Philosophy and Vulnerability: Catherine Breillat, Joan Didion and Audre Lorde 9781350004153, 9781350004108, 9781350004139

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction: Towards a definition of philosophy which incorporates vulnerability
2 Catherine Breillat I: An erotic suspension of the ethical
3 Joan Didion: Becoming.frail
4 Audre Lorde: We must learn to count the living with that same particular attention with which we number the.dead1
5 Catherine Breillat II: Embrace of Weakness?
6 Conclusion: Vulnerability and the profession
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

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PHILOSOPHY AND VULNERABILITY

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ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY On the Feminist Philosophy of Gillian Howie, edited by Victoria Browne and Daniel Whistler The Subject of Rosi Braidotti, edited by Bolette Blaagaard and Iris van der Tuin The Philosophy of Creative Solitudes, edited by David Jones Enduring Time, Lisa Baraitser Hannah Arendt’s Ethics, Deirdre Lauren Mahony Topophobia, Dylan Trigg Subjectivity and Identity, Peter V. Zima

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PHILOSOPHY AND VULNERABILITY Catherine Breillat, Joan Didion and Audre Lorde

Matthew R. McLennan Saint Paul University, Canada

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA   BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc   First published in Great Britain 2019   Copyright © Matthew R. McLennan, 2019   Matthew R. McLennan has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.   For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page.   Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image: Free Fall, 1994 (photogravure, etching & drypoint on echizen kozo kizuki paper), Smith, Kiki (b.1954) / Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, USA / museum purchase funded by Steve Lindley in honour of Shelli and Jenna Lindley at “One Great Night in November, 2015” / Bridgeman Images   All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval ssystem, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.   Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes.   A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.   A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.   ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-0415-3 ePDF: 978-1-3500-0413-9 eBook: 978-1-3500-0409-2   Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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I dedicate this work with boundless love to Anna, Leo and Moses.

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements  viii

1 Introduction: Towards a definition of philosophy which incorporates vulnerability   1 2 Catherine Breillat I: An erotic suspension of the ethical   33 3 Joan Didion: Becoming frail  67 4 Audre Lorde: We must learn to count the living with that same particular attention with which we number the dead  91 5 Catherine Breillat II: Embrace of Weakness?  123 6 Conclusion: Vulnerability and the profession  147 Notes  155 References  170 Index  179

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book was achieved with the help of a wide and tightly woven web of affiliation. While it is not possible to acknowledge everyone who had a hand in supporting me through its creation, the contributions of the following people especially should be noted. Any inaccuracies or omissions in the text are of course entirely my own. My family and friends played a central role in my ability to see this project through. In particular, I thank Anna Seifried, Leo McLennan, Moses McLennan, Susan McLennan, Doreen Richmond, Audrey Lundy, Louise Legault, Pierre Legault, Christopher Seifried, Louise Guay, Chris Casimiro and Morgan McMillan. My job at Saint Paul University has afforded me invaluable working relationships and rewarding friendships. I  thank all of my colleagues who have shared their warmth and generosity of spirit, but in particular, I thank the following for their mentorship: Manal Guirguis-Younger, Stephen Stuart, Monique Lanoix, Rajesh Shukla, Sophie Cloutier, Richard Feist, Louis Perron, Heather Eaton, Lorraine Ste-Marie and Marc De Kesel. I am daily inspired by the philosophical militants in my midst. Chief among them are Deniz Guvenc, Devin Zane Shaw, Julie Paquette, T. Mars MacDougall, Lesley Jamieson, J. Moufawad-Paul and Tyler A. Shipley. I am grateful to the many students who keep me on my toes and who push me to hone my craft. In particular, I would like to acknowledge my students and auditors in the spring 2018 graduate Public Ethics course ‘Disadvantage’, for their participation in wide-ranging discussions on themes that are important to this book. Thank you Kaelen Bray, Corrine Budge, Tami Cogan,

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Monique Comeau, Natalie Dupuis, Cristina Mirian Fernandes Amaral, Donna Joy Ghadie, Laurence Pelchat-Labelle, Merranda Rivers and Allison Trites. Ann Elliott and the students and volunteers in the Discovery University programme deserve special mention for an unforgettable classroom experience, recounted in the book’s Conclusion. I hope that the programme continues to thrive and to serve as a meeting place for people of all walks of life who are passionate about learning. Some of the material in this book received the benefit of testing before a critical public. Thank you to Scott Birdwise and the other organizers of the 2016 York University/TIFF conference Coming to Terms with Film Philosophy for allowing me the opportunity to test out my thoughts on Breillat. Thank you also to Lung Chieh Lim and the other organizers of the 2018 University of Ottawa/Saint Paul University/Carleton University/Dominican University College joint conference Actualities: Philosophy and Our Present for allowing me the opportunity to read and receive feedback on a version of the book’s Introduction. My editors at Bloomsbury Press Frankie Mace and Liza Thompson were as always kind, patient and exceptionally helpful throughout the writing process. Critical input from anonymous peer reviewers at the prospectus stage of the project was also greatly appreciated. Finally, Devin Zane Shaw provided invaluable comments on the draft manuscript and he embodies for me the ideal kind of academic: a true friend who is also an honest critic.

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1 Introduction: Towards a definition of philosophy which incorporates vulnerability

At the time of writing, my four-year-old son has started to work out some of the broader implications of change. He has had an exceptionally big year: a new house, a new neighbourhood, a new baby brother, and the start of junior kindergarten. Although he’s weathered most of it in characteristic good cheer, there are sometimes moments just after I’ve read him his bedtime story and just before I’ve tucked him in for the night when his reflections and his questioning take an unexpectedly serious turn. ‘Dad, are you and Mom getting older?’ ‘Yeah son. All of us are.’ ‘Will you be different next near?’ ‘I will. Probably just a few more grey hairs if I’m lucky.’ ‘No no Dad! I don’t want you to get old. You can go to the haircut shop and they’ll fix it! . . . Will you live to be one thousand?’ ‘I’m afraid that nobody lives to be one thousand.’

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‘How about one hundred and nine?’ ‘Maybe. I could. But I’ll have to take really good care of myself, and also have a bit of luck.’ ‘How do you take care of yourself to be one hundred and nine?’ ‘I’d have to do things like get enough sleep, avoid too much junk food, exercise often, and visit the doctor.’ ‘Ok Dad. On your one-hundred-and-ninth birthday I’ll make sure you have a nap. And that people bring you a cake but it’s not sugary.’ My son is on to something, and he will spend the rest of his life coming to terms with it. Human lives are vulnerable lives; human beings are vulnerable beings. While these claims might seem so obvious as to require no comment, it is remarkable that contemporary thinkers  – and tellingly, many of them from feminized, racialized, queer, poor and disabled vantage points  – have had to insist upon the fact of human vulnerability, painstakingly reworking our normative frameworks to incorporate it. From classical social contract theories to contemporary neoliberal discourses of personal accountability, a corrosive myth of self-sufficiency and radical autonomy has emerged which exerts a powerful effect on thought and language. This myth is deployed in the service of those in power, at all echelons of power. Its ideological function is, first, to convince those who are more and even most vulnerable that they are essentially responsible for their own plights. Second, it functions to discourage solidarity by transforming nascent social analysis into a moralizing discourse that punches both laterally and down (Harvey 2009; Brugère 2013; Butler 2015). It is no wonder then that vulnerability should be a strategically important concept in the social sciences and humanities. What is at stake is the construction of a philosophical anthropology that tears at the ideological veil of neoliberalism. Many contemporary philosophers and thinkers from across the humanities and social sciences have contributed significantly to this ongoing, counter-hegemonic project. Though an overview of their

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innovations would be both interesting and timely, this book has a somewhat different aim. In what follows, I wish to rework the definition of philosophy itself according to the theme of vulnerability. In other words, I will depict the practice of philosophy as constitutively involved with vulnerability, and this at an existential or ‘pre-disciplinary’ level. This would suggest that vulnerability is in the background of disciplinary philosophical activity even if professional philosophers would downplay, ignore or deny it. My aim is simply to show that this vision of philosophy is plausible, and I am less interested in meta-philosophical argumentation than I am with showing examples of existential philosophy in action. On the basis of a stipulative definition supported by prior research, I  will provide compelling examples of existential or pre-disciplinary philosophical engagement  – effectively, object lessons in philosophy as I construe it happening outside of the norms of the discipline, in various idioms, and linked in obvious ways to existential questions or questions of lived experience organized around the theme of vulnerability. This task forms part of a broader division of labour in the counter-hegemonic project of unseating neoliberalism. It is politically necessary because the practice of disciplinary philosophy is one avenue where the myth of self-sufficiency and radical autonomy has often, if not generally, held sway. Western/settler philosophy, in particular, has often served as a workshop for the ideological justification of hegemonic power – pretending to the role of what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘royal’ as opposed to nomadic or critical science (Deleuze and Guattari 2005: 367–8, 373–4). But since the address of philosophy is always universal and egalitarian (Badiou 2012: 26–7), even when only implicitly, or even against the grain of the contents of its address (Rancière 2003; Shaw 2016), it is therefore a built-in vocational responsibility of Western/settler disciplinary philosophers today to reconceive and to rework their practice in an egalitarian way. And this implies reconceiving the social role of the disciplinary philosopher (something like the philosopher-as-social-worker)

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and rethinking what the disciplinary philosopher does. What she does, I will argue, is profoundly if often only implicitly tied to human vulnerability. The guiding idea of the book is, therefore, to flesh out a definition of philosophy that incorporates vulnerability as a crucial component. Before proceeding to a discussion of methodology and an overview of the book’s contents, I will have to provisionally define and suggest the link between my two crucial terms: ‘philosophy’ and ‘vulnerability’.

‘Philosophy’ The argument herein follows from a previous book in which I reconstructed the dispute between Alain Badiou and Jean-François Lyotard over the definition of philosophy (McLennan 2015). Despite their considerable differences on the matter, the two thinkers were shown to hold in common a notion of philosophy as a militant activity of thought, which is provoked or occasioned or opened up by events (in the ontological sense of radically new, inherently incalculable and inassimilable occurrences). Philosophy in the Badiou–Lyotard dispute takes on a heroic cast since it figures as the vocation of a finite mind which, struck as if by lightening, has committed itself to the task of measuring up to what appears as the impossible or the mysterious or the infinite. In the wake of Badiou and Lyotard, I  will herein cleave to the notion of philosophy as an activity. It is to be distinguished from what are often called ‘philosophies’, that is, opinions, world views or philosophical systems. Regarding the last of these, I want to avoid a misunderstanding. I am not suggesting that canonical Western philosophers like Hegel or Spinoza or Schopenhauer, who constructed intricate philosophical systems by spinning out basic insights, should be excluded from the ranks of the philosophers. Rather, I claim that there is a meaningful distinction to be drawn between the system (i.e. the finished body of doctrine) and the activity of thought (i.e. the philosophizing)

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that produced the system. The reader would be right, however, to surmise that my sympathies generally lie with those canonical Western philosophers and more marginalized figures who put the emphasis on the activity and who were prepared to pull up stakes and start anew as necessary (Lyotard certainly, but also Putnam, Russell, Wittgenstein, Weil and so on). I will not plead for this sympathy here, but will note that if a philosopher is willing to leave everything behind as her thought process dictates, then this could be interpreted as evidence that her true master is the vocation rather than the system. In the terms I am presenting here, this would render her exemplary. Moreover, I continue to maintain that philosophical activity is militant. As I put it previously, philosophy is an activity that doggedly resists ‘the leveling and domesticating pressures of economic reason’ (McLennan 2015: 121). This point can be further generalized: philosophy digs in and resists the instrumentality and self-interestedness that for thousands of years have ridiculed, reduced or banished it. Socrates is the most prominent Western example of a philosophical militant, on account of his martyrdom to the search for truth – but we could add Hypatia, Boethius, Bruno and many others to the list of martyrs. The philosopher thus construed is traditionally contrasted with the sophist, who functions in typical depictions as a stand-in for mundane calculation and selfinterest. The traditional depiction of the sophist (e.g. Protagoras) positions her very closely to the philosopher but with crucial differences. She tends to affirm a similar notion of human finitude with respect to knowledge, but one that is radical and logically self-defeating (claiming, e.g., that there is doxa or opinion but no absolute truths). True, the sophist deploys among her armoury of ruses1 the very same rationality or logos of the philosopher – but only logo-logically (self-referentially) and tactically. Thus, the sophist meets the philosopher on the same terrain but with a certain irony, and while detaching her activity from the life and death commitment to truth and wisdom that defines the archetypal philosopher’s vocation.

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We should doubtless be cautious about drawing too neat a distinction between philosophy and sophistry on methodological and historical grounds (Crome 2004; Cassin 2014; McLennan 2015). But we may also make a further point about tactics:  it is not clear why the philosopher would be under any obligation to martyr herself at every turn in order to count as a philosopher. She is a philosopher, I  would argue, provided that the arc of her life bends overall in accordance with her vocation. She could, for example, remain a philosopher while deploying her reason sophistically in certain cases, as a tactical expediency – for example, to obtain or to maintain her hold on a job in the academy, or to play the administrative ‘war of position’ therein, precisely to tilt things in favour of the survival of philosophy and the other humanities. The category of ‘militant’, in short, does not equate to that of ‘martyr’, or ‘fundamentalist’ or the like (though it certainly includes them). Rather, it singles the philosopher out as one who has a clear sense of vocation and always defers to it in the last instance. With this in mind, we may cautiously assert that the archetypical sophist ultimately cedes to political expediency, whereas the archetypical philosopher ultimately does not.2 Last, like Badiou and Lyotard, I will therefore also insist that philosophy’s core characteristic is the refusal from within an avowed position of finitude to finally cede to that finitude. There is something in the practice of philosophy that has to do with being seized, caught out and caught up in what is greater, even infinitely greater, than oneself. But this engagement with the infinite plays out as a characteristic obstinacy, for which canonical philosophers from traditions around the globe are often best remembered. This obstinacy is precisely what makes a philosopher (in terms of vocation) out of the one who philosophizes (in terms of activity). I should caution here, however, that if it is appropriate to draw rough comparisons between philosophy (logos under the aegis of truth, or infinitude) and sophistry (pure logologos under the aegis of opinion and political expediency), then we might also entertain the possibility of a third,

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arguably hybrid category of thought. According to Badiou’s conception of ‘antiphilosophy’, there is a mode of thinking that seeks to affirm both human finitude and the infinite absolutely, but in a gesture that simultaneously strives to abolish the very logos through which philosophy and sophistry both labour, and to declare fidelity to a higher truth than the truths that are said to be accessible to philosophy. As I described it previously, ‘the antiphilosopher lives a life where the body is permeated and wracked by the concept, or by the infinite which outstrips every concept, and the en-actment of his very existence shows what philosophy only vainly attempts to say’ (McLennan 2015:  90). Thus, the antiphilosopher resembles the philosopher in her obstinate fidelity to a higher truth and in her self-conscious groundedness in finitude. Moreover, the antiphilosopher is a close cousin to the sophist in the pretension to depose or to have already deposed philosophy, but this time through an attempt at the very demolition of its logos itself rather than through a purely logo-logical, ironical and ultimately tactical ‘retorsion’ of the philosopher’s arguments.3 There is evidently a certain compatibility between the figure of the antiphilosopher and that of the Christian mystic, who typically affirms the infinite but through a mode of thought that would radically efface or abject the human being’s pretension to think it without grace; Badiou lists canonical Western (anti-)philosophical militants such as Paul, Pascal, Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on this score (Badiou 2003, 2011). But to flesh out Badiou’s picture, we should also note the pervasiveness of what could be construed as antiphilosophical themes in Judaic4 and non-Western traditions. The traditional depiction of the ancient Chinese sage Chuang Tzu, who affirms the existence of that which lies beyond our grasp while also insisting we cannot properly think it, is typical in this regard: ‘Our life has a boundary but there is no boundary to knowledge. To use what has a boundary to pursue what is limitless is dangerous; with this knowledge, if we still go after knowledge, we will run into trouble’ (Chuang Tzu 2006: 22).

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I have already stated that I am hesitant to draw any strict boundary between the philosopher and the sophist  – on account, primarily, of my allowing the former to borrow tactically from the latter, while retaining her identity. Similarly, I am less than convinced of the need to cleave strictly to Badiou’s characterization of the antiphilosopher. This is largely due to the fact that we might frame the antiphilosopher’s attempt to demolish philosophical logos as simply a particularly acute moment in philosophical reflection; that is, a moment that speaks to philosophy’s own status as logologos, its inherent recursivity. It is inherently possible in the practice of philosophy to take up philosophical positions with respect to philosophy itself  – and this implies the concomitant possibility of philosophy’s taking up arms against itself, militating for its own abandonment and therefore by its own lights falling into paradox.5 If we grant, however, the existence of antiphilosophy as a distinct mode of thought, then like the sophist, the antiphilosopher on Badiou’s telling is ultimately a perennial partner or intimate enemy to the philosopher – one who, through constant antagonism, keeps the philosopher honest about the scope and limits of her powers, lest she lapses into dogma and sectarianism. Assuming then that we can distinguish in a rough and ready way between philosophy, sophistry and antiphilosophy  – as tendencies in thought, perhaps, rather than as strict types  – we have an image of the philosopher as one who affirms human finitude (like the sophist and the antiphilosopher), as well as the gulf between this finitude and a posited infinite (like the antiphilosopher). But unlike sophistry or antiphilosophy – to put things metaphorically  – the archetype of the philosopher is the person who obstinately attempts to throw the rope bridge of thought over the chasm that lies between her finitude and the infinite. But in the end I  will insist – as both Badiou and Lyotard also do, each in his own way – that the very possibility of the philosophical vocation is in the warp and weft of the typical human experience. The apparent heroism of philosophy is only an everyday heroism that has become a vocation.

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The existential or pre-disciplinary definition As I construe it, philosophy in the most basic, existential sense is the activity of the self-conscious mastery of one’s being mastered. In essence, any human being will find herself in a situation that vastly outstrips her, and that shapes her while limiting her existential possibilities. She philosophizes when she engages in a self-conscious attempt to master her situation of finitude. Four comments are in order. First, philosophical activity is inherently limitless. The one who philosophizes can never actually overcome her condition of finitude, since she is exposed to time and to the omnipresent possibility of accident. She can achieve at best a fragile and temporary stability, which is always already pregnant with the negativity or contingency that will either push her activity further or force her to begin again. She engages in an activity of mastery that is not in itself and can never be an ultimate mastery. The reason it cannot finally be a mastery is that it is only ever a mastery of one’s being mastered. It is a movement towards the overcoming of one’s limitations, but in and through one’s limitations. Second, the definition of philosophy offered here is deliberately vague or agnostic about the means that are used to pursue the activity of the mastery of being mastered. One typically philosophizes in the idioms of argumentation and thought experiments, but the activity I describe as philosophical can also be pursued in those of poetry, cinema, physical discipline, painting, musical improvization, prayer, psychoanalysis and so on. At the existential level, no method is presumed superior to any other so long as it permits the one who adopts it to engage in the self-conscious mastery of being mastered. Thus, a great many more people actually philosophize than might be admitted if we were to restrict the term to its disciplinary definition. In fact, some degree of philosophizing appears to be an unavoidable activity, at least for most human beings at some point in their lives. As Lyotard put it in a lecture to his first-year students:

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this is why we philosophize: because there is desire, because there is absence in presence, deadness in life; and also because there is power that is not yet power; and also because there is alienation, the loss of what we thought we had acquired and the gap between the deed and the doing, between the said and the saying; and finally because we cannot evade this: testifying to the presence of the lack with our speech. In truth, how can we not philosophize? (Lyotard 2013: 123, emphasis mine) Third, the self-conscious aspect of philosophical activity must be stressed. What makes an activity philosophical is, first, the awareness that one either is or might be faced with an intractable problem. Second, philosophical activity is present when this awareness is paired with the commitment to test the problem’s boundaries – at a minimum, to clarify and to better understand the problem – and to work on it come what may. Such a commitment might entail that one is prepared to make indefinitely many new starts, and this speaks to the perennial and in a sense question-begging image of the philosopher as one who deepens questions ‘rather than’ providing answers. As Iris Murdoch put it, It is sometimes said, either irritably or with a certain satisfaction, that philosophy makes no progress. It is certainly true, and I  think this is an abiding and not regrettable characteristic of the discipline, that philosophy has in a sense to keep trying to return to the beginning: a thing which is not all that easy to do. (Murdoch 1970: 1) The issue might also be construed in terms of being aware of how the nature of certain problems or subject matters can undermine one’s very approach to them. As Jean Le Rond d’Alembert put it centuries ago, about the introspective analysis of affects, [t]‌otally immersed in the analysis of our perceptions, philosophy disentangles their nuances much more readily when the soul is in a state of tranquility

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than when it is in the throes of passions or of the lively sentiments which affect us. In truth, how could it possibly be easy to analyze such feelings as these with precision? We must indeed surrender ourselves to them in order to know them, even though the moment in which the soul is affected by them is the very time when it is least capable of study. (d’Alembert 1995: 96) Thus, as d’Alembert and Lyotard both attest, human finitude spurs philosophy but also constitutes its outer limits.6 Philosophy, in short, happens when human finitude obstinately and self-consciously risks reaching beyond itself. Fourth, and finally, the self-conscious aspect of philosophical activity does not necessarily commit us to any notion of the self, understood in terms of psychological personhood (Warren 2007:  130–1), as being roughly unitary or self-identical through time. On this point, we only need to posit a subject qua intentional metaphysical boundary of the world (Wittgenstein 2000: 58). This allows us to include grappling with questions of one’s own identity, one’s emotions, one’s memories, the truth of one’s own desires and inclinations under the banner of philosophical activity. The subject that philosophizes may conceivably remain constant while the empirical, psychological self who is attached to that subject fluctuates. In fact, this very fluctuation may and often does form the matter for philosophical reflection. This last point would seem to suggest that childhood and adolescence are already philosophical in and of themselves, since they typically contain passages in which the subject becomes alienated from the personality in the interest of attaining a new stage. That is, in the transitions of childhood and adolescence, the subject often takes its capacities or even its personal identity in general as objects of critical reflection. It attempts to sublate them, that is, pass beyond them while conserving them  – and is ultimately only partially successfully, since childhood may always return as a presence which haunts and unsettles. The link between philosophy and childhood is in fact a common trope that has been used for widely divergent ends. Kant, for example, defines

