d (hated) by the impossible demands of perfection.

love celebrates the imperfection of the other but not the individual imperfection of the other. the hostility of individuality ideally conceived also has no place in love. love instead celebrates the negotiated imperfection of the other as part of being in the midst of each other. in the imperfection that one learns to  celebrate in exchange for the imperfection that the other learns to celebrate. not in the imperfection that forces one not to live (not to live when living with them, not to continue to not live with them – to urbanise your relationship of non-relation: to leave). so perfect love cannot be love but domestic abuse cannot be love either. those beaten without consent – or even without the power of non-consent – have encountered the individual beyond negotiation; beyond love; in the midst of evil.

there are those that leave because they cannot live but are not dead and do not want to die. there are also those that leave because they can only live but living is not enough and they do not want to live but they are not dead and do not want to die. they want more which is the same as wanting less which is more which is less.

[relax spike. take a breadth. abandon the severity of the principle of the excluded middle. all the contradictions of non-contradiction. the self identities that constitute the other as such. it's alright - don't become subject to the subject - play flirt live seduce and be seduced love.]

x

* thrift has no place when friendship is a gift that cannot be given away, that cannot bankrupt no matter how uneconomic an expenditure is attempted, that returns as it departs, that gives itself to the other as itself.

Yep, I’m pretty heavily involved in pro-choice stuff. I suppose one major difference between the two arguments is that the pro-life argument focuses on when life begins, and the pro-choice argument focuses on a woman’s reproductive freedom. In that way, the two sides often miss each other completely, and don’t address the same points.

My pro-choice feelings come from a strong belief that the person in the best position to make a decision about whether or not to continue with a pregnancy is the person who is pregnant. There is no situation I can think of where a politician or a judge or a priest will be in a better position to make that decision than the woman herself. There’s an issue of respect here- there is no woman who takes the decision to have an abortion lightly. I cannot possibly be in a better position to judge a woman’s situation than she is herself.

I find a lot of the time the abortion debate gets tied up in abstract ideals or hypothetical scenarios. I suppose my politics are of the more practical kind. When we look at Ireland’s position on abortion- sure, no one likes abortion! Let’s not have that. But when we think about what that means- if a woman has an abortion in Ireland, she is a criminal, and the current sentence for having an abortion in this state is life imprisonment for both the woman and the doctor who performed the abortion. I can’t see them doing this, because there would be uproar. But that’s the legal situation as it stands. I support the de-criminalisation of abortion.

As for when life begins, I’m not to know. Hmm, I see foetuses as potential babies, I suppose. I don’t believe that a baby is alive at conception. On an aside, it irks the shit out of me when people think a 4-week abortion is murder but are happy to take the morning after pill 3 days after conception. It strikes me as incredibly blinkered- I’m glad everyone has the choice to take the morning after pill in Ireland. I think they should be more generous in how they view other women who make the choice not to remain pregnant, but who didn’t find out til two weeks later.

Back to the practical situation in Ireland. In the 1994 referendum, Irish women were granted the right to travel for an abortion (before this, there were several cases of pregnant women being prevented from leaving the country at ferryports and airports) and the right to information about abortion. I think for a lot of people I know, the situation is sorted as far as they’re concerned. Sure can’t a woman just hop on a plane if she wants an abortion, no need to be bringing it in here. But it’s not sorted. Immigrant women who cannot leave the country have no access to abortion. Working class women who already have kids and can’t afford the €1,500 it costs to travel, have the procedure and pay for accommodation, as well as finding childcare for the children they already have do not have this option. The idea of seeing a rise in back street abortions in Ireland terrifies me. Women will always have abortions, it’s just whether they’re safe and legal.

My pro-choice feelings have nothing to do with religion. I don’t found my morals on them being the opposite from the church. Hey, the church supports charity, right? I’m not outside Concern protesting. I am vehemently opposed to the catholic church because I am vehemently against homophobia and misogyny. It’s not the other way around (i.e. I’m not anti-homophobia and misogyny because I don’t like the church…). I think it’d be really weird to have the church or a book as the basis of your morals- it just strikes me as an irresponsible lack of critical thinking.