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enlightenment as ‘the human being’s emergence from his self-incurred minority’ (Kant 1996: 11), and he grapples with the special status of the actual child as an object of modern educational reform and anthropological as well as ethical reflection (Kant 2011). Post-enlightenment thinkers working both with and against Kant, however, have made different use of childhood (or at the limit, ‘natality’; Arendt 1998) to emphasize that which is intractable to totalization and political closure (Lyotard 1991). Apart from childhood and adolescence, the view that the subject can take the fluctuations of the empirical self or personality as its philosophical material would appear to have further implications. It seems to entail that any important life transition, or any significant pause that is taken for reflection – at least to the extent that the latter constitutes or triggers activity of the kind I am qualifying as philosophical – could also be of interest according to the definition I am stipulating herein. Is philosophy simply inevitable then, occasioned by the very course of human life itself? Since I am linking philosophy to anthropological constants, it is tempting to say so. To avoid the trap of idealism on this point, however, I will ask the reader to bear two qualifications in mind. First, though philosophical activity may be triggered by one’s circumstances, there is no guarantee that it will be assumed as a vocation or even as a regular activity. Life is often grinding, and the everyday genius of most of the world’s poor and middle class is often siphoned away into strategic and tactical thinking for survival, in addition to being numbed by soothing distractions. Absurd as it may sound, intellectuals under neoliberalism are no exception to this trend. As I realized first hand after several years in the probationary wilderness of academia, even philosophy professors can find that they have little time on their hands at the end of the day to genuinely philosophize. Second, philosophical activity is not inevitably provoked by passages in a human life because some changes or transitions seem to be radically inassimilable by the subject. It is one thing to speak of the subject taking its own personality changes  – including changes that could be problematically

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construed as decline – as matter for philosophical reflection. It is quite another to speak of the depersonalization of that subject, where the changes in question severely test or even sever the link between the subject and its personality. Whereas a given burgeoning or ‘declining’ mind might indeed be in an extremely difficult position with regard to its own particular philosophical struggle,7 some life changes are exceptional for being more abrupt and more profound. In describing the aftermath of her violent rape and attempted murder at the hands of a stranger, philosopher Susan Brison relates the following: People ask me if I’m recovered now, and I reply that it depends on what that means. If they mean ‘am I back to where I was before the attack?’ I have to say, no, and I never will be. I am not the same person who set off, singing, on that sunny Fourth of July in the French countryside. I left her in a rocky creek bed in the bottom of a ravine. I had to in order to survive. I understand the appropriateness of what a friend described to me as a Jewish custom of giving those who have outlived a brush with death new names. The trauma has changed me forever, and if I insist too often that my friends and family acknowledge it, that’s because I’m afraid they don’t know who I am. But if recovery means being able to incorporate this awful knowledge into my life and carry on, then, yes, I’m recovered. (Brison 2003: 21) What Brison describes is a fracturing of personal continuity, to the extent that she feels newly alienated from the previously accepted coordinates of her world (Brison 2003: 9) and from the person she used to be. Her struggle, which is eminently philosophical, is to think through the implications of this rupture and to tie the broken threads into a new, provisional narrative. But as Catherine Malabou argues (Malabou 2012), there also exist qualitatively different situations in which, through traumatic brain injury or the advanced stages of diseases such as Alzheimer’s, the subject can become totally stripped of her previous life and is literally as new  – ‘childish but not the child that she had been’ (Malabou 2012:  61). Since such subjects tend to exhibit a

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characteristic traumatized coolness or disinterestedness (Malabou 2012:  xi– xii), it would seem prima facie plausible that these are subjects from whom the possibility or at least the inclination to philosophy has taken leave. Thus, it would be implausible or at least premature to say that all subjective changes nourish philosophical activity. Thus, in answer to Lyotard’s above-referenced question to his students  – How not philosophize?  – I  would point to the weight of circumstances and the ever-present possibility of depersonalization. Such social and ontological contingency contributes to the fact that, beyond being a very common and perennial human possibility, philosophy is also and always a struggle.

The disciplinary definition As I have explained, my definition of philosophy is deliberately promiscuous on account of the vagueness with which it approaches the question of means. It allows for highly diverse practices to be qualified as philosophical if they are first of all construed as thought, and second are engaged as obstinate practices of the perpetual, self-conscious mastery of being mastered. This might offend the sensibilities or at least the territorial instincts of professional philosophers, but even if my definition is ultimately rejected, it would be to the discipline’s credit to forge links to like-minded practices and thereby to cultivate a more broadly philosophical culture (we need more of the right kind and less of the wrong kind of obstinacy, as the ongoing political nightmare emanating from the United States, e.g., has demonstrated). As Kwame Anthony Appiah has argued (Appiah 2009), the disciplinary isolation of philosophy is at any rate both historically recent and ultimately untenable. The great philosophers were virtually all engaged in fluid and open conversations with natural science, fine art and the practical arts until the mid-twentieth century, when AngloAmerican philosophy largely redefined itself as pure conceptual and linguistic analysis. But the moat behind which professional philosophy has hidden itself

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has since been drained of water; Anglo-American philosophy after Quine has largely naturalized itself, and everywhere we hear the clamour for a renewed and vigorous engagement with the ‘non-philosophical’ arts and sciences (Appiah 2009: 5–32). When I describe existential philosophy as ‘pre-disciplinary’, I am therefore not making a value judgment. I am merely indicating that disciplinary philosophy, to the extent that it does indeed have a claim to function autonomously, does something that existential philosophy typically does not: it poses the question and tries to establish the criteria of whether its activity counts as philosophy. In this sense it is a highly recursive and learned version of existential philosophical activity. Essentially, philosophy as practiced in the Western/settler academy describes a higher order questioning, or a search after fundamental truths that also questions the very parameters as well as the objects of the search. This search occurs within a variously deep or shallow exploration of the history of the discipline. Put differently, philosophy practiced in this way questions the very process and protocols of questioning and takes a critical stance (either intentionally or by omission) towards its history and the main currents that characterize it in the present. In this sense, like other methods enumerated above, it is engaged in the activity of the self-conscious mastery of its being mastered. But it is thus engaged in both a general and a more specialized way. The disciplinary philosopher is a generalist to the extent that she stands at a further remove from what, following Lyotard’s above-cited claim, amounts in any case to a near-universal or at least perennially possible human activity. She is a specialist, however, to the extent that she can make a strong claim to facilitate or guide the existential strivings and therefore help to meet the philosophical needs of her students (more on this in the Conclusion). She is also a specialist to the extent that her scholarship works out narrow areas of interest within that broader commitment to abstraction and generality. In this sense, the disciplinary philosopher is no exception to the rule that professions tend towards specialization under late capitalism.

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Disciplinary philosophy, according to the view presented here, therefore certainly implies norms of academic rigor and some degree of narrowing of focus. It also, however, implies claims and commitments of an anthropological nature. ‘First philosophy’ is always already bounded by the innate structures and possibilities of human thought and experience, however we wish to cash these out (Levi-Strauss 1966; Chomsky 1988; Kant 1992; Levinas 1997; Quine 1998; Fanon 2008; Beauvoir 2011; Ricoeur 2016). But there is always a risk that the disciplinary philosopher will unreflectively take his or her own experience, whether in its raw form or reduced to the essentials, to be automatically of universal import  – and thereby miss the range of diversity in which putative anthropological constants can actually be expressed. This is why disciplinary philosophy points not only to the importance of, and is immeasurably enriched by, an ongoing engagement with disciplinary psychology8 and anthropology,9 but also non-Western/ non-settler philosophical cultures as well as existential or pre-disciplinary philosophy more generally. Since the diversity and range of human thought are at issue, there should naturally be a special emphasis placed on the pre-disciplinary philosophical practice of marginalized persons and those with atypical cognitive structures and experiences. Properly construed – and this was indeed my own experience, as I will briefly detail in the book’s Conclusion– abstract philosophical study is thus compatible with an exploration of human diversity and, therefore, of the broad range of what constitutes the human and its legitimate needs and demands. Indeed, disciplinary philosophy might even be approached as an invitation to such an exploration. And to a greater extent than is typically realized, abstract philosophical study can, therefore, be approached as a prolegomenon to the concrete work of social justice. A key theme of this book is that philosophical engagement, to the extent that it forces us to confront questions of common and disparate boundedness or finitude and therefore vulnerability, pushes us to question whether, and how, and ultimately how

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equitably, this finitude and vulnerability are actually, and ultimately should be, socially distributed.

‘Vulnerability’ A study making such strong claims linking philosophy to vulnerability also requires a working definition of the latter term. A number of recent philosophical and social-scientific works have shed light on the concept (Mackenzie et al. 2013; Butler et  al. 2016; May 2017), or on related but sometimes differently inflected ones like ‘fragility’ (Nussbaum 2001; May 2017), ‘precarity’ (Butler 2006, 2015, 2016), ‘disadvantage’ (Wolff and De-Shalit 2013), ‘dependency’ (Kittay 1999; MacIntyre 2001; Butler 2006, 2015, 2016), ‘debility’ (Puar 2017) or even human ‘animality’ (MacIntyre 2001; Nussbaum 2006; S. Taylor 2017). It is impossible to do justice to the range, nuance and inventiveness of these works in so short a space. I will settle for laying out the two most basic aspects of the concept of vulnerability which I  have derived from them:  finitude or boundedness, and exposure to accident or luck. Regarding finitude or boundedness, my being vulnerable is tied to the fact that my existential possibilities are always (and can become more or less) limited. They are limited in at least three basic ways. First, they are logically limited, since not all human possibilities are compossible (i.e. possible together).10 Second, my existential possibilities are limited in time because humans are mortal and there are hard limits to human longevity.11 And finally, they are limited in scope because human lives and endeavours proceed from a place of situatedness, partiality and variously limited and fluctuating capacities. Vulnerability also implies, I  have suggested, that I  am exposed to the vicissitudes of good and bad luck (Williams 1981; Nussbaum 2001). To be a human being is to be open to contingency, and to constantly have to navigate the unexpected. In a sense, this exposure to accident or luck may be brought

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under the previously discussed heading of human finitude, since only a finite being can be subject to contingency; good and bad luck impinges precisely on my existential possibilities. Thus, as per Malabou (2013), we may even speak of human life in terms of an ‘ontology of the accident’. It should be stressed at the outset, however, that in my view, vulnerability, thus construed in terms of finitude and exposure to accident, is not simply or perhaps even centrally a matter of the fragile materiality of the living human body (though of course it includes it). The anecdote with which I  began this chapter, in which my son worried over his dawning awareness of the contingency of his mother and I, frames things in terms of the inevitability of ageing, illness and death. This is absolutely part of what it means to speak of human vulnerability, but for most humans at some point in their lives, there is even more at stake. Todd May (2017) provides a vision of human vulnerability that helps us to construe it as including, but ultimately more than, material fragility. He gives a helpful breakdown of the often interconnected factors of human vulnerability, granting ‘projects’, rather than bodies, a central role in his account. May defines projects  – or more particularly, those he calls ‘central projects’  – as ‘significant, caring engagements in or with . . . practices. They are engagements that matter, engagements through which we largely identify ourselves’ (May 2017: 18–19). As May put it, ‘humans (and perhaps other cognitively advanced species such as dolphins, elephants, and the great apes) are exposed to a vulnerability that is often, although not always, a matter of disruption of our projects’ (May 2017: 19). The disruptions May has in mind can certainly stem from ‘our physical nature’ (May 2017: 20). This is to say that our projects may be disrupted on account of our being ‘subject to injury and damage in our environment’, or on account of our being thwarted through a simple lack of alignment between our goals and our physical capacities (May 2017:  20–4). There are also, however, psychological and ‘moral’ sources of disruption to our projects (May 2017:  24–31). In this view  – and admittedly begging the

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question of the ontological status of mental states and mental events  – my projects are vulnerable to disruption by mental contingencies, such as a bout of depression or a psychotic break or an inability to concentrate. (May gives a lucid account of his own experiences with chronic depression in the book.) But there are also moral problems arising from a person’s potentially having clashing, incompatible projects or from the four kinds of moral luck in Bernard Williams’s sense;12 effectively, I may be taken off course for moral reasons that are out of my control. It might be objected that May is not talking about human vulnerability per se, since he sets the bar at the capacity to form projects and, therefore, tentatively includes certain nonhuman animals while appearing to exclude certain human beings. Recall, however, the way in which he hedges:  human vulnerability is ‘often, although not always, a matter of disruption of our projects’ (May 2017: 19). Assuming only that we are speaking of most human beings – that is, those who are cognitively capable of formulating and adhering to projects – May’s project-centred account gives a compelling example of how finitude and exposure to accident may constitute human vulnerability, without reducing the concept of vulnerability to the fragility of the human body. I will insist in any case that no human life is exempt from these basic conditions of finitude and exposure, however we construe them. Even those humans who possess, for the sake of argument,13 only a material fragility  – being too early in gestation for example, or incapable of forming projects due to neocortical death – are nonetheless finite and are exposed to accident. Accordingly, vulnerability in the broad sense that I have presented it should be construed as an anthropological constant:  it is an aspect of the human condition (or the human ‘predicament’, as per Benatar 2017). This is already evinced by theoretical work in the ethics of care, which explicitly seeks to overturn the faulty (or at best partial) and in any case ideologically motivated anthropology of neoliberalism (Kittay 1999; Brugère 2014: 3, 36–7). According to care ethics, I  am finite and exposed to accident when I  come into the

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world, and though the scope of my powers might increase vastly with time, the vulnerable bedrock of my existence is a constant in my life. As such, dependency and interdependency are much better markers of human life than the classical liberal and neoliberal fantasy of self-sufficiency.14 Note further how this double account of human vulnerability, through the themes of dependency and interdependency that it readily suggests, also opens onto what could be called a ‘social model of vulnerability’. This should be construed along lines similar to those of the social model of disability (Oliver 1990; S. Taylor 2017: 13–18). As noted, both my finitude and my luck are inescapable dimensions of human experience and are ultimately out of my control. But just like any impairments I might have, they are always mediated and they may be either worsened, maintained or ameliorated by my social surroundings. I mean by this more than just the role played by other human individuals in a person’s life  – though as Brison’s aforementioned account attests (Brison 2003), particular people may of course play a profound role in exacerbating, perpetuating or ameliorating my vulnerability. By ‘social surroundings’ I also mean the sum total of anthropogenic (though often also mixed-species)15 environments, institutions and other factors that variously support, encourage or frustrate both my ‘capabilities’ (Nussbaum 2011) and my ‘functionings’ (Wolff and De-Shalit 2013), which I will gloss here as both the characteristic ways and the concrete instances of being and doing that would constitute my flourishing, recognizably human life. The social factor may be so decisive to how I live out my innate vulnerability that, as Sunaura Taylor says regarding disability in particular, ‘Our actual physical or mental disabilities are often the least of our worries’ (S. Taylor 2017: 15). In the absence of strong, healthy and supportive social ties in particular, any human life may quickly become unbearable. Consider, then, the social good and central human capability of affiliation, in Martha Nussbaum’s sense (roughly:  having strong, supportive, equitable and nourishing social ties).16 As Wolff and De-Shalit say of it, ‘There seems

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good reason to believe that affiliation is both a corrosive disadvantage and a fertile functioning’ (Wolff and De-Shalit 2013: 140). What they mean by this is that, first, a lack of affiliation is not only a disadvantage in and of itself, but it also tends to cause further, often serious disadvantages (which in their view means further deficits in secure functionings). And second, according to their research, it also seems that having robust ties of affiliation, on the other hand, constitutes a functioning which is ‘fertile’. This means that it tends to maintain and facilitate further functionings.17 In this vein, Dean Spade provides heartbreaking examples of the potentially lethal difficulties faced by transgender and intersex individuals with whom he worked pro bono in the context of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (Spade 2015). Though he does not use the term ‘corrosive disadvantage’, Spade maps how characteristic disadvantages faced by trans and intersex persons, importantly among them a relative lack of affiliation caused by social stigma, may lock them into a path in which their very existence becomes more and more precarious.18 Such examples are highly suggestive, and they indicate patterns of acute, socially exacerbated vulnerability that require urgent attention from academics, activists, lawyers and policy makers. But the point I want to make here is more general. No matter who I am, the precise shape of my finitude as well as my resiliency – my ability to bounce back from whatever life throws at me – depend upon the presence of affiliations, fair and functioning institutions and various other public goods. If it is true that I am vulnerable by definition because I  am human, then I  am also and perhaps above all vulnerable on account of how my ineluctably human environment is conceived, constructed and variously affected by political winds and historical accidents. Let us expand further, however, on Taylor’s comment to the effect that our actual disabilities are often the least of our worries. I have already stipulated that vulnerability as I construe it is not solely a matter of the fragile material body. Neither is it simply a matter of how well a person actually ‘functions’ in a given environment, as the preceding paragraphs might suggest. In fact, it is perfectly

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conceivable that a person can function or even be ‘high functioning’ (to use problematic language) while nonetheless being profoundly, disproportionately and unfairly vulnerable. This is because, as Wolff and De-Shalit point out, a key element of disadvantage is the social burden of risk, and how risks taken by a person to secure one functioning can render other functionings precarious (2013: 63–73). Wolff and De-Shalit draw two examples from Amartya Sen and provide one of their own to illustrate this point. The first example is of wild honey gatherers in the Sundarban forest (located in West Bengal in India and the southern edge of Bangladesh; 2013:  65). The Sundarbans are the habitat of the endangered, protected royal Bengal tiger, and each year there, fifty or more people are killed by the tigers. The honey gatherers are extremely poor, so effectively they must take the risk to their lives in order to sell the honey and put food on their families’ tables. The second example is of Kedra Mia, a Muslim day labourer working in Sen’s predominantly Hindu home neighbourhood of Dhaka. To save his family from starvation, Mia took the risk of ‘going to look for a job in a Hindu neighbourhood in troubled times’ and was eventually knifed to death by Hindu assailants (Wolff and De-Shalit 2013). Finally, Wolff and De-Shalit add the example of Bedouin tribes living in a tent town in northeastern Israeli Negev. The Bedouin there suffer in general from exposure to pollution produced by settlements and industries to the north. To avoid direct exposure to chemicals on their way to school, the children must cross a busy, dangerous road. Being unable and in any case reluctant to move (for reasons of poverty and the importance of maintaining their culture, sense of place and affiliation), the Bedouin are thus ‘forced to take risks to their health and to their children’s lives’ (Wolff and De-Shalit 2013: 67). As the authors’ examples suggest, risk is therefore intimately tied to vulnerability. There is even evidence of a catch-22, to the effect that the more risks one runs, the more vulnerable one is, but the more vulnerable one is, the more risks one has to run. As Wolff and De-Shalit put it, ‘low functioning

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often brings with it sharper risks of significant falls’ and it embroils people in risky attempts to improve their functioning (2013: 69–70). The risks taken in the examples above will likely strike most readers as extreme. A  reasonable person would not ordinarily run them if she had a genuine choice in the matter. The fact that people run them anyway is, therefore, suggestive of the extent to which a given society is or is not fairly structured, in terms of providing people with ‘genuine opportunities for secure functionings’ (Wolff and De-Shalit 2013: 37). But the point about running risks to secure functionings has broader import; in fact, it permits us to cover more common cases of socially exacerbated vulnerability and contributes to a finergrained social critique. Take the issue of sexual assault on campus: though it is a comparatively under-studied phenomenon in my home country of Canada, data are emerging that paint a distressing if predictable picture (Canadian Federation of Students Ontario 2015). According to a recent Maclean’s survey of 23,000 Canadian university students from 81 schools, ‘More than one in five female students, 46.7 per cent of LGBTQ+ students, and 6.9 per cent of male students have been sexually assaulted in their lives . . . About half those assaults happened during university’ (Schwartz 2018). The numbers become even more shocking when they are read intersectionally, in terms of the race, sexual orientation, (trans)gender status, indigeneity, disability and immigration status of students (Canadian Federation of Students Ontario 2015). But in general, it is clear that women and sexual minorities studying at Canadian universities run a disproportionately greater risk to their various functionings, precisely in their attempt to secure the good of an education. Since these risks are not run in a vacuum but rather in the context of a culture, a built environment and an institution with its various policies, the disproportion indicates unfairness or a lack of equity; the numbers cannot simply be chalked up to the ‘perpetrator perspective’ (Spade 2015:  42–5) that would treat assaults as unconnected incidents, or that would grant the existence of antisocial and evil males as an immutable fact of nature. This, then, is precisely how risk enters the picture and

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why it matters for a social model of vulnerability: my risk burden is relative to the culture, social choices and policies that have shaped my environment, and so, therefore, is how vulnerable I am. Having sketched a basic definition of human vulnerability premised upon innate and socially mediated aspects of finitude and exposure to accident, I  would like at this point to dispel two impressions that might easily occur to the reader. First, when above I  invoke ‘claims and commitments of an anthropological nature’, ‘anthropological constants’ or ‘philosophical anthropology’ in connection with vulnerability, I  am not engaged in a totalizing, humanistic project. By humanism I mean ‘any and all philosophical positions or discourses that elevate the human as such to an orienting ethical/ conceptual/historical principle’ (McLennan 2013:  43). I  am sceptical of humanistic frameworks in general for the political reason that the interests of ‘Man’, whether in the abstract or cashed out according to racialized or civilizational understandings and the like, have often served as a pretext to abuse and oppress whole classes of human beings as well as particular, politically heterodox or ‘socially undesirable’ human individuals.19 But I  am also concerned about the costs of defining humanity in general according to positive criteria. If we define humans as ‘rational animals’ or ‘language-using animals’ or ‘project-making animals’ for example, then we technically exclude a range of intellectually disabled or divergent human beings from our definition of humanity, which invites pernicious consequences.20 In a 2013 publication, I coined (to my knowledge) the term ‘anthro-paralogy’, which denotes ‘a search for instabilities and novelties in the human’ (McLennan 2013: 48). This book may be read in part as an exercise in anthro-paralogy: drawing attention to the diversity and range of human vulnerability through examples does not build a positive and total vision of the human, but more accurately suggests that the neoliberal vision of human beings as uniquely capable beings obscures or leaves out a good many pertinent considerations pertaining to our needs, our differences and our limitations.

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Second, the vision of human beings in general as doubly vulnerable does not suggest that humans are only bearers of negatively defined traits, instabilities or limitations. It is not put forth here as a tragic aspect of the human condition, and the book does not amount in any way to a lament for human fragility. Far from it, in fact. My finitude is precisely the rough ground upon which I  must tread in order to pursue any particular accomplishment. As Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing put it: ‘thinking through precarity’, that is, ‘the condition of being vulnerable to others . . . makes it evident that indeterminacy also makes life possible’ (Tsing 2015: 20). Even God, an infinite being as per Hegel, has to posit itself as finite in order to be truly, comprehensively infinite (i.e. it cannot be ‘highest’ if it is not also and simultaneously ‘lowest’; Hegel 1977: 460). In one sense, my vulnerability is precisely the condition of my strength and my striving, as the authors I will examine in this book will help to suggest. And in underscoring human vulnerability, the operant political idea is not to cast humans as victims, as Badiou, for example, worries (Badiou 2002: 10–11). In fact, I find the following claim by Badiou to be quite compelling: An immortal: this is what the worst situations that can be inflicted upon Man show him to be, in so far as he distinguishes himself within the varied and rapacious flux of life. In order to think any aspect of Man, we must begin from this principle . . . The fact that in the end we all die, that only dust remains, in no way alters Man’s identity as immortal at the instant in which he affirms himself as someone who runs counter to the temptation of wanting-to-be-an-animal to which circumstances may expose him. And we know that every human being is capable of being this immortal – unpredictably, be it in circumstances great or small, for truths important or secondary. (Badiou 2002: 12) When Badiou speaks of immortality, he is pointing to the access each (presumably cognitively typical, adult) human being has, through privileged modes of thought, to the infinite. The issue is that it would be insufficient to

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simply assert this qualified immortality, especially since it could lend itself to neoliberal tropes of the type that anyone can achieve anything, or can make it in today’s society if they simply try hard enough. Rather, we must buttress and correct the claim of human immortality by widening the deceptively narrow, ableist scope of what is meant here by ‘every human’ and insisting upon and locating the instabilities and novelties that are a function of human animality, broadly construed. It must be repeated that such an endeavour is undertaken as a means of undermining the anthropological postulates of neoliberalism and directing attention to the social structures which transform inherent and ontologically equal vulnerability (and by extension, capacity, ‘immortality’ even) into an unfair, pernicious and frequently murderous ‘distribution of life chances’ (Spade 2015: xii). If it is true that typical human beings carry something of the infinite inside of them, it is also true that real social conditions are rigged to trap them in their finitude and crush them into servile animality. Humans really are victims, but not inherently. And philosophy as capability raises the question of the concrete grounds that can frustrate, maintain or encourage that capability.

‘Philosophy and vulnerability’ By way of summarizing and bringing together the preceding, the two terms are joined as follows. Philosophy is a self-conscious activity of finitude reaching beyond itself, through itself; finitude describes or encompasses human vulnerability. Thus, philosophy is inherently tied, in some way, to vulnerability; it is, in one sense, an activity of vulnerable beings, labouring in and through their vulnerability. Inasmuch as disciplinary philosophy ignores the vulnerability which is both its ontological precondition and its primary spur, it will risk lapsing into ideology – that is, a failure to understand the boundedness and the rootedness,

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in material interests and unfair advantages, of its position. Inasmuch as disciplinary philosophy turns its focus on vulnerability, however, it can begin to listen for the nuances of the latter that are spoken in a wide range of idioms, including those which are typically considered to fall outside of its ambit. But this kind of listening – while not in and of itself already ethical or political – is a prolegomenon to ethical and political engagement because it pushes back against neoliberal ideology and widens not only the accepted scope of human needs and limitations, but also possibilities.

Aims and methodological considerations The point of this book is to help ground disciplinary philosophy in existential philosophy through the theme of vulnerability. As stated above, this task belongs to a larger division of counter-hegemonic labour. It is undertaken with two specific outcomes in mind: first, to temper but not erase disciplinary philosophy’s claim to hold a special status among human endeavours, which emerges in problematic form as its perennial temptation to elitism and/ or ideology; but, second, to suggest in the same breath that disciplinary philosophy’s very generality renders it of near-universal pertinence and perennial importance. Disciplinary philosophy, in short, is taken down a peg in the interest of further democratizing and thereby saving it. Inasmuch as existential or pre-disciplinary philosophy encompasses a good range of human activity, any number of sources could have been tapped to suggest that much of philosophy happens at the margins of or even well beyond the discipline proper. I have chosen three thinkers, however, who are exemplary in three ways:  Catherine Breillat, Joan Didion and Audre Lorde. First, they deploy divergent methods in the activity of the self-conscious mastery of being mastered (film direction, screenwriting, novelistic writing, poetry, memoir, journalism, public speaking and so on). This helps to illustrate the thesis of

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the diversity of methods of philosophical engagement. Second, they deal in concepts and formulate their thoughts in a way that makes them conversant with and largely accessible to disciplinary philosophy; when one encounters their work, the impression is often that whether they know it or not, they are banging at the gates of the discipline. Third, and finally, their philosophical engagement is properly existential to the extent that it is rooted in concrete, personal experiences of vulnerability and the striving to master it. All three are women who came of age in the post-war twentieth century, weathering sexism, rank misogyny and the dislocations of the sexual revolution during a wider, post-Fordist historical context of rapid change and social dissolution. All three have chronicled their considerable and costly battles with illness, accident and ageing – with Lorde, who among the three is deceased, describing the process of her dying from cancer in moving poetic terms. All three cultivated a personal style as a means of facing up to their human and specific vulnerabilities. And unlike Breillat and Didion, Lorde suffered the further vulnerabilities that come with being a woman of colour and a lesbian in post-war America. Taken together, Breillat, Didion and Lorde help to teach a range of lessons from what I have defined as an existential philosophical perspective. Approached in the right spirit – and again, speaking from my own experience – they refresh and inspire the disciplinary practice. The selection of sources is admittedly far from perfect. It is obviously limited in the extent to which it can guide the reader outside of a Western/ settler framework for thinking. While Lorde’s Caribbean/African diaspora heritage may be invoked as offering material for reflection that is simultaneously inside and outside of this framework (Lorde 1982), the book largely reflects the limitations that come with the subject-positions of the authors studied, as well as my own training and experience brought to bear on their interpretation. This is not to unduly relativize or discount the research presented herein, but to suggest that it is a very partial and imperfect contribution to an ongoing project of inspiring disciplinary philosophers to

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keep refreshing their practice and learning from atypical, non-canonical sources. Since I  am invoking my training and expertise here, commentary is required regarding the disciplinary status of the book itself. The definition of philosophy that operates herein is stipulative, and the bulk of the book comprises exegeses and analyses of three thinkers who have much to teach us about the link between philosophy and vulnerability as construed according to this definition. As such, the book might be considered to be about philosophy or at least a certain contentious vision of philosophy rather than a book of philosophy. This would not be altogether unfair; comparatively little metaphilosophical argumentation is done and the book fleshes out a vision of philosophy concretely through examples that are interpreted in such a way as to accord with its image. It should come as no surprise to the reader, however, that if I am perceived to have failed to adequately illustrate and shore up the definition stipulated herein, I will claim this setback to be but a moment in the endless activity of the self-conscious mastery of being mastered. There is, after all – and as I believe I have forcefully suggested in my previous book – enough of the sophist in any philosopher to suggest she make use of such escape clauses as needed. Indeed, what good would a definition of philosophy be if it didn’t make room for fresh starts?

Structure of the book In summary, having stipulated a definition of philosophy that divides into existential and disciplinary versions, and in which vulnerability constitutes both one of its ontological conditions and its primary spur, I will sound out how Breillat, Didion and Lorde (chosen from an indefinite range of other possible sources) demonstrate various lessons on philosophy and vulnerability from an existential perspective.

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In Chapter 2, I present Breillat as a thinker whose intellectual project at least up to 2006 or 2007 can be defined as a struggle to overcome shame and ‘sexual self-loathing’ (Keesey 2009: 152), as well as socially imposed and sexist ‘servile representations’ (Vasse 2004:  22, my translation). Socially enforced and exacerbated vulnerability, the maldistribution of life chances resulting from sexism and misogyny, have shaped Breillat’s work to such an extent that in a corpus that is largely marked by progressively abstract repetition, she plumbs the depths of masochism and voluntary debasement in order to subvert and ultimately master them. Breillat thus forcefully demonstrates how such social-sexual wounding leads to philosophical engagement as I construe it. But as I will detail, Breillat does not derive therefrom a solidary, or ethical, or feminist bent. Rather, as a thinker who derives a version of the Cartesian cogito from a non-psychoanalytical notion of the unconscious, and for whom the sexual encounter is a privileged mode of self-realization, Breillat’s understanding of philosophical activity is individualistic and idiosyncratic to the point of solipsism. While her corpus is broadly referenced throughout the chapter, her book of interviews Corps amoureux and the novel Bad Love, from 2006 and 2007, respectively, are given pride of place in an analysis that underscores the ethical pitfalls of labouring philosophically as if one were alone. In Chapter 3, Joan Didion’s writings – in particular, her memoir Blue Nights (2011) – are read in terms of the theme of vulnerability. They are, on one hand, approached as teachings on an ethic and cultivation of ‘hardness’ that, perhaps despite initial appearances, is built up for the benefit of both oneself and others. Didion may be approached as a halfway point between Breillat and Lorde, demonstrating deep and fierce attachments to a small set of loved ones as well as an overall concern for the vulnerability of others and the political drift of her society, but generally despairing of the prospects of progressive struggles and wider solidarity. Above all, however, Didion is approached as a thinker who expertly captures the event of subjective frailty – the occurrence

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of facing up to one’s vulnerability without illusions, and what that means for one’s attachments and for an ethics of memory. In Chapter 4, Audre Lorde helps turn the focus more forcefully onto the social connectedness and the ethos of solidarity that are crucial to philosophical practice as I understand it. Following a discussion of the notion of ‘privilege’, the intersectional nature of Lorde’s lived experience is explored. I will emphasize the ways in which her struggle with cancer was overdetermined by vectors of social exclusion and oppression – becoming, in the end, a uniquely black lesbian mother’s struggle with a disease that otherwise affects so many as to be an experience that touches humanity in general. The chapter, however, will not solely comprise criticism of the ways in which vulnerabilities are differentially mediated. Rather, the emphasis will be on how Lorde fashions both an ethic of using one’s own privilege for good and a corollary concept of self-care and ‘support’ from these experiences and an underlying epistemology of ‘many selves’ and pre-rational knowledge. Lorde, in short, will cap a spectrum of existential or pre-disciplinary philosophical engagement which moves from isolated struggle to more or less other-directed but conservative melancholia, to transformative social labour. In essence, Lorde’s activity accords most closely with philosophy as I conceive it – though both Breillat and Didion are acknowledged for offering precious philosophical lessons in their own right. In Chapter  5, Catherine Breillat is revisited in light of her experience of stroke, hemiplegia and the ‘abuse of weakness’ she suffered at the hands of the conman Christophe Rocancourt beginning in 2007. I will briefly sketch how the door is opened to a new kind of struggle after these events – wherein the previously well-defined and assertive if unconsciously overdetermined cogito becomes fractured and vulnerable. This necessitates a clearer coming to terms with Breillat’s own vulnerability and perhaps the beginnings of a notion of solidarity that is sketched through the ‘privacy beyond privacy’ of sleep and the trust it necessitates. An underlying message of this chapter is that in terms of philosophizing, one may always begin again – sometimes because one has to.

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Finally, in the Conclusion, I  tie up some of the disparate threads of the book’s previous chapters by reflecting upon a pedagogical experience that has had a profound impact on my thinking since the publication of Philosophy, Sophistry, Antiphilosophy in 2015. I  relate how my work with low-income students in the Discovery University program in the fall of 2016 cemented many of the convictions contained herein. My aim in the Conclusion is to bring the discussion of philosophy and vulnerability down to earth by considering some of the real ways in which I  have observed pre-disciplinary and disciplinary philosophy in conversation and witnessed how the boundary between them is not always so clear. I also draw a general, normative conclusion from this experience to the effect that some amount of disciplinary philosophy  – far from being simply a luxury or a pastime – can constitute a powerful need, even for those with more pressing and basic issues to attend to.

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2 Catherine Breillat I: An erotic suspension of the ethical

I  Provocation: A philosophical approach In the prologue to his book on Saint Paul, Alain Badiou remarks that ‘Basically, I  have never really connected Paul with religion’ (Badiou 2003:  1). This is most likely an exaggeration and it is said by way of provocation, but Badiou is making a compelling methodological and rhetorical gambit:  forcefully engaging the reader to confront that which speaks most clearly to him from below the surface of a given thinker’s words and works. Paul, for Badiou, is not primarily a Christian saint but rather the founder of militant political universalism. Badiou reads Paul, then, closely but with a view to his own purposes. His provocation serves to goad us into engagement with his  – Badiou’s – own project. Without wishing exactly to pull such a rhetorical or even sophistical flourish on my readers, I would like to make a similar gesture here in the first of my two chapters about Catherine Breillat. Specifically, I will claim that Breillat’s oeuvre

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is not ‘really’ about sex. Or at least: I will argue that at a certain level of analysis, her work is not about sex, but rather about vulnerability. I am aware that I run the risk that this interpretation will be rejected out of hand. It will certainly appear at first blush to be demonstrably false, since as anyone with even a passing familiarity can attest, Breillat’s films and literary works are saturated with graphic depictions of sex and have often blurred the lines between pornography and art in the eyes of her critics. Indeed, notwithstanding her genuine artistry as a writer and filmmaker, Breillat is notorious in France and beyond precisely for her idiosyncratic and highly provocative explorations of sexual desires and behaviours. This association of Breillat with sex and sexuality is not in the least surprising for the further reason that it dovetails with her stated goals and preoccupations, forming a recognizable intellectual and artistic itinerary. As Douglas Keesey nicely put it, ‘the fight to liberate herself from sexual self-loathing is Breillat’s great subject’ (Keesey 2009: 152). David Vasse adds that ‘her niche, invariant until the end, will be to deliver the woman from her servile representations, by means of a system of permanent and violent oppositions to imposed values’ (Vasse 2004:  22, my translation). There is, thus, no discussing Breillat without also discussing sex and sexuality, since her work is a decades-long and intensely personal (Bélot 2017) exorcism of sexual hang-ups, some of the origins of which are pinpointed in the loosely autobiographical Une vraie jeune fille (Breillat 2001b). Breillat is a particularly interesting subject on this score because her adolescence coincided with the sexual revolution of the post-war twentieth century in France; the social upheaval of her time, in which sex and sexuality were key factors at stake, was thus also a lived experience. Publishing her first, scandalous and sexually charged novel L’homme facile (Breillat 2000) at the age of 16 and in the thick of the events of May 1968, Breillat will later brag that it was the ‘most frequently stolen book of the student revolution’ (Clouzot 2004:  20, my translation). Breillat is perhaps exemplary in the way she maps out and faces the personal

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challenge of leaving the past behind at the very moment when the new is trying to be born both in her and around her. It would seem then that, whatever other meaning might be detected beneath or alongside her texts and films, sex and sexuality must retain a privileged place in their analysis. Thus, for example, interpreter Sophie Bélot foregrounds the theme of intimacy in Breillat, while giving sex and sexuality their due (Bélot 2017). Similarly, I wish to argue herein for an approach to Breillat’s work that is first and foremost philosophical, in the existential sense tied to vulnerability laid out in the Introduction. More precisely, the philosophical approach will acknowledge and conserve the sexual nature of Breillat’s work while digging deeper to the underlying engagement with finitude (and, as is more evident in Chapter 5, with the theme of exposure to accident). As I reconstruct her, Breillat is engaged in an ongoing intellectual project that is certainly personal, that certainly affirms sexual autonomy while engaging not only in a critique of patriarchal values and social institutions  – including their effects upon both feminine and masculine self-image and self-understanding (Vasse 2004: 24–35; Bélot 2017: 91–105) – but which also opens onto philosophical questions of subjectivation and ethics. I will repeat here that I  am a thinker for whom obstinate philosophical resistance is both possible and necessary. This colours absolutely my interpretation of Breillat. As I understand her, sex – or rather the promise of self-discovery and transcendence through sex, the advent of a ‘corps amoureux’ (a ‘loving-body’ or ‘body-in-love’; Breillat 2006: 35) – is precisely the path to, or at least marks the possibility of, an obstinate philosophical resistance for Breillat. My aim in this chapter is, therefore, to show how this is so, as well as to show the ways in which, seemingly, her project fails or at the very least reaches an impasse. When I return to Breillat in Chapter 5, I will track how her militancy – which for the better part of her career has come across even to some sympathetic critics as politically irresponsible and almost pathological in its individualism (Clouzot 2004: 11) – gives way in her later works on time

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and vulnerability to an opening, the glimmer of possibility of a militant mode of being-together. The philosophical resonance of Breillat’s corpus is not, as I  have come to understand it, a purely theoretical affair; I came to and was interested in her films and literary works as a student of philosophy. My enjoyment of (or more accurately, my struggle with) her works, even those in the strictly filmic medium, was interchangeable at that time with the academic philosophical labours I was already undergoing. This in turn had to do with the confluence of academic and more personal labours. As Emmanuel Levinas tells us, thinking ‘probably begins through traumatisms and gropings to which one does not even know how to give a verbal form: a separation, a violent scene, a sudden consciousness of the monotony of time. It is from the reading of books – not necessarily philosophical  – that these initial shocks become questions and problems, giving one to think’ (Levinas 1997: 21). Breillat’s ‘books’ – her books and her films, her interviews, her various ‘texts’ if you like – certainly ‘gave me to think’ certain traumatisms and gropings that were and are largely tied to persistent alienation in and from my own body – including but not limited to chronic discomfort and periodic acute pain caused by spinal malformation. Though I could never hope to intimately understand the joys and pains of an artist with such a different embodied and social experience than mine, and who in any case created her works for such expressly personal reasons, my own intimate encounters with finitude resonated in some sense with what I  saw and heard on the screen and could glean from her speech. In a very specific sense, I felt there was something in Breillat worth unpacking. But this feeling was complicated by the fact that her work struck me as acutely reactionary in certain respects that I will describe as the chapter unfolds. There was, in any case, an intuitive connection between Breillat and the articulation of what could not yet for me, qua ‘traumatism and groping’, be put into words. But this connection was – and is – far from being purely negative. I partly agree with Simon Critchley when he writes that ‘[p]‌hilosophy does not

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begin in an experience of wonder, as ancient tradition contends, but rather, I think, with the indeterminate but palpable sense that something desired has not been fulfilled, that a fantastic effort has failed’ (Critchley 2008: 1). In my view, the effort need not be ‘fantastic’ but merely of considerable importance to the one who is making the effort; think back here to Todd May’s construal of typical human vulnerability in terms of the disruption of central projects, which I discussed in the Introduction. But if Critchley is in general correct in asserting that ‘[p]hilosophy begins in disappointment’ (Critchley 2008: 1), he is also correct in stressing that philosophical activity need not end there. In his terms, philosophical activity is defined as a resistance to the temptation to forget or to close over the wound of disappointment. As such, ‘[p]hilosophical activity, by which I mean free movement of thought and critical reflection, is defined by militant resistance to nihilism’ (Critchley 2008: 2). I won’t dwell on Critchley’s compelling discussion of nihilism in its passive (self-denying) and active (world-hating) forms (Critchley 2008: 2–6), but I will point out that his terms are in one sense broadly compatible with my definition of philosophy as laid out in the Introduction: by engaging in the activity of the self-conscious mastery of being mastered, a person philosophizes. And by sticking with it, she becomes a philosopher. What most struck me in Breillat’s films were, therefore, both her philosophizing and her sticking with it. She demonstrated a tenacious activity of transcendence  – Vasse calls it dépassement, passing over and beyond to ‘a femininity that would almost be an inalienable being-in-itself ’ (Vasse 2004: 19, my translation). Such transcendence stands in an uneasy relation to the body-hating, world-denying, neo-Platonic modality of the transcendence, characteristic of ‘repressive French society’ (Bélot 2017: 56–66), that would so mark if not traumatize Breillat through her conservative upbringing and, to a great extent, her first forays into the broader French culture and its puritanism.1 It is nonetheless, through and through, permeated by this world-denying transcendence as transmitted through social norms; as Breillat admits, and

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notwithstanding the individualism of her quest, society interferes ‘absolutely’ with our intimacy (Breillat 2006: 108). Breillat appears to appropriate the movement of transcendence in a holistic, immanent and, on first impression, body-positive mode, welcoming the unconscious through the satisfaction of sexual desire so as to achieve oneself in a total or integral sense. To this extent, Breillat’s work is not about self-effacement in the pursuit of the transcendent because it thinks transcendence in an integral if not dialectical way; this allows interpreters such as Bélot to correctly emphasize the activity of empowerment and the establishment of personal identity as key themes (2017). As Claire Vassé interprets her in her preface to Corps amoureux, Breillat is involved in a progressively spiralling, infinite quest for the absolute. It is, however, a quest that aims to reunite ‘mind, body and heart’ rather than suppress and leave the body behind as per her conservative milieu (Breillat 2006:  9, my translation). The Hegelian cast of the interpretations drawn by Vasse and Vassé in particular is striking, but as I  will suggest in this chapter, they perhaps better describe the aspirations than the realities of Breillat’s project. There is a sense in which Breillat’s conception of subjectivity appears to involve her in a bad or spurious infinity,2 by closing her off from the mind, body and heart of the other in the pursuit of the integrity of her own. This point will be crucial in what follows, and I will dwell upon it later at some length. The infinitude of Breillat’s quest is, in any case, a function of its philosophical nature; there is something paradoxical in the idea of uniting or reuniting what is finite, yet Breillat persists.3 Thus, in the very same text where she defends an apparently body-positive and immanent vision of transcendence, Breillat admits that she doesn’t like her body inasmuch as it inhibits her and, qua sexualized object, draws the gazes of others (Breillat 2006: 64–5). Moreover, she expresses that the image of her ageing body is intolerable to her (Breillat 2006: 65). The same auteur who dives so deeply into the question of her identity in her works counsels the interviewer that one ‘should not look at oneself ’, at least not on the surface (Breillat 2006: 65).