If I can take a brief swing back to the ideals level of the debate again…I think it’s a mistake when pro-life and pro-choice are seen as the opposite poles of the abortion argument. If we have a pole here, on one extreme is the opinion that a woman should be forced to continue with an unwanted pregnancy. On the other extreme pole would be the position that abortion should be forced on all pregnant women. Ban abortions Vs enforce abortions. The pro-choice position is smack-bang in the middle of this ground as far as I’m concerned. All we’re saying is, hey, why don’t we let the pregnant woman decide whether to remain pregnant? Who else is in a better position?

Some of the stuff you might see me involved in is trying to shut down the rogue crisis pregnancy agency on Dorset Street. I suppose I should make it clear why we’re doing this. We have absolutely no problem with pro-life pregnancy counselling services. That is totally cool. Pro-life women have the absolute right to go to a clinic that refuses to discuss abortion as one of their options. We aren’t standing outside picketing them, that would be horrendous. The agency we’re picketing is a large lie. It advertises in the Golden Pages as a pro-choice pregnancy counselling service, where they will discuss all of your pregnancy options with you. The agency, though, is run and funded by the christian solidarity party, based on the American model of rogue agencies- that is, advertise to women who are considering abortions, then lie to them, manipulate them, breach their confidentiality- anything to keep her pregnant.

I went into this agency, not in a crisis pregnancy, but because several pregnancy counselling organisations had had a quiet word with us about them, and we wanted to find out what they were telling people. I was made to hold a model of a feotus in my hand during the entire interview. I was made to name my baby. I was told that abortion causes cancer (not true), infertility (not true), suicide (not true), promiscuity, child abuse, and sighing (wtf??). I was told it is impossible to get pregnant from a rape. This is fucking dangerous disinformation. I was told that it is impossible to have an abortion before two months. Again, they’re messing with medical misinformation here. The list goes on. The agency justifies itself by claiming that by lying, it’s saving women from abortion. I just believe we deserve better than that.

Wow, this has been a very long insight into my pro-choice feelings. In the end, I suppose it comes down to the fact that I can’t tolerate a situation whereby the state has the power to actually force a woman to continue an unwanted pregnancy through to birth. I respect women a lot more than to think that anyone makes the decision lightly. Nobody likes abortion. But banning it is about more than an ideal, it means a lot of practical shit to the 17 Irish women who travel to England for an abortion each day, and to rest of the women who can’t afford or can’t leave the country to do this.

One final thing is that I think it’s important to remember how many women we know who have had abortions. Granted, it’s not something people tend to share, but a fairly good amount of our friends and colleagues have gone through an abortion. Knowing these women makes it even more important to me that they feel supported, and are not criminalised, as is currently the case.

Ooh, and a final final point is that- hey, let’s see fewer abortions! I’m ALL about the sex education and classes around the issues of consent and reproductive control.

*phew*!

Anyway, I’d love to hear what you think.

Sorry if this was a bit rambley and not very structured, I’m not used to writing about these things!

Love

There has been a lot of talk on blogs lately about Kyle Payne. See for example this blog. Basically this guy was a prominent anti-pornography feminist and it recently emerged that he broke into a woman’s room at college when he was an RA and photographed her as she was unconscious. This is a creepy episode to find out about but I’m a little concerned about the “hang em!” attitude of some of the blog discussion on this.

Kyle deliberately engaged in threatening non-consensual behaviour – invasion of a private space without consent, removal of clothing without consent, photographing without consent. The woman has clearly been sexually objectified in an threateningly invasive manner. I would not want to find myself in a similar situation and she has my sympathy.

What Kyle did was wrong and quite creepy. It certainly wouldn’t endear him to me as a person. He’s a kind of anti-role-model for the kind of person I feel that I ought to be.