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Breillat can, therefore, be approached as a thinker who is acutely aware of the pains of finitude, yet persists in seeking to master them. She plainly acknowledges her quixotic side as such, but maintains that the very gesture that ultimately amounts to nothing from a cosmic perspective can still be in and of itself transcendent. Or at least, she acknowledges that it points to humankind’s definition as a self-transcending animal:  ‘I believe that Man is made to lift himself up until the end of his life. With there maybe being, at the end, some things to understand’ (Breillat 2006: 134, my translation). Returning to aforementioned themes articulated by Critchley, Breillat is thus experimenting with the possibility of wonder in and through disappointment. Differently put, she seeks redemption in and through what her formative culture considers her ‘fallen’, embodied being. The juxtaposition of luminous purity and animality in one and the same character, or in one and the same action or scenario, is in fact a recurrent theme in her work. As the character Jeanne, a movie director who represents Breillat,4 declares in the film Sex Is Comedy: ‘I like purity. But the dunghill kind. Or it’s not purity, it’s dumb’ (Breillat 2002). And in a more general sense, Breillat maintains the inherent, evidently dialectical link between purity and pollution by pointing out that ‘Only idealists can be deprave themselves’ (Breillat 2006: 199, my translation). What she has in mind seems to be that the very possibility of depravity and abasement depends precisely upon a horizon of purity from which one can fall. Concomitantly, as per Jeanne’s comments and the general drift of her works, we can reasonably surmise that for Breillat ‘only the depraved can be idealists’ – or at least, can be idealists in some true sense. While the philosophical nature of Breillat’s work as I understand should now be clearer, it is worth noting that she makes numerous other comments to the effect that her project is inherently philosophical in my sense: for example, in a nod to the future anterior reminiscent of Lyotard, she holds that art answers questions that haven’t yet been clearly posed (Breillat 2006: 124): ‘we aren’t the masters of what we say through art; it comes on its own’ (Breillat 2006: 128, my

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translation). Breillat maintains, therefore, and in terms that are very close to my own: ‘It is our unconscious that is important and it is what, finally, we must master’ (Breillat 2006: 122, my translation). Breillat will even call philosophy by name, in a passage that links it in clear terms to her project: ‘to speak of love is a matter for philosophy [because love is] transcendent, it’s a very complicated concept’ (Breillat 2006: 55–6). Indeed, the picture of a serious philosopher-thinker emerges more and more clearly the more one unpacks Breillat. As such, discussions concerning the precise artistic and cultural status of her work  – that is, whether it is ‘pornographic’, or merely ‘erotic’, or if it is indeed either or both – may be interesting and fair, but are according to what evidence we have of Breillat’s self-interpretation as well as the arguments of her major interpreters largely beside the point. Importantly, she explicitly maintains that she is not even concerned with sexuality or sexual predilections and behaviours as such; rather, she is trying to think sexual identity.5 This she characterizes as our ‘mental constitution’, the subjective structure which ‘precedes by a great measure [our] sexuality and contains it’ (Breillat 2006: 106, my translation). Sexual identity is in other words a question of the subjectivity that transcends or encapsulates our sexual predilections and behaviours. Accordingly, Breillat may be profitably approached as a philosopher, specifically a thinker of subjectivity and, wherever it is a question of exploring identity formation, a thinker of the process of subjectivation. Depictions of sex are pervasive in her films and novels inasmuch as sexuality, subsumed by the broader category of sexual identity, is for epistemological and methodological reasons a privileged point of access to her underlying philosophical problematic. My own take on Breillat thus broadly respects while attempting to complicate, philosophically, her self-interpretation and those of her interpreters who are cited herein. The problem, as I see it, is that the better part of Breillat’s work, in focusing on sexual identity, is wedded to a phenomenological account of subjectivity that

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frames an erotic suspension of the ethical: effectively, a rendering inoperative of ethical norms or at the very least a subsumption of them by the erotic prerogative of self-transcendence. In the following I wish to both explain and trouble this putative suspension. I will first set out the problem and subsequently turn to an analysis of the novelistic screenplay Bad Love by way of illustration. But first, I must briefly cover another important methodological consideration. My primary sources are Breillat’s films, novels and interviews. How I handle the sources deserves some commentary; readers will find that I often discuss Breillat in terms of what I claim are the specific ideas she articulates through language, whether in her own voice or through the dialogue of her characters when it can be reasonably surmised that the latter are expressing her ideas. The operant standard for what is reasonable here assumes that we can identify certain ideas as Breillat’s when they are frequently repeated or developed across multiple works. Bélot draws attention to the fact that Breillat’s cinema makes direct or indirect references to other visual or written materials. Previous texts intersect with other texts to create a dialogue, a synergy between each other. The repetition and recycling of features from previous films define Breillat’s cinema. Self-referencing themes are present throughout Breillat’s work, as is the use of the same actors and actresses. (Bélot 2017: 34) While I  aim nowhere near an exhaustive account of the intertextuality in Breillat, I will cleave to Bélot’s reading (2017), according to which hers is an essentially intertextual cinema. Where characters iterate ideas that crop up frequently, in this view, it is reasonable to assign them an importance and to tentatively impute them to Breillat herself; the plausibility of this method is only strengthened by noting where Breillat also articulates or develops such ideas outside of her main works, that is, in lectures or in interviews. This allows us to glean from her oeuvre an overall drift or certain core themes on the basis of its component parts.

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Breillat herself, however, cautions against the kind approach to her work that would treat ‘ideas’ as discrete entities transmitted through language, capable of being ascribed to her in the way I have suggested. First, she suggests that her films form organic aesthetic wholes that resist interpretation by amorcelation into their linguistic components. Second, she explicitly downplays the significance and integrality of both the role of words in her films and of her literary output in general. Third and finally, we have seen above that Breillat’s understanding of subjectivity and the work of subjectivation privileges a notion of the unconscious (i.e. ‘sexual identity’). This would indicate a view of the artist’s intentions that would resist a simple mapping of aesthetic contents onto discrete, identifiable and clearly formulated thoughts. In Sex Is Comedy, the surrogate character Jeanne speaks to the first two points when she declares ‘to hell with what I write. Cinema is who plays it’ (Breillat 2002). And elsewhere: ‘Words are lies, bodies are truth. Now I have to invent the truth’ (Breillat 2002). Echoing Jeanne in her interview with Vassé, Breillat claims that there is ‘no corporeal reality’ prior to our inventing it, that is, prior to the projection of our bodies into fictions that they subsequently impose onto others (Breillat 2002: 188, my translation). Thus, even if bodies are in some sense truer than words, they are not so in a primordial sense. Breillat even goes so far as to paradoxically claim that ‘truth does not exist’ as such, or rather that it only exists in the ‘superior instance’ made possible by the creation of a film (Breillat 2002: 189, my translation). In another context, Breillat also claims that she has never been able to speak, in the normal sense – that is, that she can only speak and understand the language of cinema (Breillat 2009a: 116). This alone seems to privilege an imagistic rather than a linguistic approach to her craft. In the memoir Abus de faiblesse, Breillat considerably strengthens this impression when she tells us that I have always wanted to be a writer and a filmmaker. Filmmaker first and foremost, writer when I’m old and I have no more strength. The pretension

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has never left me . . . But I strongly think I’m nothing else but a filmmaker. As a woman, I was happy to be one even when the genre submitted me to an interrogation that men rarely demand of their own sex. But a filmmaker, there’s no doubt. My films belong to me. People like them, or don’t like them, but they are unique and coherent. Not a film here, a film there. This continuity is called an oeuvre . . . I don’t ‘make’ a film, I ‘am’ the film.’ (Breillat 2009a: 38–9, my translation) Furthermore, in her book of interviews with Vassé, Breillat grants cinema a special status over the other arts, therefore subsuming writing  – or at least, exceeding it in what it can accomplish vis-à-vis the other arts. Specifically, she comments that ‘cinema is the seventh art, but I think above all that it is the [meeting] place of all the other arts’ (Breillat 2006: 245, my translation). Moreover, cinema is ‘ideogrammatic’ in that in accumulates and dispenses sense immediately and simultaneously through the image, whereas (most nonpoetic, Western) writing does so only ‘horizontally’, through syntax (Breillat 2006: 251–2, my translation).6 This aesthetic superiority of the filmic medium – both on account of how it constitutes the meeting ground of the other arts and on account of the purported immediacy with which it communicates – would indicate for Breillat that ‘[i]‌f one makes a film out of a book, one should betray it. If one doesn’t betray it, if one [merely] illustrates it, it’s dreadful. It’s the same thing with the screenplay. One mustn’t revere one’s screenplay, it should be betrayed in making the film’ so that something new and important is born (Breillat 2006: 256, my translation). These passages, then, indicate at least two things:  first, that Breillat understands what is at stake in her film-work to be generally represented in each film as a whole (or rather, her film-work as a whole) rather than in the dialogue of a specific character or in any voice-off; second, that the films stand over and above (while evidently subsuming and retaining an intertextual relationship with) the screenplays, books, lectures and interviews as integral expressions

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of her subjectivity or, rather, of her subjective project of transcendence. But since, as I have indicated and will further discuss in what follows, Breillat’s take on the unconscious is largely constitutive of her account of subjectivity – and this is the third point – it would seem furthermore facile to speak of her ‘point of view’ or her ‘thoughts’ being expressed directly in the films, as though they were discrete entities, admitting of either expression or communication to an audience, and therefore analysis and debate. Examining the evidence of Breillat’s self-interpretation, it seems better to concur with Bélot and Frampton that ‘the film does not reproduce reality (of thoughts) but rather is “the projection of thoughts of the real” . . . the film is not a reproduction or representation but has its own “reality”, “its own world” ’ (Frampton quoted in Bélot 2017: 28). For these reasons, my disciplinary philosopher’s tendency of borrowing heavily from Breillat’s written or spoken words in order to analyse what she means might be interpreted as in some way missing the point or as betraying the spirit of her works. Taking Breillat and her major sympathetic interpreters at their word, this certainly seems fair. But one could respond in a variety of ways, for example, by noting that Breillat has given no reason in her works as to why betrayal in general, or of an artistic work in particular, is inherently a bad thing (rather, she seems frequently to point the other way on this, as in her above-cited comments on the desirability of self-betrayal, at the very least). However, I will stress the more substantial point that since the filmic image in and of itself does not and apparently cannot say what it (purportedly) shows (Wittgenstein 2000: 26), this theme of the priority of the image is everywhere, and perhaps by necessity, conveyed in language (whether that of the characters, or in voice-off, or in Breillat’s written and spoken interpretations of her works). Thus, two possibilities arise. First, there is the possibility that Breillat’s words or the words she deploys artistically are senseless, or lacking in a certain sense, at least as compared to the purported ideogrammatic force of her images (i.e. her words are only a ‘ladder’ to be discarded when one attains the truth or true sense of the filmic image, as per Wittgenstein’s metaphor – Wittgenstein

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2000: 74). But if, for example, we are to take literally Jeanne/Breillat’s claim that ‘Words are lies, bodies are truth’, then she is conveying the thought through words and is therefore lying to us by saying so. As such, we cannot take her words about words at their word, so to speak. Thus, in privileging the filmic image over the word, Breillat in a sense undermines any and all commentary on her works – including her own, which would mean that her self-interpretation is no more faithful to the works themselves than is my ‘betrayal’ cashed out herein. Second, and as I  am more favourably inclined to believe, there is the possibility that in general, Breillat’s words are quite meaningful and perhaps not at all senseless. In this case my linguistic emphasis herein is not actually much of an issue, though it deserves to be flagged so that I do not encourage a lopsided interpretation. Indeed, the thrust of Breillat’s willingness to engage in commentary and discussion would be to bear this possibility out. The interpreter is in any case under no obligation to reflect the auteur’s labours as a whole, or to force the discordant aspects of a body of work to fit; these would amount at any rate to contestable hermeneutical prejudices (Foucault 1980). My approach to Breillat will, therefore, be agonistic, in roughly Chantal Mouffe’s sense (Mouffe 2013):  sympathetic in recognizing a fundamental philosophical kinship, but otherwise combative and at times heretical where it is a question of details.

The problem While I have already laid out the broad ways in which Breillat’s body of work is philosophical, I have yet to examine in any detail how the work itself functions. In essence, I view the better part of Breillat’s output as a highly instructive but in some sense insufficient engagement with vulnerability as I have construed it. The problem as I see it is that her grasp of sexual identity, and the endless work of

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accessing it through sexuality, privileges a self-regarding conception of the erotic dimension of experience. Indeed, Breillat goes so far as to indicate that the drive for self-knowledge and self-preservation in the erotic encounter, both of which index the subject’s innate vulnerability, might entirely preclude any real relation to the other person. This is assuming, of course, that a ‘real relation’ implies an other-regarding stance, as well as trust and therefore an earnest, as opposed to simply tactical, exposure of one’s weaknesses. Breillat appears, in any case, to suspend the ethical by positing the primacy of a self-regarding eroticism. In keeping with my approach to Breillat, I  will begin my analysis of her philosophical activity by somewhat downplaying and deferring the topic of sex. I will begin, rather, by discussing sleep. Sleep is more intimate than sex, as Georges tells Barbara in Dirty Like an Angel: ‘Sleeping’s the most intimate thing of all’ (Breillat 1999a). For Breillat, sleep evokes the trust and the earnest exposure of weaknesses I  invoked above. It is for her ‘la démission de soimême’, that is, self-abandonment, in the sense that one quits a job or takes leave of a post (Breillat 2006: 41). In theory, this would appear to put sleeping at odds with her philosophical goals, to the extent that whenever one is asleep one is also maximally vulnerable (I will discuss sleep and dreaming further in Chapter 5). Moreover, in sleeping with someone, this vulnerability is inherently heightened. In this light, it is easy to understand Breillat’s distinction between having sex with someone and sleeping with them, and the importance to which she confers it. When we sleep with someone, we ‘belong’ to them (and they to us) much more than we do through any sexual act: I went eight years without falling in love with anyone, going to bed with men just like that, really like an amazon . . . What’s important though is to never sleep with them. When you sleep with someone you become attached. That’s my theory. Having sex with someone we don’t love is nothing, even if it’s something really complicit and intimate. But sleeping with someone is much more tricky . . . If people sleep together, their bodies belong to

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each other much more than during the physical act. (Breillat 2006: 211, my translation) The passage is significant in cleaving sex from love and explaining the difference by making reference to a quintessentially vulnerable state of the human animal. Sleep figures here as a theme that will not only come back to trouble Breillat, but also give her rich material for reflection. The hero of Breillat’s films and novels is, therefore, on this reading, someone who is aspirationally wide awake. This should be taken metaphorically of course, but it is also the case that central characters in Breillat tend literally to stay up all night through their labours of subjectivation (Vasse 2004: 156– 9). Breillat’s hero is invariably someone who is attempting to know and to consolidate her control on herself and her world and is, apparently, some expression of Breillat herself. More precisely, in Breillat’s works, one encounters an aspirationally selfidentical but ultimately uncertain or unstable phenomenological subject who strives to become totally lucid and to liberate herself from shame, through what often amounts to gruelling and masochistic sexual practices. That this process of liberation or self-attainment is difficult and painful is chalked up to existential themes of finitude and exposure to accident, as suggested in the Introduction. But though these general themes are present, and though Breillat devotes a great deal of attention to the specific trials of masculine subjectivity as well, she is explicit in describing the pain of her subjectivation as a function of the situation of women in general (especially in her more abstract, mythical tellings: Breillat 2003, 2008). This is on account of the sexist social structures that Breillat diagnoses with dark humour and scalding clarity, though at such a level of generality as to risk rendering her works irrelevant or even antagonistic to more marginalized populations of women.7 Indeed, noting the cis-gender, racial, national and, arguably, class homogeneity8 of the women depicted in the better part of Breillat’s films

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and novels, we can determine that her approach is far from intersectional (I will have occasion to discuss intersectionality at some length in connection with Lorde in Chapter 4). To the extent that Breillat is above all telling us about Breillat, such homogeneity is to be expected; it should be stressed, however, that she frequently reaches beyond herself in philosophical, quasipsychoanalytical, and mythical terms to speak for women as a class (Breillat 2003, 2008). Breillat’s work does have the virtue, in any case, of underscoring the fundamentally social as opposed to ontological nature of the linked problems of sexism and misogyny. Breillat, who is described as having been a tomboy in her youth (a ‘garçon manqué’; Clouzot 2004:  15) maintains that ‘[t]‌he only difference between a man and a woman is their sex organs’ (Breillat 1991, interview, my translation). Elsewhere, she maintains that ‘[t]heir brains are the same, they’re two human beings’ (Breillat 2006: 121, my translation). ‘Penis envy’ and the like are for Breillat problems of sociology, not (sexual) identity; they amount only to recognizing that if one had a penis, one would be treated differently (Breillat 2006:  85). On this point, Breillat recounts that I was very happy to be a girl. I felt like a complete human being, and when I looked at boys I said to myself: ‘The poor things, with that horrible thing between their legs, so cumbersome!’ . . . when people started to forbid me from doing things on account of the fact that I was a girl, I felt like I was in an unjust and totalitarian world, and I was obliged to go look between my legs to find out what it was to be a girl to verify whether, really, the girl’s sex that I had really had no link to my brain. (Breillat 2006: 85, my translation) It should be flagged that claims about sexual difference in terms of ‘sex organs’, ‘having the same brain’ and the like amount to a crude rendering of the issue, for two reasons. First, Breillat is making problematically normative assumptions about women and men when she speaks of the link between their bodies and their social identities. Despite understanding in some sense that

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gender is socially constructed, she ignores or excludes from analysis both an avalanche of research in queer theory and gender studies,9 as well as the very realities of transgender, non-binary and intersex persons. Second, Breillat’s comments about sexual difference depend upon empirical considerations that she does not flesh out. Perhaps, given her interests, her statement about ‘having the same brain’ should be interpreted in terms of a psychoanalytical or ‘sexual’ rather than strictly neurological order of causality (Malabou 2012:  1–2). This would be a plausible approach to her comments in this vein, since as mentioned earlier, she frequently employs the notion of the unconscious. Moreover, Breillat at times expresses a highly qualified and troubled sympathy for psychoanalysis (Breillat 2006: 128). According to such a reading of her comments, then, she would be giving voice to a view that primary psychic process is, considered in itself, non-sexed, non-gendered and polymorphously perverse; the organization of putatively ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ sexualities is only ever a function of secondary psychic elaboration, that is, repression and canalization through socialization (Freud 1991). In this view, women and men are libidinally identical, that is, indistinct at the deepest level of psychic analysis. But their sexual drives are canalized differently according both to biological differences (i.e. the function and distribution of erotogenic zones) and, above all, to sexist structures of social articulation. Note however the limits of this classical psychoanalytical model  – which Breillat ultimately rejects – in cashing out male and female. As Irigaray argues (1993b: 34–67), the sexuation of primary process in psychoanalysis is always explicitly male; prior to her full socialization, the sexuality of the little girl is supposedly ‘active’ and clitoral rather than ‘passive’ and vaginal, etc. This leads to a subtractive definition of the feminine: the feminine is lack (of a ‘real’ penis as opposed to a clitoris; of an achieved active libido; of a fully achieved castration complex, and therefore a fully achieved superego . . .).  These considerations render psychoanalysis in the strict sense a pursuit that is ‘for men and by men’ (Breillat 2006: 128, my translation). Breillat, therefore, speaks

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of film in particular as a ‘more modern and more vital’ form of psychoanalysis, in the loose sense that it gives voice to the unconscious (Breillat 2006). What this non-psychoanalytical positing of libidinal non-sexuation means – and as Breillat will repeatedly demonstrate in her films, novels and interviews – is that (biologically normative, cis-gender) women desire just as ardently as men but must navigate specific interlocking hurdles to accomplishing their enjoyment. These include not only physical realities like the powers and risks of pregnancy, but also and above all include external, structural systems of oppression, internalized shame and conservatism and the misogyny that is internalized by men in the process of their own socialization. Breillat defines (biologically normative, cis-gender) women positively, which is to say in terms of their powers of creating, giving birth, being and reflecting (Breillat 2006: 128). The issue for her is that sexism and misogyny have exploited these powers and held them in check. This imposed weakness is not, however, the end of the story. In another strikingly Hegelian moment – one which basically describes the dialectic of master and slave, in which the weakness of one party obliges them to engage in the essential activity that will lead to their historical overcoming of the stronger party (Hegel 1977: 111–119) – Breillat claims that ‘[i]‌n a certain way, access to the human passes by way of femininity. This would be the renunciation of force as a way of achieving consciousness. When one isn’t strong, one is obliged to be conscious. Women are therefore obliged to be conscious. But not [men]’ (Breillat 2006:  170, my translation). According to this view, women are the bearers of humanity – both literally, through childbirth and in terms of being the guarantors of the essentially human quality of consciousness – on account of their comparative vulnerability. This helps to explain why Breillat depicts the often violent struggle of the sexes as in some sense necessary. As she put it to Vassé, ‘I am founded in antagonism . . . I deny domination, but it has to be there so that I can deny it’ (Breillat 2006: 228, my translation). It is also notable that ‘la force des faibles’, the strength particular to the weak, is understood in

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terms of their sophistical ability to employ the ruse. It is notable that Breillat and Lyotard, in their own ways, have a tendency to cast women in a sophistical light (Lyotard 1976, 1992; Breillat 2006: 99). This mandatory project of survival and overcoming occasioned by one’s weakness is, however, simultaneously a struggle with the other and a struggle with oneself. Recall in this connection that for Breillat, ‘sexual identity’ precedes, transcends and recuperates sexuality qua set of predilections and behaviours. What interpreters have seen as the pervasive sexuality of Breillat’s corpus can thus be rooted in her claims that jouissance is a kind of access to oneself, and that the project of self-knowledge takes place ‘totally in the amorous rapport’ (Breillat 2006: 104–5, my translation). Again echoing Freud, Breillat maintains that every subject goes through a certain degree of necessary social ‘formatting’ with respect to her sexuality and subsequently seeks herself through an erotic process of ‘de-formatting’ (Breillat 2006: 104). Such is, for Breillat, the only genuinely ‘eternal project’, or project reaching or aspiring to eternity, that a human being can ever have (Breillat 2006: 105 – Breillat says ‘projet d’éternité’). Note that in one sense at least, Breillat is not exaggerating. If human life were not finite, this process of self-discovery would be literally eternal because it is inherently and insurmountably under-determined. I  have access to my sexual identity through my sexuality, which is always already an outcome of secondary elaboration or the social embeddedness of my being. Thus, I can never know if I  have achieved self-knowledge; I  never know who I  am, or if I  am self-identical because I  am caught up in a circle that constrains my epistemological possibilities. I seek myself endlessly, in other words, because I do so precisely in and through that part of myself that has been fashioned in myriad ways by the desires, norms and expectations of others; I  cannot jump over my own shadow. But whereas the term ‘others’ here denotes the inescapably and broadly social nature of sexuality, Breillat is also explicitly concerned with the particular other in the erotic encounter.

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In this context, the other is an unreliable, inconstant mirror who accomplishes as well as provisionally – but only ever provisionally – guarantees for me my hard-won self-image.10 Breillat’s search for sexual identity is eternal because the subject can only ever ground itself in what is reflected back by the amorous or desiring orientation of itself toward the other person. While explicitly couched in erotic terms, it is far from obvious that this view is in any respect ethical, in that it fails to consider equally or, what is perhaps necessary, go so far as to privilege the point of view of that other in the amorous encounter. This approach to Breillat should be of interest to those who, familiar with the explicitly philosophical work of Luce Irigaray and Emmanuel Levinas to take but two well-known examples, have tried to think the troubled boundary between the erotic and the ethical – and indeed, both could serve as points of reference herein.11 The idea is not to beg precise definitions of ‘erotic’ and ‘ethical’. Rather, it is to note that desire automatically raises the problem of whether, and if so to what extent, I  am failing to do justice or fulfil my obligation to the person who is the object of my desire. Even if, as Breillat seems to maintain, I require the other in order to approach a provisional selfidentity, it is not at all clear that this constitutes an alibi for eliding the question of ethics. In this connection, some interpreters have plainly stated that Breillat and her work are ‘autistic’. As Clouzot describes her, Breillat is ‘an autistic auteur. She only perceives what concerns her. From one work to another, she dwells upon the adventure of her desires, of her obsessions. She is deaf to the world, to the social, to the societal’ (Clouzot 2004: 11, my translation). I will strive to avoid reproducing loaded and ableist usages of terms like ‘deaf ’ and ‘autistic’ herein. Instead I will favour the term ‘solipsistic’ to describe Breillat’s work, in the sense that it invokes a mind working in isolation and is not fundamentally other-regarding. Such an approach is apposite according to Breillat’s own selfinterpretation: as she put it in 2009, ‘I have a hard time accepting that the other exists. In love particularly, I have a hard time. I only believe in myself. In an

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amorous relationship, in particular when it is very amorous, I no longer speak. I speak to the one I love in my head’ (Breillat 2009a: 35, my translation). To the extent then that it takes a solipsistic approach to sex and sexuality, Breillat’s work can be placed in a lineage of erotic writings that includes Sade and Bataille.12 Such an interpretation also sheds considerable light on why Breillat’s work can come across as regressive or reactionary. In particular, she often stages feminine self-mastery and transcendence as a masochistic journey in which ‘a violent taste for voluntary servitude’ finds expression through her characters (Vasse 2004: 23, my translation). This in turn risks nourishing an interpretation that she is simply mirroring the victim-blaming, misogynist attitudes that have immemorially vulnerabilized women and constrained their opportunities. She frequently flirts, for example, with the idea that the young girl’s ‘no’ is really a ‘yes’, being often enough a ruse to get what she desires while maintaining her innocence.13 As Breillat says about the film 36 fillette (Breillat 1987), ‘My theory was that young girls ask for their own rape because it is impossible to decide on one’s own to no longer be a young girl. What’s more, I  wanted to call the film:  36 fillette, or how young girls invite their own rape’ (Breillat 2006: 150, my translation). Breillat calls this viewpoint ‘subversive’ (Breillat 2006: 151). The most cursory glance at her society (and at most societies for that matter) shows it rather to be both hegemonic, in the form of rape culture, and corrosively disadvantageous to girls and women. In fact, Breillat’s artistic handling of rape (as distinguished from her comments to the effect that rape is indeed real)14 in general posits the woman who is raped as fundamentally responsible because she is supposedly in control (Vasse 2004: 123–8). The issues of rape, rape culture and rape apologism are unfortunately not purely theoretical or solely artistic issues in connection with Breillat. Recent comments of hers have spilled over into contemporary cultural politics and have put her squarely on the wrong side of history. In an episode of The Murmur Podcast (which was taken down 30 March 2018, shortly after the story

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broke), Breillat made a number of problematic remarks concerning #MeToo and its French equivalent #BalanceTonPorc (‘denounce your pig’; Nordine 2018). Notably for the discussion at hand, Breillat addresses Asia Argento’s accusation that disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein had raped her in the 1990s. Breillat says of Argento, who starred in her film The Last Mistress (2007b): To be very honest, I don’t believe Asia . . . I know her, and she was very, very young . . . If there’s anyone I don’t believe, it’s Asia Argento. As a person, Asia Argento is quite servile. I never asked her to kiss my feet, but she’s that kind of person. I don’t believe Asia. If there’s anyone capable of defending herself, who’s not timid about sex, who does it a lot, and has lots and lots of desire for both men and women, it’s her. So I don’t believe Asia. (Nordine 2018) This appears to be in keeping with Breillat’s artistic construction of the archetypal young girl as inviting her own rape. But her comments also have the wider, highly pernicious implication that if a woman ‘does it a lot, and has lots and lots of desire’, then she is in some sense un-rapeable. Breillat opines further that For Asia, it was obviously, let’s say, motivated by self-interest – it was a kind of semi-prostitution. Harvey Weinstein’s not the worst man there is; he’s not the most stupid, either. Asia may have been disappointed that she didn’t become a great Hollywood actress she might have been, but there were lots of other things: drugs, many other things. She feels bitter. Because bitterness, too, can lead people to denounce if you wanted to obtain something and you didn’t obtain it, if you feel humiliated. Quite honestly, I don’t like Asia. I think she’s a mercenary and a traitor. (Nordine 2018) Pressed on why she feels comfortable publically airing such slanderous and potentially libellous opinions about someone claiming to have been raped, moreover by someone in a position of power, Breillat says that ‘Since I’m

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an artist, I don’t have to be politically correct’ (Nordine 2018). This is worth unpacking. Claiming that one is ‘not politically correct’ is first of all a stance that has nearly lost all meaning, if it ever had any, since it is now used for example in political discourse as a defence of rule breaking, bad policy and incompetence (Weigel 2016). If Breillat’s comment does mean anything, it is most likely that she reserves the right to be a contrarian on account of her vocation. But note that in the longer quote above, Breillat is reproducing the ubiquitous trope of the resentful woman who falsely cries ‘rape’. This is hardly subversive, but rather expresses precisely the hegemonic values that are in the process of being unseated. Further, if being an artist is what gives Breillat her right to be ‘politically incorrect’, this would seem to imply that in her view, the artist is absolved of social responsibility – or at least, absolved of the social responsibility to justify those of her normatively loaded claims that she perceives as going against the grain of popular opinion. Breillat does indeed seem to think that the artist in her role as artist is not socially responsible in this precise sense. To this effect, and in the same Murmur Podcast interview where she attacks Argento, Breillat also claims that ‘I’m a feminist, but not in my films’ (Nordine 2018). This is why, in her view (apparently completely conflating cultural progressives and cultural conservatives), the people behind #MeToo are ‘the same people’ who attack her films (Nordine 2018). Breillat apparently wants it both ways then: she is a feminist who does not have to be a feminist or push a feminist line when she does not want to because she is also an artist. Breillat’s viewpoints as expressed in the interview at any rate beg a definition of feminism and would of course be at odds with a good many contemporary articulations thereof.15 In her blistering salvo on Twitter, Argento returned fire not only by alleging that Breillat was a cruel and sadistic director, but also precisely by calling out ‘these old school self proclaimed “feminists” and their lack of humanity in face of other women’s suffering’ (Cills 2018). Apparently, alluding also to a January letter to Le Monde criticizing #MeToo signed by Catherine Deneuve,

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Catherine Millet and others, Argento continues, ‘The French ones have proved to be the worst. Fin’ (Cills 2018). Holding Breillat to normative social and political standards might miss the point entirely of course, and it hasn’t always sat well with her interpreters. Clouzot has already alerted us to Breillat’s unconcern with anything outside of her own desires and obsessions, and as Vasse maintains, Breillat ‘remains indifferent to anything even vaguely resembling political responsibility . . . Catherine Breillat is above and beyond the political’ (Vasse 2004: 23, my translation). Notwithstanding Breillat’s career-long struggle against censorship and a variety of misogynist attitudes, let us not miss the opportunity to note that the pretension that one is apolitical or in any way beyond politics – even in a putatively ‘restricted’ area of one’s life, such as art – can amount in practice to giving objective support to the political status quo. Breillat even seems to open the door to admitting as much when she allows that art in and of itself is ‘completely political’  – though ultimately, and contrary to my view, she conflates ‘political’ with ‘subversive’ and further claims that one shouldn’t ‘do politics’ through art (Breillat 2006: 206).16 Whatever its political implications, the apparent female masochism at issue in Breillat’s artistic works figures, alongside specifically masculine strategies of self-preservation, as a strong form of self-assertion that appears to rule out communication, understanding or sympathy across the divide of sexual difference. In short, the erotic appears to suspend if not preclude the ethical, for above-noted reasons rooted in Breillat’s understanding of subjectivity. Thus, though she works in the orbit carved out by Simone de Beauvoir with regard to the feminine struggle to personally overcome the effects of sexist and ageist social structures, it is much less clear that she shares Beauvoir’s insistence or has the resources to articulate that true liberation for the individual woman entails the liberation of everyone through a radical transformation of those very structures (Beauvoir 1970, 2011). The comments on Argento etc. are not promising in this regard.

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In the next section, I will focus on Bad Love as an exemplary artefact in support of my interpretation. I  will also continue to draw frequently upon Vasse (who according to Breillat’s preface amounts to something of an official interpreter of her work up to 2004; Vasse 2004: 10–12) and the 2006 interview collection Corps amoureux, which is roughly contemporary with Bad Love and helps to clarify and substantiate many of the interpretive moves I will make herein. Doubtless a more thorough and wider-ranging approach to Breillat is desirable, but for reasons of scope, I believe it is sufficient to largely restrict myself to one of the artist’s works, the statement of a major interpreter, and a prime example of Breillat’s self-interpretation through the interview format. Readers should note, however, that Breillat’s post-2007 work is another story, and one that will be revisited in Chapter 5. Suffering a cerebral haemorrhage, hemiplegia and exploitation by the con man Christophe Rocancourt (who was slated to star in the film version of Bad Love, and to whom the book version is dedicated), Breillat tells her story in the book Abus de faiblesse and its movie adaptation. It is an open question whether her experience of radical weakness and vulnerability facilitated an opening to the ethical domain that one is at pains to find in her earlier works. It is my suspicion that this is indeed so, but the task at hand is limited to the unpacking of what I have called the erotic suspension of the ethical in Breillat’s corpus.

Bad Love: Title and philosophical distillation The title is Bad Love, and not ‘Bad Sex’. There is a distinction operant here between the corporeal means of self-transcendence and the encounter with the other as pointing towards a transcendent ‘ideal’ of love that cannot be brought home and domesticated (Breillat 2006: 100). Bad Love is midway between a screenplay and a novel; at the time of writing, it had not been filmed due in no small part to the aforementioned

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turmoil which erupted in Breillat’s life when she sought to cast known con man Christophe Rocancourt as its leading man (Breillat 2009a). As such, Breillat frames the action from the omniscient narrator’s perspective at the outset of the book before alternating the third-person narrative voice with the firstperson voices of her two protagonists. Breillat’s opening, omniscient-voiced philosophical distillation of the story goes as follows: ‘Il est des amours parfaits, il est des amours mauvais – mais dans le fond c’est toujours la même chose qui arrive . . . Un déni totale de soi fait de l’appropriation de l’autre, il est normal que le chemin inverse se fasse, mais parfois la réappropriation de soi-même ne peut passer que par l’élimination de l’autre . . .’ (Breillat 2007: 9). Roughly rendered in English, Breillat is telling us that it is always the same in love, whether that love is ‘perfect’ or ‘bad’; that, faced with the total denial of myself through the other’s appropriation of me, it is normal that the reverse movement should also occur – that is, it is normal that I assert myself and appropriate the other in turn so as to preserve and thereby save myself. But, she goes on, there are cases in which my self-preservation cannot pass otherwise than through the elimination of the other. Put more simply, Breillat is claiming that there are cases of love in which the absolute defeat, even the literal murder of the beloved is a necessary condition for saving oneself. Her understanding along these lines is gendered, in the sense that it is the woman who defeats, and it is the man who literally kills.17 Elsewhere she makes an autobiographical point which both bears this vision out and complicates its gendered aspect stating that ‘only the death penalty prevented me from killing certain lovers’ who had left her hopeless and desolate (Breillat 2006: 102–3).18 Taking her at her word, the murderous feelings Breillat refers to originated precisely in the loss of a vital illusion of herself; when I  love someone, what I  love in him is not actually him, but rather that part of him that relates or pertains to myself (Breillat 2006). Hence, to love someone is not unlike loving a reflection of oneself in a mirror. As Breillat put it,

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We’re really in the ‘I think, therefore I am’. So the loss of illusion amounts to no longer being, to no longer being able to conceive of oneself and produce oneself as a human person, since the other has taken what we were away with him. Hence the suicidal temptation, the impression that it is no longer possible to live. (Breillat 2006: 103, my translation) But the depressive and suicidal impulse is only one side of the coin; one way to maintain a kind of minimal control over myself is to throw away or even break the very mirror that contains my cherished reflection, before it can ever be taken away from me. It is not just a question here of loving-and-leaving. In the most extreme cases, the subject pre-empts a loss of illusion through the literal destruction of the other. Pre-emptive murder is the obverse, perhaps even an inner truth, of the broken heart. The title Bad Love (in English in the original) no doubt refers to such worstcase erotic scenarios. Note, however, the full meaning and severity of what Breillat has communicated:  that even in the best-case scenario, love always entails the risk that I lose myself in and through the activity of trying to find myself. Hence, while the tale of murder in Bad Love is an extreme, it distils what is for Breillat a basic truth:  that in love, the only way to find and to preserve myself is at the other’s expense.19 If then, as Breillat maintains, the search for self-knowledge takes place entirely in the amorous encounter, this suggests that the Delphic command to ‘know thyself ’ is at its core an invitation to violence.

Bad Love: A sterile dialectic of desire Bad Love illustrates how two lovers, on account of the self-regarding nature of eroticism, might reach such a murderous conclusion. As Breillat recounts in Abus de faiblesse, in the context of explaining the drift of the film to Christophe

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Rocancourt, it is more specifically about how ‘[m]‌ost women are the authors of their own murder in a crime of passion, because they can be stronger in becoming victims’ (Breillat 2009a: 22, my translation). Note for now that we have passed from the theme of girls and women inviting their own rape to the similar one of women in love inviting their own murder. In the text, Vivian Parker is an elegant, beautiful and vain movie star possessed of a ‘mysterious and terrifying wild purity’ (Breillat 2007:  12, my translation). Vivian never makes an effort with others, we are told, because she does not even understand herself (Breillat 2007: 36). Note how she has a full name, which befits her public persona and is suggestive of the movie theatre marquis. The character Louis, by contrast, is referred to only by his first name and assumes a peasant, everyman cast. He is worldly, poor, something of a hustler, considering himself a ‘white Chinese’ whose ‘real’ language, the one he feels most at home in, is Mandarin (Breillat 2007: 14).20 The story tracks the erotic suspension of the ethical as it takes place on both sides of the amorous divide. Note that this omniscient framing is in itself already suggestive of an interest in or at least an awareness of the philosophical if not properly ethical dimension of the amorous encounter. But as I will show, it ends in a sterile dialectic of desire. Louis encounters Vivian Parker at an outdoor café one morning while she is attending the Toronto International Film Festival as a judge. Recognizing her through her celebrity status, he gives her his phone number and invites her to a Chinese film in an act of boldness, seeking to allow ‘the unknown to enter his life’ (Breillat 2007: 20, my translation). Vivian Parker is intrigued by Louis’s vulgarity and accepts on a whim of ‘reverse snobbism’ (Breillat 2007: 22, my translation). Louis subsequently brings Vivian Parker to Niagara Falls. There we see for the first time not only the masochistic cast of her subjectivity, but also – and what is perhaps the same thing – the depth of her power. Faced with the great force of the falls, she expresses a sublime mix of terror and pleasure in

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perceiving how small she is (Breillat 2007: 2). She feels vertigo, the perverse desire to jump into the water and be destroyed. She notes that she has always been fascinated by that which is infinitely more powerful and terrible than her – but that nothing is more dangerous to her than she is to herself (Breillat 2007: 41). She also notes that there has always, without her having to ask, been a man there to hold her steady and to save her from herself (Breillat 2007: 37). Louis is not affected by the falls in the same way, but he is wary that Vivian Parker is attempting to trap him and lead him to ‘an even more terrible abyss’ by this performance of her weakness (Breillat 2007:  38–9, my translation). Paradoxically then, Vivian Parker is putting Louis on the defensive at the very moment that she seems to be showing her vulnerability. In this connection, after the trip to the falls, she lets Louis pay the exorbitant cab fare, knowing it will financially ruin him and though it would be nothing for her to pay it. She takes a ‘perverse pleasure’ in this, finding it ‘reassuring’ when others pay for her (Breillat 2007: 44). The night ends outside her hotel; Louis gives Vivian Parker his card, and the two part ways. After several months elapse, Louis contacts Vivian Parker in Paris, where she lives. She has kept his card out, visible. Louis seduces Vivian Parker by ingratiating himself with her adolescent son; he remains jealous, however, that her ex-husband is still a large presence in her life, involved as he is in her career. When the relationship turns sexual, we see Breillat’s philosophy of subjectivity played out on her understanding of the masculine and feminine poles. Louis sees himself as trying to break through Vivian Parker’s solipsism, to force her to totally abandon herself and thereby discover herself (Breillat 2007: 72–3).21 He expresses an incongruous vision of the lovers as a ‘double hemiplegic being’, each escaping the useless part of himself or herself to create something new with the other (Breillat 2007: 78, my translation). It appears, however, that this is a utopian ideal; Louis’s attempts to bring Vivian Parker into touch with herself are all about him, being precisely the obverse of her

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erotic solipsism. She confesses that ‘even in love, the other doesn’t interest me! . . . It’s the idea that I make of myself that I try to perceive . . .’ (Breillat 2007: 109, my translation). Thus, while she only explores her idea of herself by giving herself over to the other’s control, Louis only explores his idea of himself through his pretention that he is capable of mastering the other and controlling her. This suggests a crude sexual dispositif of penetration, wherein Vivian Parker retreats into voluptuousness and Louis pursues her literally into the folds of her body while fretting about his performance. As Louis and Vivian Parker’s passion becomes more intense, and their anxiety about the sustainability of their relationship becomes more pronounced, their sex becomes more aggressive and takes on violent undertones (with Louis acting the aggressor while Vivian Parker expresses her consent, but only after the fact). The climax of the story occurs when, after a string of arguments prompted by separation anxiety, Louis becomes physically violent. He smashes Vivian Parker’s head against the bathroom tile. In the moment immediately following, he cannot comprehend what he has done; she leaves the room and he follows her. He wants to ask forgiveness but she is defiant, striking him. He punches her back repeatedly until, having become aware of how badly he has injured her, he lays her down gently and weeps. She tells him with both pride and love in her voice that ‘It doesn’t hurt, in any case’ (Breillat 2007: 144, my translation). The two lay tenderly entwined ‘like two eternal lovers . . . happy together’ (Breillat 2007, my translation). The next morning,22 Vivian Parker is dead; again Louis weeps. The police lead him away in a storm of camera flashes as the body is taken away under a white sheet. The arc of the story is evidently quick and brutal. The key thing to retain is that, paradoxically, both the violence of the book’s conclusion and the dialectic leading up to it are staged by Breillat as in some sense reflective of an equal balance of power. Vivian Parker expresses her will through the elicitation of Louis’s violence, making him lose himself irretrievably by bringing him to the point where he demonstrates his inadequacy with respect to the object

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of his desire. And Louis, for his part, literally kills Vivian and thereby causes her to lose herself in an even more radical way. The case could even be made that in Breillat’s framing, Vivian is ultimately the victor despite her death, inasmuch as she has positioned Louis into a reactive role and led him to the fatal conclusion. We must tread carefully here, noting the danger of framing intimate partner violence in these terms. The previously discussed impression that Breillat’s work is regressive or reactionary is in this case apposite; whatever her intentions in telling the story, she seems to posit the victim of an all-toocommon and terrifying form of violence as being at least equal in power to the abuser, if not having finally proven to have been the dominant party. We must assert that the game that Vivian Parker seems to be playing cannot be generalized to the victims of intimate partner abuse. Giving Breillat the benefit of the doubt on this point – which is admittedly very difficult given her precedent comments on girls both desiring and soliciting their own rape and about men being made for killing – we might chalk up the violent conclusion to Bad Love as nothing but an overblown and inappropriate metaphor. The point to retain from the book would be that, as Breillat depicts it, both protagonists enact the ruination of the other by way of their own instinct for self-preservation. That neither deployment of the strategy actually leads to self-preservation, let  alone to the sublation of the amorous encounter by an accession to the ethical, renders Breillat’s dialectic at best suggestive of a larger ethical problematic, but doubly sterile. Differently put, the dialectic in play is irremediably negative, resulting neither in the selfknowledge promised by erotic desire, nor in an accession to a sustainable ethical relation with the other person. In the amorous encounter I seek myself but I  also court the risk of losing myself; I  retain myself only at the other’s expense. But I have lost something of myself because in returning to myself I  destroy the other through whom I  had become, or was in the process of becoming, self-identical. In Bad Love, the impression is that we are in the primordial scene of encounter with the other sketched out by Hegel in the

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Phenomenology of Spirit – only there is no question of a positive recuperation by means of a master–slave dialectic (Hegel 1977: 111–19). Simply, in Breillat’s universe, two masters meet and destroy themselves in destroying each other. They might, at best, attain a fleeting insight into the sterility of their struggle and of an ethical horizon that retreats from them forever in the death of the masochistic partner. In sum, the amorous dialectic herein described – whether it reaches such murderous proportions or not  – has no real teeth; the subject cannot find purchase on the other. Breillat makes a striking claim in Corps amoureux to this effect: that in love, the beloved is a ‘used being’ (un être utilisé) who can use you in return. She adds that ‘[i]‌n this moment, there is surely something happening between the two . . . but in parallel’ (Breillat 2006: 103, my translation and italics). The lovers are together, but apart. Such a vision can only fatally and tragically entrench the ethic of self-preservation that is Breillat’s last recourse.23 Note, however, that there is a suggestion of mutual solicitude and care opened up after the worst of the violence has subsided and there no longer appears to be any question of ardent desire. While Vivian Parker is dying, she and Louis lay together until morning in tenderness. But this is an exceptionally bleak and altogether unacceptable conclusion. It suggests that the ethical only emerges, if at all, after the utter, terminal and mutual ruination of the two subjects and their projects. It emerges only, that is, as a lost possibility.