I am however concerned at the articles attempt to close debate on this matter (eg. the title of the above linked blog entry is “Kyle Payne: There is no debate here, this is wrong”). I agree that it’s ethically very important to acknowledge what Kyle did was wrong but I think that arguing against debate is itself also wrong because it simply gives a kind of carte blanch to polemic. There should be a debate but we need to find the right locus of the debate. The locus should not be located around whether what Kyle Payne did was right or wrong but rather around how wrong it was or how it relates to the rest of his life and work.

I’m not apologising for what Kyle actually did but I think there is a need for (1) perspective about how we understand what he actually did. (2) question the manner in which everything else he has ever done has been interpreted through this rather creepy episode.

Firstly, Kyle didn’t violently rape this woman in the way so many other women have been violently raped. I’m not saying we should give him a gold star for not being worse but I argue that the severity of our condemnation should be in proportion to how we understand the awfulness of what he did. I don’t think it’s necessarily useful to polemically conflate many different kinds of problematic behaviours with the most violently awful kinds of rape. As feminists we oppose all these problematic behaviours but being objectified in the street is not the same as being raped at knifepoint and what Kyle did seems to be somewhere in between these two points.

Just to re-affirm a few points in case people misunderstand me: what Kyle did was wrong and he deserves criticism for it, the woman whose privacy and consent he violated deserves our support, Kyle didn’t rape anyone at knife point here and shouldn’t be treated as if he had just because as feminists we condemn both rape and knife point and what he actually did as patriarchal aggression against women.

Secondly, I’m not sure we can just rewrite the entire history of this persons life and writing through the lens of this creepy episode. If we’re to criticise Kyle for what he did then that implies that we believe he did it deliberately (as against viewing it as some kind of improbable accident) but to condemn everything he ever did on the basis of this action implies that this creepy act was the only deliberate thing he ever did in his whole life and the rest was a kind of elaborate charade.

I don’t really buy the psychoanalytic reading that has been offered where Kyle is understood to be working as a feminist in bad faith. It’s certainly embarassing for Kyle to have done this creepy thing and to work against patriarchy but I think that in some sense he can do both. It looks like a logical contradiction but I think people can act differently at different times (the asshole in your office might be the biggest sweetheart to his children) or even, dare I say it, change.

I don’t think that finding out that someone has done something wrong means that they are evil to the bone and that we should reconsider everything else they have ever done looking for further evidence of the evil essence that has supposedly been uncovered. I believe that there are relatively few true sociopaths that could be considered “evil” (that overly religious term). If you’re going to burn everyone at the stake that ever does anything wrong then that’s something I can’t relate to. I’m an atheist but religious terms – like forgiveness, atonement, and charity – still spring to mind.

It’s not that what someone does doesn’t matter. What Kyle did is now firmly part of the public history of Kyle and that is a kind of punishment in itself that should not be sneezed at.

I know that a lot of feminists are up for locking up everyone that has ever raped and throwing away the key but that’s just the easy way out – a way of abdicating our responsibility to them as people (though perhaps necessary when a true sociopath exhibits an ongoing threat to other people). Not caring for women as people is one of the levels on which rape is morally wrong. Putting someone in prison is not the same as rape (unless prison rape is considered part of their sentence) but just because someone has done something wrong doesn’t imply that how we treat them doesn’t matter. It’s a lot harder to think about learning to live with these people in spite of what they did rather than to think about just shooting them. We need to avoid the dreadful stalinist simplicity of the “No man: no problem” solution. It’s easy to have a will to power over people that have exercised power so violently over others…but power is not the solution, it’s the problem. So my question is this: if you’re not going to kill them or lock them up then how are we going to treat them? How are we going to live in the same world as them?

These questions might be too hard to face for women that have been raped and it is with these women that our first concerns must remain. Their anger is understandable but their anger is not simply a gift that helps them. The true gift is of course having no reason to be angry in the first place and this is a luxury that rape survivors don’t have. They are angry because they have suffered and their anger is part of their suffering. It can be a kind of penance that traps them in the significance of the awful thing that they have lived through. I don’t think that retribution necessarily solves the suffering of this anger. Retribution operates on the reality of what has happened and cannot undo what has happened. Nothing can. History is inescapable except by living after it. In spite of it. Without it. The possibility of change is important to survivors too.