Toward the ethical If I have been successful, then this chapter has achieved three aims. First, I will have demonstrated the plausibility of a philosophical approach to Breillat as I understand it, foregrounding the theme of vulnerability and the activity of the self-conscious mastery of being mastered.

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Second, and more particularly, the notion of an erotic suspension of the ethical should now stand as a plausible interpretive key to Breillat’s corpus – or, at a minimum, to the primary sources I have posited as exemplary: Bad Love and Corps amoureux. It should now be clear how Breillat’s particular philosophy of subjectivity, which is phenomenological in inspiration but not fundamentally other-regarding, contributes in leading her to this suspension and thereby fosters a pernicious and reactionary image:  that of the abused intimate partner who is in an equal position of power and who in some sense asks for the violence that is perpetrated against her. Third and finally, however, I also hope to have drawn lessons from Breillat regarding existential or pre-disciplinary philosophy in general. Having posited that philosophy is the activity of the self-conscious mastery of being mastered, I began by making the case for her pertinence and even her exemplary status. But even while admiring her for her philosophical tenacity, we can also distil two extremes of a spectrum of philosophical error from Breillat’s corpus. First, the apparent slow progression towards self-knowledge that takes place in her films may actually be interpreted as a bad infinity. Second, the refusal to be bested by the lover may take a murderous (or, in a sense, suicidal) turn, thus bringing development to a ruinous end. The two extremes really boil down to one basic error: suspension of the ethical, which is to say the refusal, while working towards self-mastery, to insist upon the other’s primacy – or even, at a minimum, her equal importance. As indicated earlier, the next step of the argument regarding Breillat will be to explore how her illness, exacerbated weakness and subsequent events may have altered and enriched her point of view. It is my contention, to be explored later on in the book, that a minimal opening to the demands of the ethical thereafter occurs. If correct, this would retrospectively cast Bad Love as the culmination of a bleak vision of personal struggle which, while placing Breillat in the widest orbit of Beauvoir’s feminism, leaves the ineluctably related question of solidarity with the oppressed and broader social transformation in

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abeyance. First, however, I  will take a detour through two other exemplary ‘non-philosophers’ whose work also knocks on the door of the discipline. Through their variously inflected recognitions of personal dependence and the importance of social solidarity, Didion and Lorde will immeasurably enrich our picture of vulnerability and set the stage for an assessment of what might constitute at least the beginnings of an ethical turn in Breillat.

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3 Joan Didion: Becoming frail

It might seem counterintuitive to include Joan Didion in a book on vulnerability. Her name typically evokes hardness, coolness or aloofness. As a novelist, journalist and essayist, Didion has unflinchingly witnessed the anomie and decomposition of post-war American society, the abjection of neocolonial states struggling under American interests and the intimate details of her own grief and mourning. It turns out, however, that precisely because of her ethos of hardness and how it evolves, Didion proves an invaluable teacher about vulnerability. To this end, Deborah Nelson has masterfully distilled the shifts in Didion’s ethic as a writer. In general, Didion’s ethic has been one of looking evil and horror plainly in the face  – drawing moral lessons not only from banal everyday wickedness, but also from piles of murdered bodies in El Salvador and the fate of the Donner–Reed party, for instance – and, in the interest of fidelity to the truth, Didion has not spared her reader’s or her own feelings in the telling (Nelson 2017: 154–5). What shifts for Nelson is above all Didion’s relation to the question of self-pity, which also entails a difference of inflection in her approach to the question of memory. For the writer of the early essay ‘On SelfRespect’ (Didion 2006: 109–13), self-pity – her own and that of others – was something of an ethical impossibility, a cardinal sin. Barring certain moments where she or some composite including herself might be speaking through her

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fictional protagonists (1977: 115–17), it appeared to remain so through much of her literary career. In the end, it was her grief over the deaths of her husband and daughter that forced Didion to finally confront the question of self-pity. As she relates in her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, ‘We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all’ (Didion 2005: 198). Glancing back over her writings from this belated encounter with self-pity, we see that Didion has always been the bearer of important lessons on vulnerability and its dialectic with strength. While Nelson has compellingly suggested hardness and vulnerability as interpretive keys to Didion’s work in general, and while I  will later provide a concise overview of the theme of vulnerability in Didion to advance my interpretation, my focus in this chapter will be narrower. I  am primarily interested in the philosophical aspects of the late memoir Blue Nights (2011). The latter is a lucid memoir of grief woven around the death of Didion’s adult daughter Quintana Roo Dunn. It may be considered a companion to her 2005 memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, which recounts the circumstances surrounding the sudden death of her husband John Dunne (during a period in which Quintana was also acutely ill). However, Blue Nights also stands on its own with respect to its philosophical aspects. In particular, the memoir offers powerful insights into the subjective experience of Didion’s newfound vulnerability or, as she refers to it throughout the text, the ‘frailty’ she discovers in herself upon Quintana’s passing. In this chapter, I will unpack and analyse the temporal aspects of the subjective vulnerability described by Didion, with a view to making some tentative conclusions of relevance to philosophical anthropology  – at least where it is a question of cognitively typical adult persons – and the ethics of memory.

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More specifically, I  will organize my reading of Didion’s admittedly disjointed if not traumatized narrative around two key, connected lessons that I perceive. First, Didion shows how even in the absence of any obvious physical or cognitive pathology, or any deficit of social functioning, vulnerability as a lived experience may befall a person according to something resembling the Freudian mechanism of Nachträglichkeit or deferred action. Second, Didion shows how one may respond to the discovery of one’s vulnerability through a past-preserving and future-regarding retraction or diminution of style, both in broad and more restricted senses of the term; one diminishes one’s style, in her telling, in response to the perceived precarity of one’s substance. Or, to put this last point differently: subjective vulnerability may be conceived as the feeling which occurs when one’s ontological responsibility for others through memory is tied to the ontic precarity of one’s own life – and this, for Didion, entails an urgent winnowing down of both her writing and of her everyday living to a zero-degree of style. Thus, from questions of time, we move in Didion’s memoir to questions of responsibility and therefore of ethics, broadly construed. Both of these themes dovetail with finitude and exposure to accident, which are the keystones of vulnerability as I  conceive it herein. Moreover, the ethics which emerges in Didion’s writing self-consciously bears the impossible burden of gathering vulnerable others to oneself, for the ultimately futile task of preserving them and their memory. Thus, despite sharing an essentially violent and precarious vision of the world in which individual struggle is paramount, Didion departs from Breillat fundamentally, in the other-directedness of her philosophical activity. Before proceeding, a note of methodological caution is in order. Blue Nights is admittedly a deeply personal book, and it bears all the marks of its author’s idiosyncrasies. Moreover, Didion is well known and widely appreciated as a literary stylist, even in her journalistic or essay writing; notably, her style was already strikingly spare prior to the memoirs on grief. Thus, even if we assume

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that the memoir is overall faithful to her experiences of the events described, or that the posture of stylistically impoverished communication she adopts truthfully reflects either a genuine aesthetic shift or her actual mental states, it might be fairly questioned to what extent Blue Nights may be mined for more general insight into the subjective vulnerability of cognitively typical persons. My response is to treat it in the manner one might undertake of a natural history of grief, noting its most striking features in an additive (or ‘anthro-paralogical’) way. Ultimately, to me it is sufficient that the memoir be an occasion for reflection, opening onto anthropological and ethical questions of wider import. Such an apparently dispassionate approach can perhaps be forgiven, since is not out of keeping with Didion’s own.

The event of frailty Like any human being, Didion has been more or less objectively vulnerable from before the moment of her birth, and she will be until the moment of her death. As described in the Introduction, dependence on others, finitude and exposure to accident are anthropological constants. It is important to emphasize, however, that by Didion’s account, her frailty was not something she experienced as constant or as fundamental to her being; as Blue Nights attests, it befalls her as a kind of subjective precipitate and is organized in a specific and punctuated temporality. This is not to say that Didion was ever deluded concerning her own objective frailty. The topic of her very slight frame, for example, crops up in her essays and has been frequently noted by people close to her.1 She simply could not have been unaware of the ways in which she was finite and vulnerable, as she demonstrates for example when discussing her various ailments (Didion 2006:  211). But even here, Didion often tended to render her vulnerability for others (i.e. in the eyes of others) as a kind of strength

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in herself. Consider what she says in a notable passage from the preface of Slouching Towards Bethlehem: I am bad at interviewing people . . . My only advantage as a reporter is that I  am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out. (Didion 2006: 6–7, emphasis in the original) Didion’s claims here are significant in that they link back to Breillat through the theme of ‘la force des faibles’, that is, the strength of the weak. In the previous chapter, my complaint against Breillat amounted to the claim that weakness cannot even exist in her universe, since it is either crushed by strength, or it overcomes the strong through the dialectical development of self-consciousness and the deployment of sophistical ruses. A complaint along similar lines could be levelled at Didion, who in her more libertarian moments chalks feminists’ claims of injury, disadvantage and vulnerability up to so much immaturity (Didion 2006: 257–64). As the centrality of her recurrent but developing reference to the Donner–Reed Party suggests (120–4), for at least part of her career, Didion’s universe is also, to some extent, one in which there are only the strong – whose group includes the wily, even if they be slight of frame – and the cannibalized dead. Ultimately, then, the truth of her frailty is something Didion only expressly assumes as her own in the wake of Quintana’s death, and thus it only gains a robust subjective dimension relatively late in her life. Both the belatedness and the manner of discovery are what interest me here. Effectively, Didion is first of all objectively vulnerable for most of her life, without there being any obvious, straightforward subjective implications by her reckoning (other, perhaps, than the implication that she must cultivate personal strength and can do so precisely through how her frailty is perceived by others). Second, when her

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vulnerability acquires a subjective dimension, she feels it before she is able to understand and articulate it. There is, in other words, a time lag between the affect of frailty or ‘being-vulnerable’ on one hand and conceptual knowledge on the other, at the heart of Didion’s experience of grief. This suggests that the subjective structure of vulnerability can be affective before it is cognitive or before it is conscious in a narrower sense of the term. Lyotard’s gloss on the Freudian mechanism of Nachträglichkeit – usually rendered awkwardly as ‘après-coup’, ‘double-blow’, ‘deferred action’ or, more strangely, ‘afterwardsness’ – sheds light on what Didion is describing. (I will favour the intuitive English translation ‘deferred action’ in what follows.) Lyotard invites us to imagine the introduction of inert, harmless particles into a particular mind, conceived as per Freudian metapsychology along the lines of a physical, dynamical, topographical system (i.e. what Lyotard calls ‘the physical metaphor’; Lyotard 1990: 62). In such a scenario, ‘the first blow . . . strikes the apparatus without observable internal effect, without affecting it. It is a shock without affect’ (Lyotard 1990: 15–16). Then, at a later date, ‘the energy dispersed in the affective cloud condenses, gets organized, brings on an action, commands a flight without a “real” motive’ (Lyotard 1990: 16). With the ‘second blow, there takes place an affect without shock: I buy something in a store, anxiety crushes me, I  flee, but nothing really happened’ (Lyotard 1990: 16). Because the condition of buying something in a store is not in and of itself sufficient to account for the flight, this flight ‘informs consciousness that there is something, without being able to tell what it is’ (Lyotard 1990, emphasis in the original). There is, in other words, a gap between the ‘il y a’ (‘the there is’) and the ‘ce qu’il y a’ (‘the what there is’). On such a model, as far as the psychoanalytic patient and her analyst are concerned, there is only an affect/effect, such as anxiety, accompanied by a loss of memory – or more accurately, a gulf or blank in which nothing was recorded that could have been remembered in the first place. That there

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was an initial cause is assumed in the very positing of the mechanism; but if the mechanism works as it should, then the initial cause in the sequence is untraceable temporally, or in its specificity; what it is remains opaque. There is a failure of communication here, not to mention an apparent suspension or violation of chronological time (Lyotard 1990:  16; 2000:  69). And yet, in the ‘working through’ (Durcharbeitung; Lyotard 1988b: 26) of the talking cure, wherein one attempts the impossible ‘chronologization’ of the first blow which occurred outside of any diachrony (Lyotard 1990:  16), one does not thereby abandon the search. In the practice of psychoanalytic listening and testimony, one bears witness to the fact that something must have occurred, and this amounts at least to listening to a timbre, in an interminable process of working through (Lyotard 1990: 20). Going back to Didion, we note that something resembling this mechanism – of an effect without an apparent cause – is at play in the account of her grieving Quintana. The example of fleeing a store, which Lyotard takes from Freud’s ‘Emma’ case study, shows how mundane and seemingly banal, benevolent circumstances may cause panic and even suggest the presence of a hidden malevolence. It is mirrored nicely by Didion’s account of suddenly feeling vulnerable while sitting on a folding chair, watching the rehearsal of a Broadway musical. As she relates (Didion 2011: 109–10), I sit on a folding metal chair. Behind me I hear voices I recognize . . . but I feel too uncertain to turn around . . . As I sit on the folding metal chair I begin to fear getting up. As the finale approaches, I experience outright panic . . . What if I stand up from this folding chair in this rehearsal room on West Forty-second Street and collapse, fall to the floor, the folding metal chair collapsing with me? Or what if – (Another series of dire possibilities occurs to me, this series even more alarming than the last –) and Didion here links the feeling of vulnerability to the possibility of a complete cognitive collapse.

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Didion knows that there is more to her fear than simply falling from a chair, but she is not sure how to explain it. The lacuna is expressed as follows: ‘When I tell you that I am afraid to get up from a folding chair in a rehearsal room on West Forty-second Street, of what am I really afraid?’ (Didion 2011: 117). It is important to note in this connection that Didion later experienced a literal blackout and a fall, an episode that her doctor diagnosed as syncope. But here again her account mirrors the mechanism of deferred action in several respects. First of all, the subjective effect of the fall was profound and seemingly out of all proportion with the putative physical cause: as Didion tells it, the episode ‘altered my view of my own possibilities, shortened, as it were, the horizon’ (Didion 2011: 142). In the same vein, regarding the effect of two nights of ‘relatively undemanding hospitalization’ necessitated by her blackout, she claims that ‘demoralization’, to use a rather strong term, ‘happens in the instant’ (Didion 2011: 146). And Didion further recounts how, following her episode of syncope, a new MRI, a new MRA, a new ultrasound and a full-body PET scan turn up nothing. Significantly, she links this medical non-discovery to her subjective frailty: ‘Surprisingly, there were no abnormalities to explain why I felt as frail as I did. Surprisingly, there were no abnormalities to tell me why I was afraid to get up from a folding chair in a rehearsal room on West Forty-second street’ (Didion 2011:  148). To express the uncanniness of her experience, the seeming failure to link cause and effect, she gives an evocative metaphor from another area of medicine: ‘ “It doesn’t present as pain”, I once heard an oncological surgeon say of cancer’ (Didion 2011: 149). In sum, even factoring in her episode of syncope and the subsequent battery of tests, the precise cause of Didion’s subjective frailty remains mysterious to her. It requires a certain labour – quite plausibly, the labour of writing Blue Nights itself – until, at the book’s conclusion, she recovers the meaning of her frailty by linking it explicitly to Quintana’s death. This suggests perhaps that the psychoanalytic understanding of deferred action should not be literally and strictly applied to Didion’s case. If the mechanism works as it should, the

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process of working through will be endless – in the sense that philosophy in general is endless. Didion, however, appears to believe that she has discovered the meaning of her subjective frailty. What keeps the book open-ended and ultimately philosophical, however, is the way in which this discovery leads us from questions of philosophical anthropology to questions about the meaning or even the possibility of an ethics of memory. Assuming that Didion finally understands her subjective frailty, there is always the possibility that ‘To look for “reasons” is beside the point’ (Didion 1970: 3). To quote Maria in Play It as It Lays, ‘I have trouble with as it was. I mean it leads nowhere’ (Didion 1970: 7). Didion thus evokes the possibility of a discovery or a settling of accounts that is actually neither, in the sense that it leaves one essentially where one started. I  am confident the reader will recognize at this point why of all Didion’s writings, I am drawn to Blue Nights as an exemplary philosophical foray, in the existential sense. Notwithstanding the philosophical importance of Blue Nights as I  understand it, in the interest of better grasping its anthropological and ethical dimensions, I will backtrack a bit and will reiterate here that Didion’s account of her apparently belated, subjective experience of frailty is not her first encounter with the theme of vulnerability and its temporal dimensions.2 Nor, for that matter, is the memoir her first engagement in the inherently impossible struggle to overcome it. If Blue Nights is in some sense exemplary, it also helps us to understand to some extent what is going on in Didion’s literary output even decades prior to its appearance. A quick look back will help us to better understand and to situate the philosophical undercurrents of Blue Nights with respect to Didion’s oeuvre. The theme of toughness, as Nelson (2017) rightly argues, orients Didion (and interpretations of Didion) both stylistically and in terms of her arguments from an early date. A Goldwater Republican in her youth (Didion 2006: 735– 6), the early Didion evinces a pretension or ideal of personal responsibility and the overcoming of vulnerability which to some extent, and for a considerable

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time, informs both her politics and her essays qua political interventions. It is this point of view that allows her to chastise as immature those who refuse to ‘accept the universe’ (Didion 2006:  258). For example, Didion excoriates of the women’s movement of the 1970s on account of its cult of the ‘dolorous phantasm’ everywoman who is ‘everyone’s victim but her own’ (Didion 2006:  261). It is thus clear why the aforementioned and quintessentially Western, quintessentially Californian trope of the fate of the Donner–Reed Party plays a life-long and arguably central role in her self-understanding. But Didion will nuance her relationship to this trope as she ages. In Where I Was From, a collection of essays wherein she tries to come to grips with her home state of California, Didion centres the dictum of Donner Party survivor Virginia Reed:  ‘Remember, never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can’ (Didion 2006: 999). But as Didion put it in the same text, ‘When you jettison others as not to be “caught by winter in the Sierra Nevada Mountains”, do you not deserve to be caught? When you survive at the cost of [the children who are left behind], do you survive at all?’ (Didion 2006: 974). It is also worth reiterating how throughout her career, Didion often conceives of her own embodied being and her central projects along the lines of an ongoing struggle to make peace with finitude. In a stunning short article on living with migraine, for example, she describes ‘the imposed yoga’ of being laid up in bed, stoically wrenching a modicum of clarity and something she can use from what is otherwise a chronic and frequently debilitating condition (Didion 2006:  305). Vulnerability also informs Didion’s understanding of terror in Salvador, which is conceived in terms of an absolute, ontological exposure to violent death that demoralizes, undoes and humiliates ‘in a single instant’ (Didion 2006: 355–6). Prior to Blue Nights, then, the theme of a generalized ‘ontology of the accident’, though understood through its link to human violence, is already in play. Finally and in spite of her arguably deserved reputation for hardness, Didion is across her corpus actually painfully attuned to the vulnerability

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of others, especially children. This attunement is persistently expressed in terms of a variously muted anxiety and is perhaps what lends her writings their characteristic sense of dread. Amplifying her anxieties through the main character in Play It as It Lays, she tells us how Maria ‘could not read newspapers because certain stories leapt at her from the page:  the fouryear-olds in the abandoned refrigerator, the tea party with Purex, the infant in the driveway, rattlesnake in the playpen, the peril, the unspeakable peril, in the everyday’ (Didion 1970:  99–100, emphasis added). This theme of the vulnerability of children moreover receives variously political, sociological and deeply personal expressions. Anxiety over the fate of a generation of lost children serves as the explicit thematic focus of the journalistic Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and it crops up again for example in her discussions of the Lakewood High School scandal in Where I Was From. In her fiction, anxiety over her failure as a mother seems to generate Didion’s nightmarish literary imagery of aborted foetal tissue backing up through drains, and infants dying of dehydration and convulsions in desolate tropical wastes (Didion 1970: 96–7; 1977: 148–52). The aspects of Blue Nights that relate to hardness, vulnerability and the care of others are therefore not without precedent in Didion. Throughout the memoir, she emphasizes in familiar terms, for example, the vulnerabilities of embodied being and the several and acute anxieties attendant to her role as a parent and caregiver that had haunted her work since the late 1960s. Relatively early in the memoir, Didion claims that ‘[w]‌hen we talk about mortality we are talking about our children’ and that ‘once [Quintana] was born I was never not afraid . . . The source of the fear was obvious: it was the harm that could come to her’ (Didion 2011:  54). Thus, when a child arrives in a family that welcomes it (Didion and Dunne adopted Quintana when she was a baby), the parent discovers fear, construed as a fear for the child’s safety and for her life. But in the situation when a parent outlives a child, this fear is transmuted into a fear of the parent’s own death. It is not a fear of death per se; in fact,