If anyone reading this thinks that it isn’t my place to say these things then I respect that.

My mother went back to work after being the prime carer for us as babies and infants. Like a lot of people these days I just grew up with women working without thinking too much about it. I just kind of assumed equality of pay between men and women and didn’t really think about how the involuntary “career break” of having four children, or how working the double shift of being the primary carer and housekeeper even when working outside the home, might affect something like that. It’s only thirty or so years in Ireland since women were forcibly retired from government jobs when they got married but you’re not born knowing something like that. I think that I grew up in a society that had more or less absorbed the lessons and limitations of first wave feminism  – the theoretical legal and political equality but with all these matters of culture and attitude that still get in the way of that. I became conscious of things a lot of the time only after they had already happened – like when there was the media coverage around the first prosecution for rape within marriage in this country. That’s not something I had heard about before then or had thought about as a teenager.

I came into contact with feminist theory at college. I was doing a course on gender in film. It was the first time that I’d actually come into contact with feminism calling itself feminism. To be honest, at first, I didn’t take to the theory like a fish to water. I was a bit frustrated that “gender in film” seemed to mean “women in film”. All the classroom discussions and all the secondary texts we were prescribed were about how women were portrayed in film and I thought that was a bit biased or something. We were talking about femininity all the time and never talking about masculinity and I thought that was weird – wasn’t masculinity a gender as well? I felt like the course wasn’t as meaningful to me as it could be. Of course, now I recognise the irony in the feelings I had because this is how women must experience the vast majority of college courses that talk about nothing but dead white males worrying about dead white male stuff! I was experiencing the absence of the male privilege of having the world tailor itself to me as a man and I was so unaware of that privilege that I actually thought that I was the one who was being slighted!

That’s not entirely true I suppose. The course did address me as a man but not in a flattering way. The course was trying to convict me of being a man after the feminist critiques of what that means in our society. That’s not an easy lesson to learn. I already considered myself an anarchist (naive and ignorant though I was/am/trying-not-to-be) and I resented being cast in the role of the authoritarian patriarch. Privilege operates by making itself invisible and I’m always amazed at how we find reasons to feel hard done by – like feeling the pinch of being constantly broke as you work your way through college amidst the incredible privilege of getting to go to college at all and enjoying all this white male privilege without having to think about it because only women and people of colour are forced by their experience of inequality to think in those terms.

We were working with a lot of second wave feminist film criticism working with psychoanalytic theory and this was a barrier for me coming to identify as a feminist. I still have a problem with it. Having a very essentialist understanding of gender in the manner of the second wave is problematic. The point of feminism for men is to make them aware of male privilege and get them involved in overcoming their privilege and tackling it as a social and political problem. An essentialist theory of gender can sound like “if you are a man then you are a patriarch and a patriarch is all you can ever be”. This is true on some level but it’s also depressing and depression prevents action. It makes it sound like feminism has nothing to offer men. I think that feminism is more encouraging for men if it avoids some of the confrontational rhetoric of the second wave that talks about men as the problem. It’s more encouraging to men if we theorise the problem as one of social relations so that we say “you’re a man but you don’t have to act like a patriarchal asshole”. This is different to the essentialist understanding because it criticises how men act and live in society rather than what they fundamentally are. Men need the hope of not being condemned to being a patriarchal asshole forever because they don’t want to be assholes and feminism can help them not be!

The psychoanalytic bits of the second wave feminist texts we were working with also brought problems. Freud had a nasty streak in him about gender. Freuds holds that women have this envious experience of men based in not having a penis. Freuds notion of penis envy is nonsense but I suppose this theory was useful to some feminists at one stage because it is a theory in which women are resentful of men and examining how women’s resentment manifests itself in different films is interesting for feminists. Of course, if women are resentful of men its because of the male privilege that they exercise over them not because women feel the loss of not having a penis! So Freud is far from an unproblematic source for feminist criticism.