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Didion maintains when describing the discovery of an aneurysm at the base of her brain in 2009 that she ‘realized that I was no longer, if I had ever been, afraid to die: I was now afraid not to die, afraid that I might damage my brain (or my heart or my kidneys or my nervous system) and survive, continue living’ (Didion 2011: 24–5). Rather, the fear that comes with the prospect of the parent’s own death is, specifically, that death will wipe out the most authentic and intimate remaining traces of the lost child’s days on Earth. The fear of death is presented here as other-regarding since it is the double and absolute loss of the child that is actually at issue when the parent dies. In this connection, the final pages of the memoir invite close analysis. Didion discovers the meaning of her frailty  – which, recall, was articulated throughout as having been felt before it was cognized: I myself placed her ashes in the wall. I know what it is I am now experiencing. I know what the frailty is, I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked doors. The fear is for what is still to be lost. You may see nothing still to be lost. Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her. (Didion 2011: 188) What is so shattering about the book’s final passage is the idea that even after all that Didion has lost, there remains even more to lose. Specifically, she faces the loss of her memories through further illness and her eventual death. Didion’s subjective frailty, in short, is a function of the immeasurable value of what she, and she alone, still holds onto simply by living with her cognitive faculties intact. Many other people would certainly also have memories of Quintana, but arguably not to the extent of or with the same

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significance as Didion’s (recall here that John Dunne, Didion’s husband and Quintana’s father, had predeceased her). As the best if not the only guarantor of the memory of her daughter’s childhood, and of the richest account of her days on Earth, Didion discovers herself to be a fragile and infinitely precious vessel. In particular, she is now struck suddenly and at any time by a dreadful and altogether new impression of her exposure to accident; whereas accident was always an objective possibility, she now feels herself ‘[t]‌he target of any wheeled vehicle on the scene’ (Didion 2011:  139). Diminution, then, in the style of living; Didion must choose each step carefully, must plan her days out meticulously and she ends by falling into the stereotypical, habitual and conservative patterns of elder behaviour that Simone de Beauvoir long ago (if controversially)3 described as characteristic (Beauvoir 1970). Effectively, at the age of seventy-five and without it ever having occurred to her that her age ‘could present as a significantly altered situation’ (Didion 2011:  141), Didion finally, brutally and abruptly becomes old. The question of style, however, is not here solely about the style of living. It carries another, more literary sense in the context of Didion’s memoir:  it concerns both the ethical importance of clarity and truth as pertaining to her understanding of her vocation as a writer, and her attempt to transcribe her memories of Quintana. As I have already suggested regarding her vocation, a case can be made that the stylistic reduction of Blue Nights is in some sense continuous with Didion’s method as deployed at earlier points throughout her career. She refers in the memoir, for instance, to ‘the absence of style that I welcomed at one point – the directness I encouraged, even cultivated’ (Didion 2011: 110). In Blue Nights it is simply, on this reading, a matter of stylistic reduction folding back on itself, or of the writer characteristically reducing her experience to the essentials, but from an already impoverished affective and cognitive state. As Lili Anolik put it,

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[Didion’s] method, which is also her genius, has been to attenuate nature, strip it of its force and vitality. And then nature did that to her. Did it by aging her, taking away her youth and beauty. Did it again, and more violently, by taking away those she loved most. With just about anybody else, it would have ended there – heartbreak of that magnitude breaking the spirit and the will, as well. Not with Didion, though. She did it right back to nature. Magical Thinking and Blue Nights are loss and grief and pain transformed into meditations on loss and grief and pain; they’re loss and grief and pain aestheticized. (Anolik 2016) At the risk of oversimplifying, Didion would thus be something of an American counterpart to Marguerite Duras, whose ‘[s]‌tylistic awkwardness would be the discourse of dulled pain’ (Kristeva 1989: 226). Like Duras’s writing, Didion’s writing ‘encounters, recognizes, but also spreads the pain that summons it’ (Kristeva 1989:  229). This it does, as I  have suggested, for eminently ethical reasons: Didion spares no one’s feelings, not even her own, in her duty-bound quest for the unvarnished delivery of the truth. In terms of serving as a memorial to Quintana, on the other hand, the writing of (and in) Blue Nights is certainly a start  – but it, and any similar endeavour, can only ever be a start. First, this is because in Didion’s eyes, the escape from grief through memorial writing is strictly speaking impossible. In fact she repeatedly challenges the notion that her memories could serve in any sense as a comfort, or form the grist for any satisfying project:  ‘You have your wonderful memories’, people said later, as if memories were solace. Memories are not. Memories are by definition of times past, things gone. Memories are the Westlake uniforms in the closet, the faded and cracked photographs, the invitations to the weddings of people who are no longer married, the mass cards from the funerals of the people whose faces you no longer remember. Memories are what you no longer want to remember. (Didion 2011: 64)

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Elsewhere she describes opening boxes of mementos and the devastating effect this has on her: ‘In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see’ (Didion 2011: 46). Second, the writing of Blue Nights, or any similar text, can never do justice to the person memorialized – and Didion shows that she is acutely aware of this. Her scepticism on this count evokes one of the senses in which we can read Lyotard’s claim that ‘The witness is a traitor’ (Lyotard 1988b: 204). As Kent Still glosses these words, [t]‌hey are an alert to the plurality of ways in which the singularity of an event may be eclipsed in the very testimony to it: the representation of an event can foreclose other ways of linking with it, attention paid to one event may cast a plurality of others into oblivion, and attentiveness to different events may obscure the singularity of each. (Still 2007: xi) But Still is also correct to point out that ‘attentiveness to such difficulties is not a pretext for not trying. Just because one is not – and cannot be – up to the task does not mean one is off the hook’ (Still 2007: xi). As Lyotard tells us in a different context, ‘[t]‌he witness is always a poor witness, a traitor. But [she] does, after all, still bear witness’ (Lyotard 1993: 146). Didion writes under no illusions. Rather, she simply writes because she must. And when all else fails, she writes of her very failure to write – in the sense of failing to measure up to the ethical imperative to bear witness to Quintana’s life. In the end, the impossible ethical imperative of memorial writing and the event of her frailty even conspire to undermine Didion’s attempts to communicate with her reader: What if the damage extends beyond the physical? What if the problem is now cognitive?

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What if the absence of style that I welcomed at one point – the directness that I encouraged, even cultivated – what if this absence of style has now taken on a pernicious life of its own? What if my new inability to summon the right word, the apt thought, the connection that enables the words to make sense, the rhythm, the music itself – What if this new inability is systemic? What if I can never again locate the words that work? (Didion 2011: 110–11) And further: In fact my physical confidence seems to be reaching a new ebb. My cognitive confidence seems to have vanished altogether. Even the correct stance for telling you this, the ways to describe what is happening to me, to the attitude, the tone, the very words, now elude my grasp. The tone needs to be direct. I need to talk to you directly, I need to address the subject as it were, but something stops me. Is this another kind of neuropathy, a new frailty, am I no longer able to talk directly? Was I ever? Did I lose it? Or is the subject in this case a matter I wish not to address? When I  tell you that I  am afraid to get up from a folding chair in a rehearsal room on West Forty-second Street, of what am I  really afraid? (Didion 2011: 116–17) Further, still, and in spite of everything, Didion pleads with the reader: ‘Let me again try to talk to you directly’ (Didion 2011: 134). The distinct possibility emerges here that there is some significance in the very saying of Didion’s memoir, the supreme effort that it represents, even if we hold her at her word that she fears losing, or has already lost, her grasp on the said.

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From philosophical anthropology to the ethics of memory If I have been successful in my reconstruction of Didion’s insights into the temporal dimensions of her subjective vulnerability, then it should now be apparent that the deferred action of becoming frail links onto a vision of frailty that is fundamentally other-regarding. It is possible, doubtless, to find echoes of Breillat in Didion  – for example, in her tendency to individualism, or her toughness, or the jaundiced eye she turns towards the women’s movement. The crucial difference between the two thinkers, as I see it, is that unlike Breillat, Didion cannot be said to suspend the ethical. Though I hold both thinkers to be doing philosophy in the existential sense, Breillat’s vision and the ethos that flows from it are more or less solipsistic, whereas Didion’s work is fundamentally anchored in an understanding of being-together. To repeat in outline what is at stake for Didion in Blue Nights: the event of having a child is something that can provoke fear, or the discovery of fear, in the parent. Furthermore, outliving the child can provoke a shift in the object of this fear. Specifically, the parent now feels an anxiety or dread, the true object of which is the contingency or frailty of her very subjectivity. This is on account of the latter grounding the survival of the last, or in any case the richest or very best, of the child’s earthly traces.4 The grieving parent discovers, in the end, that there is even more to lose, and this constitutes the real meaning of her new feelings of frailty. Didion’s worries, focused as they are on her child, are through and through ethical in the general sense of being fundamentally caring and other-regarding. But it is also possible, I would suggest, to read Didion as a moralist when she shifts registers to more broadly social and political topics. As I  have noted, her anxiety about the fate of children persists in her journalism and cultural commentary. It takes on a broader meaning when we read her essays as

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critical interventions. As can be gleaned for example from Slouching Towards Bethlehem, the coming into being (or the coming of age) of a generation of children taxes the older generation in much the same way as does the event of the particular child. But specifically for Didion, and in terms that are apposite to my understanding of philosophy in the existential sense, her generation is failing the younger one by ill-equipping it for society, through lack of investment in the ‘mastery of language’. As Didion tells it, we were seeing something important. We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen the children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society’s atomization could be reversed. This was not a traditional generational rebellion. At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing . . . They are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts . . . their only proficient vocabulary is in the society’s platitudes. As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of the language, and I  am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from ‘a broken home’. They are sixteen, fifteen, fourteen years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words. (Didion 2006: 93) It is plausible to assert, then, that Didion’s work on grieving as well as her more social and political interventions on behalf of children are ethical in a broad sense. If, further, we hold that Didion is recounting widely relatable truths about frailty and grief in her memoir – and this is borne out anecdotally by factors as simple as the ability of a wide readership to engage critically and enthusiastically with her text – then we can question whether Blue Nights or

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Didion’s works more generally can teach us anything in terms of an ethics of grieving or, more broadly still, an ‘ethics of memory’. I will use the notion of an ethics of memory in Avishai Margalit’s sense, to indicate the norms of remembrance that flow from our belonging to various, ‘thick’ and concentric communities. As Margalit put it, ‘[m]‌emory is the cement that holds thick relations together, and communities of memory are the obvious habitat for thick relations and thus for ethics’5 (Margalit 2002: 8). While Margalit also speaks in the same text of a comparatively thin ‘morality of memory’ covering our duties of remembrance to humankind at large (via, e.g. the memorialization of crimes against humanity, i.e. assaults on human dignity and the notion of shared humanity), it is in the thicker and rather more constrained ethical sense that I believe Blue Nights (and The Year of Magical Thinking) can be approached. Effectively, Didion is confronted with the ethical obligation to preserve something of her two thickest relations through the act of memorialization. But she is also confronted with the possibly insoluble question as to how. An ethical practice of memorialization, for Didion, would at most be necessary but could never be sufficient. Blue Nights is a witnessing to Quintana’s life and death. But as we have seen, it is not and could never be an adequate witnessing, in the sense of its being either comprehensive or objective. No matter how hard I  strive to preserve and to present to you what has happened, it is literally impossible to present the event, or the other person in her entirety. Put differently, it is impossible to present the pure presentation of the remembered person. Any witnessing of her is therefore only a representation, that is, literally a re-presentation that entails a labour of editing and therefore a series of editorial choices, each of which may be fairly questioned. The memoir Blue Nights pales in comparison to the store of Didion’s memories from which it draws, but even these are already selective and partial. Moreover, as we have seen, this inadequacy of the memorial gesture measured against the memories she holds is precisely the source of

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Didion’s anxiety and, more specifically, of her discovery of her own frailty. An ethics of memory, from Didion’s point of view, would appear to connote a set of impossible obligations and we therefore hit up against the Kantian stricture that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’. Note however that there are different ways to handle this apparent impossibility. Even if we grant that the mourner cannot adequately fulfil her duties of memory, it is not necessarily senseless to imagine a perfect preservation of the lost person in memory per se. This might provide a measure of comfort, while constituting a normative horizon against which she might ground or justify her memorial activity. What I have in mind here is that from a philosophical point of view, it is possible to conceive of a kind of comprehensive immortality rooted in memory, even without literally believing in personal survival after death. Paul Ricoeur, for instance, has mused on the idea that God preserves all that has happened in His infinite and totalizing time-consciousness (this being the metaphysical meaning of the biblical idea that no hair goes uncounted by God, that the first will be the last and so on; Ricoeur 2014:  81–4). Ricoeur’s direct inspiration for this idea is the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (2014: 77–8), but such an idea can be traced even further back to Baruch Spinoza, for whom a kind of immortality or more accurately ‘eternity’ inheres in the fact of temporality being one of God’s or Nature’s infinite attributes; no matter if one dies, and no matter if no one remembers – one will always have been (Spinoza 1992: 213–14). And since the Gods (or Natures) of Ricoeur, Whitehead and Spinoza are infinite in their capacity to preserve their moments, nothing is ever, from a metaphysical perspective, truly lost. Therefore, even if the ‘can’ of human remembrance is constrained by finite human nature, it is still conceivable granting a noumenal, metaphysical view from nowhere that something of the lost loved one might be forever preserved  – and that the ethics of memory may model itself according to such abstract preservation of the person as a regulative if never fully achievable ideal.

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As noted, such a view might provide a measure of comfort – cold, minimal comfort, perhaps, for the mother of a deceased child or for an agonized person at the brink of her own death. Certainly it would be a cold comfort for Didion, who has reported on a great deal of post-war suffering and who would be acutely aware that the Spinozan metaphysics of survival would entail a qualified eternity not only for her daughter’s days on Earth, but for all manner of horrible events. I believe that the vision presented in Blue Nights, however, is radically pessimistic in rejecting even this austere possibility.6 Again, Kristeva’s assessment of Duras would be apposite in describing Didion:  ‘Lacking recovery or God, having neither value nor beauty other than illness itself seized at the place of its essential rupture, never has art had so little cathartic potential’ (Kristeva 1989: 228). A view ‘lacking recovery or God’ would appear to render the ethics of memory a non-starter: as Cathleen Schine put it, for Didion, ‘[m]‌emories – even these memories, the ones she has collected in this book – are as fragile and complicated and beautiful as one of the scraps of her grandmother’s lace, she tells us. They are as singular and, finally, as meaningless. There is no dress to trim with the old lace. There is no daughter. There is no future’ (Schine 2011). But whereas the said of Didion’s words opens an abyss of grief without issue, their very saying is still rich in ethical possibility. A memoir of grief is, after all, not nothing – even in a universe altogether unlike Ricoeur’s or Whitehead’s or Spinoza’s, where finally nothing is preserved and there is no dress to trim with the old lace. Arguably the very gesture of writing is already ethical, inasmuch as it responds to the impossible task with which it is burdened. It assumes a responsibility of remembrance, and it communicates at a minimum, and in the first instance – even if this is the only instance – to the author herself, that is, to the other that she is for herself (Ricoeur 1990). But here the author, or at least the author’s witnessing, also gestures beyond herself to the community of her readers. In a godless universe, one way that ethics gains its meaning is through the inherently impossible but heroic task of weaving lasting and

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honest fabrics of memory in human communities.7 Even if there is no dress to trim with the old lace, one bears witness to the fleeting and fragile existence of the lace itself – and there is in any case a community of suffering for whom such witnessing is significant. In this regard, Didion connects her grief over her mother’s death, as well as John’s and Quintana’s deaths, to the experience of handling mementos. Not knowing what to do with everything she has gathered in a box after her mother’s death, Didion tells us how ‘I closed the box and put it in a closet. There is no real way to deal with everything we lose’ (Didion 2006: 1103). Similarly, and in a striking formulation, Didion describes mementos as ‘[o]‌bjects for which there is no satisfactory resolution’ (Didion 2011:  45). Note here that the memoir Blue Nights itself may be so described. But so may any human endeavour, or for that matter any human life, considered biographically. If we wish to call Didion a ‘humanist’ we may do so, I believe, only to the extent that we recognize her as offering a consistent and uncompromising vision of radical human finitude. Consider the potential here in conceiving human lives roughly along these lines; if I am unburdened of the expectation that I reach some final resolution, in this life or after – or that some resolution might be assigned for me, that my life be put to work for a greater scheme that outstrips me – and if I cease placing the very same demand on the other person, then the door is open to a radical ethics of acceptance or hospitality. This is not to say that there would be no demands placed on me at all – in fact, such an ethical situation would rightly be described as infinitely demanding (Levinas 1997; Critchley 2008), since it would require me to always welcome the frailty and contingency of the other. Rather, it is simply to insist that the courage required to navigate a finite life with finite others entails no vision of a final totality. Thus, Didion’s courage, which is often construed as her hardness – conveyed to us through the gesture of her writing, if not always its letter – invites us to face up to the task of human life as one in which we are unavoidably vulnerable,

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and in which we can only ever hope to spend our days on Earth in irresolute bonds with others who share our condition. Blue Nights may be read in many ways, but I invite the reader to approach it as a fragment of a philosophical anthropology, describing but more importantly striving to do justice to human lives for which there is no satisfactory resolution.

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4 Audre Lorde: We must learn to count the living with that same particular attention with which we number the dead1

Privilege, or the maldistribution of life chances In the two preceding chapters I have explained why, as well as the extent to which, Catherine Breillat and Joan Didion exemplify for me the practice of philosophy as I  understand it. More precisely, I  interpret them to be philosophers, that is, obstinate practitioners of the self-conscious mastery of being mastered. They are so, I claim, in the pre-disciplinary or existential sense that I  have articulated in the Introduction. I  also note, however, that Breillat and Didion think at such levels of abstraction that they could be fairly portrayed as ‘knocking at the gates of the discipline’, or as offering something from which disciplinary philosophers could learn. In giving my account of Breillat and Didion as philosophers, moreover, I have foregrounded the closely linked theme of vulnerability, understood here in terms of human finitude and

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the exposure to accident. This has allowed me to compare how the two thinkers construe the role of others in the context of their philosophical practice. In particular, I  showed how Breillat construes her project in fundamentally solipsistic terms, whereas Didion ultimately grounds hers in the care of other people, particularly children (her own child to be sure, and to an apparently lesser but still significant extent, children in general). Thus, while there is a certain similarity to their existential activity as made manifest in their works, there is also a deep difference between the projects of Breillat and Didion that could be called normative, or ethical. But Didion’s ethics, I emphasized, are wedded to and are maintained in the face of a dread and a melancholy that closely resemble, without constituting, nihilism. Thus, while she goes further than Breillat in thinking the properly ethical dimension of human vulnerability, Didion does so in a very basic, largely personal sense, and she evidently despairs of both the scope and the posterity of human endeavour in general. In this chapter I will take the development from Breillat to Didion a step further. Specifically, I  will give an overview of poet and civil rights activist Audre Lorde. In doing so I will explain why, of the three thinkers profiled in the book, hers is the existential practice of philosophy qua vulnerable practice that I  think best, and most critically, captures its inherently social nature. Lorde will be, to put it differently, positioned as the most developed of the three thinkers in terms of her ability to envision and to articulate the social nature of vulnerability through an existential or pre-disciplinary philosophical practice. To show how Lorde makes an advance over Didion from my perspective, I  will consider the passage in Blue Nights where Didion discusses privilege. Taking exception to the notion that her daughter Quintana grew up privileged, Didion interprets the anticipated attribution of ‘privilege’ by a certain set of her readers as ‘a judgment . . . an opinion . . . an accusation’ (Didion 2011: 76). She goes on to say: ‘ “Privilege” remains an area to which – when I think of

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what she endured, when I  consider what came later  – I  will not easily cop’ (Didion 2011: 76). The idea is that because of Quintana’s relatively short and often difficult life,2 the attribution of privilege is at best inaccurate and is at worst something to be taken personally. It is perhaps even an insult to her memory – and we have seen how, for Didion, memory is a deeply ethical and serious affair. Didion’s resistance to the notion that Quintana was privileged raises an important issue, pertinent to the discussion of vulnerability. As her comments suggest, the attribution of privilege, ‘white privilege’, for example, is often taken as a judgement or an accusation by those at whom it is levelled. There are certainly times when the attribution is indeed intended this way – notwithstanding the plausible thesis of white fragility, according to which whites in general are socialized to have comparatively lower levels of tolerance for racial stress (DiAngelo 2011). But sociologically speaking, the attribution of privilege constitutes neither a judgement, nor an opinion, not an accusation. In the terms of this book, it names the factual matter of disproportionate access to the social goods that would mitigate the universal human experience of vulnerability, qua finitude and exposure to accident. To use Dean Spade’s language: privilege indicates a situation in which life chances are differentially and unfairly distributed, that is, maldistributed, for example, across racialized populations, or populations that are classified according to their gender or sexuality (Spade 2015). Life chances may be differentially distributed in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons. On an extremely charitable reading, the perpetuation of a given maldistribution may be unintentional. It could have resulted, in theory, from a combination of past injustices and subsequent economic, social and bureaucratic neglect or inertia.3 Simply put, the weight of past inequalities tends to perpetuate and sometimes exacerbate those inequalities  – and as Spade reminds us, we needn’t posit the ongoing influence of ‘perpetrators’ with evil intentions to account for why (Spade 2015: 51–2). In this vein, Wolff and

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De-Shalit discuss such maldistributions in terms of the ‘dynamic clustering’ of disadvantages that can occur even in the absence of an identifiable perpetrator. For them it is both a question of how, through a process of inertia, ‘a person “accumulates” disadvantages over time’, and how ‘the reproduction of disadvantage over generations’ is caused (Wolff and De-Shalit 2013: 120). But life chances may also be distributed  – or, their existing differential distribution may be maintained, or further exacerbated – by civil society as well as public and private sector interests, according to specific intentions and strategies. Under this heading we could of course list the spectrum of non-governmental activism that runs from organized instances of gardenvariety discrimination to far-right terror. More innocuous-seeming but similarly pernicious bureaucratic phenomena could also be included, such as biopolitical strategies of assimilation or ‘anonymous care’, wherein a putative policy of caring for vulnerable minority populations actually generates perverse and debilitating effects (Stevenson 2014: 75–100). Further, differential distribution may also result at the state and corporate levels from biopolitical strategies of ‘slow death’ (Berlant 2011: 95–119) or ‘debility’ (Puar 2017), wherein certain populations are targeted for chronic indebtedness, control and exploitation through the intentional creation and perpetuation of injury, sickness, of other forms of what is often (problematically) referred to as ‘low functioning’.4 It is without a doubt politically important to identify which strategies if any are at play in a given distribution of life chances. And as Collins and Bilge make clear, we must never forget that such distributions are intersectional: ‘When it comes to social inequality, people’s lives and the organization of power in a given society are better understood as being shaped not by a single axis of social division, be it race or gender or class, but by many axes that work together and influence each other’ (Collins and Bilge 2016: 2). What matters most for my argument, however, is the following much broader claim:  that beyond the minimal and in any case already socially determined contributions