The problem with Freud goes deeper than the mere nonsense of penis envy. Beneath the idea of penis envy is the idea that women can be understood as men who happen not to have a penis and wish that they did. This way of understanding women as men but missing something is fucked up. It’s based in a commitment to a binary gender opposition between men and women in which men are privileged. This leads to all sorts of misunderstandings – such as the homophobic argument that gay men are victimised because they are feminine or feminised men. Of course, gay men aren’t victimised by a homophobic society because they are women – they’re victimised because they are gay. Historically homophobic cultures may have denied a masculine identity to homosexual men but its important for feminism to recognise that these are male victims of patriarchy on a grounds other than female gender and that patriarchy does not always operate across a neat gender binary or in the same way.

I ended up doing a paper on how fucked up the portrayal of masculinity is in Hollywood movies and exploring the flipside of second wave feminism. I wrote about how the male body is most visibly present in action movies when it is being tortured or beaten. That’s a weird relationship to the masculine body in cinema. The male body is so rarely presented in a sensuous way in film and this is the flipside of the objectification of the female body – the male body is not eroticised half as much and while this means that it’s not so subject to the opinions of strangers it also means that it is not that-which-is-to-be-celebrated. This is dangerous ground because it is a more nuanced take on objectification than feminists often take but I think it also says something meaningful about how I have been sexualised as a man in our society: to not feel sexually desirable but only sexually desiring. It was difficult for me to negotiate a lot of confrontational feminist theory as a man. My paper might have sounded much more defensive than I would be now because my comfort zones in this area were different – but luckily my course leader had some patience with me, took my ignorance alongside the earnestness and gave me a good grade anyway. By this stage I was starting to realise that the kind of treatment of masculinity in film that I had attempted would have been impossible without the feminist politicisation of gender and its exposition in relation to how women are portrayed. I think that this is a great gift of feminism for men – men would be helpless to understand their own gender situation without feminism and feminism therefore enables men as well as women.

I found second wave feminism as I first encountered it fairly off putting at first and I actually came to identify myself as a feminist through my encounter with queer theory. Queer theory just blew me away. It has all the incredible insight of earlier feminism while being much more subtle in some ways that allows it to avoid many of the things that I felt blocked me in the second wave stuff. I came to value the second wave after absorbing some queer theory. Flaws can be off putting at first but you come to love things for the flaws in the end. Now I love the aggressive anti-male rhetoric of the feminist separatists in the seventies. Those women kick ass! I understand them much better now – where they were coming from, their admirable audacity and determination to live in a different way and be real gender radicals. The rhetoric still excludes me but I’m more comfortable with being excluded by feminism and feminists sometimes now – I understand more about why that is necessary and feeling a bit excluded now and then as a man is experiencing something that women have to cope with all the time. A lot of feminists don’t bother with queer theory – they think its too abstract or academic or something – but I think that it is really important for understanding what it means to be a male feminist.

Spending time with people who were more feminist than I was has also helped me recognise not only the truth of feminism but also the real need to stand up for feminism and its importance in my life. My loving feminist partner has been a huge influence on me in this respect. Working as a feminist activist around access to abortion has also brought me into contact with wonderful feminist people and helped me really get my head inside the importance of feminism at a macro social level and not just the micro social level (the level of me and my relationships) or as mere theory.

In a funny way another great thing that helped me get into feminism is feminist infighting! I don’t fully agree with everything that calls itself feminist and probably never will. Margaret Thatcher aint no feminist to me. Sex and the City doesn’t look like empowerment as I understand it. I’ve already tried to explain my problems with some aspects of second wave feminism such as the appropriation of dubious psychoanalytic theory and some of its underlying assumptions from time to time…but thanks to widespread feminist infighting I realise that my reservations are ok! Feminism is tolerant enough of difference to let me make up my own mind about things as long as I’m willing to explain where its coming from and talk it out with others.