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of our biology,5 the distribution of our life chances happens largely at the social, political, legal and administrative levels. On this score, the differential distribution of life chances is demonstrably more than just a theoretical matter. It can in fact be measured, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Wolff and De-Shalit, whose work I  have noted has been formative for my understanding of vulnerability, make a good case that ‘disadvantages’ can be clarified philosophically, identified empirically and to some extent measured and prioritized for policy purposes, since they tend to cluster together in recognizable ways (2013). But there is a wealth of additional evidence that ‘privilege’ and ‘disadvantage’ map onto palpable, measurable social realities. As an object lesson in the clustering of disadvantages, take the firsthand accounts of a set of African American and Latino fathers in Watts, south Los Angeles, struggling to break the carceral cycle and the disproportionate exposure to violence and poverty which have severely disrupted their ability to parent their children (Leap 2015). Consider further the evidence for the legal and administrative creation of a permanent African American underclass through racially targeted laws, differential enforcement, administrative catch22s and the like (Alexander 2012). In terms of not only carceral status but also health outcomes, educational opportunities and a whole range of other social goods, the evidence overwhelmingly points to the clustering of disadvantages. But it also points to the arbitrary and unjust differential distribution, that is, maldistribution, that so frequently clusters them together. The key idea here is that for social and political reasons, people have empirically unequal access to the support systems that would help them to weather the contingencies of the human condition. This, then, is what it means to speak of ‘disadvantage’, and therefore of ‘privilege’. Without disputing her difficulties in life, without doubting that there were ways in which she may have suffered more than her share from the finitude and exposure to accident which are the existential bedrock of human vulnerability, it cannot be denied that, in the specific, social and structural

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sense laid out here, Quintana was privileged. All things being equal – and as Didion herself has demonstrated she is capable of understanding, for example, in her handling of the ‘Central Park Jogger’ case (Didion 2006:  685–727)  – Quintana would have enjoyed the benefits of a much stronger safety net than the average American of colour or poor white American her age, simply on account of her race and class. To name only a few factors recounted by Didion herself, Quintana’s access to leisure environments outside of urban centres to various kinds of therapy, and finally, to extensive and intensive medical care would all be cases in point. To repeat, noting this does not amount to saying that Quintana’s life was easy. In Didion’s and Daugherty’s accounts, it comes across as having been in some respects harder than most. Rather, the point to stress here is that Quintana’s experience of human vulnerability was differently mediated than it would have been for many if not most other Americans going through similar difficulties. The issue we come to, then, is what to do about privilege in practical terms. It is necessary but not sufficient to assert and to organize around the principle that all members of society deserve the same high standards of mediated vulnerability, adjusted to their needs according to the principle of equity. It is even possible to rally around the progressive principle that all members of society should have equitable access to even higher standards of mediation than the very privileged enjoy now. But these assertions will be non-starters without a certain analytical, critical and constructive work on existing privilege (Spade 2015: 94–116). This is because privilege manifests even in the spaces and organizational cultures that seek to dismantle privilege  – and this can have a distorting effect on social justice movements, for example, by centring the concerns of the least vulnerable members of a group or a coalition. As Collins and Bilge explain, In the 1960s and 1970s, African-American women activists confronted the puzzle of how their needs simply fell through the cracks of anti-racist social

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movements, feminism, and unions organizing for workers’ rights. Each of these social movements elevated one category of analysis and action above others, for example, race within the civil rights movement, or gender within feminism or class within the union movement. Because African-American women were simultaneously black and female and workers, these singlefocus lenses on social inequality left little space to address the complex social problems that they face. Black women’s specific issues remained subordinated within each movement because no social movement by itself would, nor could, address the entirety of discriminations they faced. Black women’s use of intersectionality as an analytic tool emerged in response to these challenges. (Collins and Bilge 2016: 3) Audre Lorde enters the discussion at this point as an invaluable guide. It is important, first of all, to situate her with respect to intersectionality. The latter is, roughly,6 the theory and analytical tool according to which different oppressions organized along lines such as gender, race, class and disability intersect to create unique realities, challenges and injustices for persons belonging to socially marginalized groups. ‘Stock stories’ in the academic idiom claim that intersectionality was ‘coined’ by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1991 (Crenshaw 1991; Collins and Bilge 2016: 80–4). But as Collins and Bilge relate above, it is above all the result of many African American and other racialized women’s thoughtful collaborations in response to certain practical frustrations in social justice organizing.7 Among these women was Lorde, who was already sketching intersectionality as a theory8 and incorporating it into her life as praxis long before what she was doing had a name (Collins 2009: 21; Collins and Bilge 2016: 80, 168–9). At a colloquium in 1980, for example, she related to the crowd that ‘[a]‌s a 49-yearold Black lesbian feminist socialist mother of two, including one boy, and a member of an interracial couple, I usually find myself a part of some group defined as other, deviant, inferior, or just plain wrong’ (Lorde 2017b:  94).

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On account of the complex social positioning of her identity according to intersecting vectors of oppression,9 virtually any social group or class to which Lorde belonged as a ‘sister’ could potentially also shun her as an ‘outsider’ (Lorde 1984). Thus, her social standing  – or in my terms, her access to the mediating conditions of her innate vulnerability – was exceptionally precarious both in theory and in practice, as her autobiography or ‘biomythography’ Zami and other writings often attest (Lorde 1982). Her insider/outsider status makes Lorde an exceptionally well-placed witness regarding not only the social factors which tend to exacerbate human vulnerability, but also some of the resources and tactics at people’s disposal in the effort to overcome them. Significantly, though she couples privilege with injustice throughout her writings, Lorde does not hold to a purely negative or critical understanding of it. As she put it, To acknowledge privilege is the first step in making it available for wider use. Each of us is blessed in some particular way, whether we recognize our blessings or not. And each one of us, somewhere in our lives, must clear a space within that blessing where she can call upon whatever resources are available to her in the name of something that must be done. (Lorde 2017a: 129) To this extent, Lorde’s vision of intersectional justice is not exclusionary or solely wedded to negative rights, or to a logic of scission as might be feared.10 Rather, it sketches a practical and constructive ethos for the work of social justice through a strongly communitarian, coalitional lens. Though her critiques of white feminism have become classics (e.g. ‘An Open Letter to Mary Daly’ in Lorde 2017b: 38–44), Lorde holds to a vision of the integrality of each woman (and, by extension and through the logic of social responsibility, each man and each intersex and non-binary person) to the emancipation of the broader community of women. As she put it,

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If I fail to recognise them as other faces of myself, then I am contributing not only to each of their oppressions but also to my own, and the anger which stands between us then must be used for clarity and mutual empowerment, not for evasion by guilt or for further separation. I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. And I am not free as long as one person of colour remains chained. Nor is any one of you. (Lorde 2017b: 117, emphasis added) Further, Lorde states that ‘[d]‌ifference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic’ (Lorde 2017b: 90–1). What interests me, then, is how Lorde identifies many of the same existential struggles as Breillat and Didion – but also how further, and on account of her centring the social nature of vulnerability in a militant, constructive and lifeaffirming way, she goes beyond the combative monadism of the one and the anxious pessimism of the other. What competing tools does Lorde offer, and to what extent can they be mined for specifically philosophical lessons?

Existential philosophy: Subjectivity and self-knowledge, self-care and support My gesture of incorporating Lorde into a discussion of philosophy and vulnerability is based on two factors:  first, it is based upon her minute unpacking of her socially overdetermined, that is, intersectional struggle with accident and finitude; second, it is based upon her own frequent suggestions that subjectivity, knowledge, self-care and support are intimately connected. In brief, Lorde illustrates the thesis of existential philosophy’s inherent link to vulnerability while richly demonstrating the social model of vulnerability’s mediation. Since I have already indicated in the previous section how Lorde’s

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works may guide us through the social model of vulnerability by laying bare privilege and intersecting oppressions in a forthright way, I will focus here on a pair of more basic, existential themes. First I will look at subjectivity and selfknowledge, and then self-care and support. These will shed additional light on the social dimensions of vulnerability, while standing in their own right as philosophically significant.

Subjectivity and self-knowledge Lorde was trained in the Western humanities and library sciences, working with and around books throughout her professional life. It is thus notable, but hardly surprising, that she was able to shift so effortlessly between poetic heights and depths of emotion, on one hand, and exceptionally clear and simple prose, on the other. This reflects not only her impressive skill with words, but a philosophical orientation regarding subjectivity, and the related theme of self-knowledge. By way of situating this philosophical orientation, it is necessary to first discuss in very general terms the status of one of Lorde’s key modes of engagement, namely poetry. Since Lorde defines herself not as a philosopher,11 but as, among other things, a poet, we must consider whether this distinction has any significance for the philosophical story I am telling. It is first of all remarkable that poetry plays a contestable role in the primordial Western constellation I sketched in the Introduction. Specifically, there is a tradition according to which poetry’s status is at issue at the very dawn of Western sophistry and philosophy. Arguably, it therefore deserves a place among them (in addition to antiphilosophy, should we wish to retain the category) as a foundational mode of thought (McLennan 2015: 67–70). On this understanding, the poet makes of herself a clearing for the revelation of being (or truth). Epic poets such as Homer, for example, ground the authority of their accounts in the omniscience of the Muses, and the first Greek thinkers as Heidegger would construe them – most crucially, Parmenides – similarly

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ground their discourse in the ‘demonic phrase’ of divine authority (Lyotard 1988a:  15). It is precisely when sophistry emerges and ‘ruins’ the demonic phrase by treating it as an argument, rather than as a revelation, that philosophy proper emerges to defend the notion of being or truth inherent to poetry – but it does this by meeting sophistry on its own, logo-logical terrain (Lyotard 1988a). Poetry, on this understanding, is therefore a close cousin to philosophy. In some sense, however, it is also inferior to it or outmoded by it. Poetry nonetheless maintains more than a historical place in the Western tradition even by this account, due to contingent factors such as the persistence of religion and spirituality, but also poetry’s modern tendency to understand its revelatory vocation in terms of the immanence of language itself. As Badiou put it regarding modern poetry, ‘It says: I create silence in order to say that which is impossible to say in the shared language of consensus, to separate it from the world so that it may be said, and always re-said for the first time’ (Badiou 2014:  25). Put differently, modern poetry even today prepares the ground for the revelation of the real in the form of the new  – but now the language that it uses is both the tool and the object of this appearance. In my view, we should borrow but only lightly from this traditional Western picture. This is for three reasons. The first speaks to my agnosticism about the means used to pursue philosophy in the existential or pre-disciplinary sense. It is not obvious to me that philosophy, qua existential mode of thought, becomes a distinct entity from poetry at the moment of its becoming partly logological and militantly recursive (arguably, that is to say, at the moment of its becoming ‘disciplinary’). The second reason is that, as any poet will probably attest, composition is not purely a matter of inspiration (divine or otherwise); it is also a matter of considerable, frequently frustrating and sometimes dispiriting work. It is therefore meaningful, in my view, to speak of poetry not as though it was essentially passive, but as a poetical engagement in the self-conscious activity of the mastery of being mastered.12 The third

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and final reason to borrow only lightly from the account given above is that it is Eurocentric, and therefore insufficient as a means of approaching Lorde. Granted, through her lifelong love of reading and her training especially, Lorde was certainly something of an insider to the Western tradition. But, precisely through her female, Afro-Caribbean, African American and lesbian affiliations and heritages, she is simultaneously something of an outsider.13 This outsider or non-Western status is emphasized by Lorde herself, when she claims an importance for poetry on account of its link to ‘our own ancient, non-european consciousness of living as a situation to be experienced and interacted with’ (Lorde 2017b: 8). What I  will retain from the admittedly contestable sketch of poetry, as plotted out above, is therefore only the basic notion that the poet labours so as to allow something real or important to appear. I  believe this is warranted in interpreting Lorde because she articulates this idea herself, claiming that poetry is both ‘the revelation or distillation of experience’ and an ‘illumination’ (Lorde 2017b: 7–8). But if we were to insist further on the pertinence of the primordial and Eurocentic picture, then at the very minimum Lorde the poet would stand alongside philosophy in her opposition to (pure, cynically opportunistic) sophistry. As Lorde put it in the poem ‘Power’, ‘[t]‌he difference between poetry and rhetoric / is being ready to kill / yourself / instead of your children’ (Lorde 2000: 215). Though a particularly forceful expression of what is at issue, Lorde’s framing wonderfully captures the difference between militant and merely tactical thinking that I explored in the Introduction. What then, in Lorde, does the poem allow to appear? There are certainly spiritual aspects to Lorde’s poems, not the least because she draws frequently upon African and Afro-Caribbean pantheons (Lorde 2000: 330–2). It would clearly be a misreading, though, to reduce Lorde to these terms. Her vision of poetry also to some extent resembles modern poetry as per Badiou’s understanding, for as she put it, ‘it is through poetry that we give name to

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those ideas which are  – until the poem  – nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt’ (Lorde 2017b: 7). But Lorde is interested in much more than the immanence of language. She is no modernist, in the sense that she rejects ‘the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean – in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight’ (Lorde 2017b:  8). Above all, Lorde’s eyes are always trained on poetry as ‘the skeleton architecture of our [actual] lives’, in the sense that it concerns the very consistency of our most intimate and vulnerable lived realities. What appears in poetry, we will see, are aspects of the deepest and most closely held knowledge of subjects. For these reasons, I feel, there is no rigid distinction to be made between Lorde’s poetry and what I would argue are her philosophical labours. What she allows to appear through the medium of poetry is very often and quite generally in the nature of philosophical struggle as I understand it, first and foremost perhaps because she grapples with subjectivity and subjectivation in their relation to vulnerability. Take, for example, the theme of one’s having ‘many selves’, which recurs throughout Lorde’s work. Having many selves does not literally mean that one has several discrete personalities. The ‘selves’ in question refer to the subject’s being inhabited, if not constituted, through difference. At times, this difference is construed as pain or as a challenge to be overcome. Lorde asks, ‘Am I to be cursed forever with becoming / somebody else on the way to myself?’ (Lorde 2000: 79). At other times, however, it is precisely the loss of this constituent difference, or the loss of it in others, that is painful; one of the most moving of Lorde’s poems concerns an ex-lover named Martha, who after a head injury must emerge into the circle of her loved ones ‘with the dross burned away’ (Lorde 2000: 37–44). Ultimately though, Lorde will celebrate this difference that is in – or that is – both herself and others. It is the stuff of a more hopeful becoming, and it charts the growth both of oneself and of one’s community. She writes, in connection with becoming a mother,

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my legs were towers between which A new world was passing. Since then I can only distinguish One thread within running hours You, flowing through selves toward You. (Lorde 2000: 173) Notable at this point is how Lorde’s vision of constitutive subjective difference courts paradox. She points, however, to the necessity to live, as best one can, with one’s paradoxes. The necessity is for Lorde at bottom epistemological as well as political, and it is constitutive of human experience. Specifically, Lorde indicates the existence of ‘something beneath language’ (Lorde 2017b:  57), what she refers to as our ‘deepest and non-rational knowledge’ (22–3). There is a distance to cross, as she put it, ‘between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings’ (Lorde 2017b:  23). Moreover, there is a further distance to cross between these feelings and our ideas; as Lorde put it, ‘feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding’ (Lorde 2017b: 7). Thus, in Lorde we have an order of epistemological priority, wherein the self or selves precede our feelings, and our feelings in turn precede our ideas. These, in turn, form the raw material for poetry and other forms of discourse. The role of the poet in this picture is above all to allow ideas to appear. But in doing so, the poet also names and clarifies them, as well as amplifies their affective resonance, presenting them in effect as real and palpable possibilities. This helps to explain why in poetry qua reflexive activity, ‘there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt’ (Lorde 2017b:  11). But this reflexive and affective role of poetry is politically crucial, particularly for women, because it alone can help the composer or the reader or the listener to feel her ideas as immanent possibilities.14 Poetry is not a luxury because

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as Lorde put it, ‘there is only poetry to hint at possibility made real’ (Lorde 2017b:  10). An affective affirmation of women’s immanent possibilities, particularly the possibilities attendant to their emancipation, is in Lorde’s view a source of hope. It is also a crucial factor in women’s very survival. As Lorde put it, within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanisation, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets. And there are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They surface in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom. They are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare. (Lorde 2017b: 10–11, emphasis added) In terms of a politics of poetics, Lorde’s vision is compelling. We should pause here, however, because as an epistemology in the register of disciplinary philosophy (and/or sophistry), Lorde’s vision is doubtless open to charges of performative contradiction. This is on the grounds that she is asserting the epistemological primacy of the pre-linguistic, the pre-intellectual and the prerational, but through language and by using ideas. While I wish to flag this as an issue that might trouble Lorde’s relation to the discipline, I should also mention that one may always mitigate this kind of charge in two ways. First, one could simply note the distinction between the registers in which Lorde is writing, specifically her poetry and her prose; Lorde would perhaps not be on the hook for failing to coherently express the exact nature of poetry in a non-poetic register, especially if poetry does what she says it does. Second and relatedly, one could point out how the failure to defend the primacy of pre-linguistic and pre-rational knowledge in language and rational discourse certainly indicates

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the limits of the discourse one is using, but not necessarily whether or not the thesis being defended is false. In any case we must remember that Lorde avows that she is no theorist. And yet she communicates powerfully, if at the edges of rational discourse. Above all we must remember that Lorde emphasizes the role of the poet in the transition from the inchoate to the resonant and revolutionary idea. This role is inherently in tune with the question of others. And significantly, the midwife of the epistemological crossing as Lorde construes it is the erotic. Lorde’s vision of eroticism, however, is nearly unrecognizable according to Breillat’s coordinates.15 If there is an ‘erotic suspension of the ethical’ in Breillat, for Lorde the erotic is already ethical through and through; this is part of what allows Lorde to distinguish it from the ‘pornographic’16 (Lorde 2017b:  23). Among the ways the erotic functions as a ‘nurturer or nursemaid of all our deepest knowledge’, Lorde lists ‘providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference’ (Lorde 2017b: 26). We are in a world vastly different from Breillat’s; it is a world where the deep and multitudinous differences between subjects are tapped a means to mutual empowerment through mutual knowledge and feeling. None of this is to say, however, that Lorde is naïve when it comes to love; she understands how power may ruin it, and she expresses the sadness and the pain of it throughout her writings with great skill, without however retreating into solipsism. The differences between the two thinkers on this score are not merely theoretical. For instance, they carry normative implications for sexual practice. Breillat, the reader will recall, gave a qualified defence of female sexual masochism and, arguably, more or less implicitly, male sexual sadism, on account of their role in her project of subjectivation. Lorde, on the other hand, rejects even the simulacrum of power-over between consenting adults in the

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bedroom. In an interview with Susan Leigh Star on the topic of sadomasochism17 in the lesbian community, Lorde comes out as adamantly opposed to any form of play that would mimic ‘the learned intolerance of differences’ (Lorde 2017a: 6). Notably, she grounds her rejection of sadomasochism in her integral concept of the erotic: Those involved with sadomasochism are acting out the intolerance of differences which we all learn: superiority and thereby the right to dominate. The conflict is supposedly self-limiting because it happens behind bedroom doors. Can this be so, when the erotic empowers, nourishes, and permeates all of our lives? (Lorde 2017a: 6) There is more to say here as well about Lorde and Didion. Though I  have foregrounded their difference over the notion of privilege, it is remarkable that Lorde’s writings about living with cancer contain numerous references to frailty and temporality that would be very much at home in Didion – save for their ultimately affirmative spin. Lorde speaks, for instance, of the temporality of living with cancer in the following terms: This is no longer a time of waiting. It is a time for the real work’s urgencies. It is a time enhanced by an iron reclamation of what I call the burst of light – that inescapable knowledge, in the bone, of my own physical limitation . . . If living as a poet – living on the front lines – has ever had any meaning, it has meaning now. Vulnerability as armor. (Lorde 2017a: 119, 124) And elsewhere: ‘I feel I am working to capacity, and this gives me deep joy, a reservoir of strength I draw upon for the next venture. Right now. This makes it far less important that it will not be forever. It never was’ (Lorde 2017a: 118). Cancer, in short, disabused Lorde of ‘the myth of omnipotence’ (Lorde 2017a: 133), but enabled her to access ‘another kind of power . . . tempered and enduring, grounded within the realities of what I am in fact doing’. Thus, like in Didion, there is a discovery of her frailty with its own peculiar temporality.

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The discovery is for Lorde, however, the basis of true power because it grounds her transformative work in a sober assessment of her capacities. In the end, the heart of Lorde’s epistemology is an insight that is very basic to philosophy as I construe it: that human finitude in its self-conscious mastery of its being mastered may strive to express itself through non-rational, embodied, but not necessarily reductively material ways – and it must obstinately cling to its activity, at the cost of the pain of paradox.

Self-care and support Lorde’s work is notable for integrating the recognition and the stewardship of one’s own vulnerabilities and strengths within an anti-neoliberal or socialist framework. Put simply, Lorde politicizes self-care, the necessity to take one’s well-being in hand, in a way that runs counter to current trends of ‘wellness’. This is a vital undertaking because, as Lizzie Ward has argued, the rhetoric of self-care has been co-opted into neoliberal policies that would increasingly devolve responsibility for well-being away from the welfare state and onto individuals themselves (Ward 2015). Further, by obscuring the social determinants of health and other markers of well-being, a commoditized ideology of ‘wellness’ contributes to the false anthropology of radical autonomy (Penny 2016). This commoditization often plays upon people’s vulnerabilities, or in many cases upon their feelings pertaining to the vulnerability of others. Mothers especially may find that they are bombarded with encouragement to take care of themselves, so that they can in turn take better care of their dependent children – but they will also often find that it is they who are on the hook to obtain the prescribed means to this self-care. Not surprisingly, these can be quite costly. This situation is to be resisted, and it is thus important to emphasize that the idea that one should take one’s care into one’s own hands need imply no such delusions of radical autonomy. Rather, as Lorde demonstrates, self-care can be

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conceived as a moment in a wider social web of care that aims at transforming society. By insisting on the importance of what is necessary to the individual’s survival and well-being, Lorde aims to give consistency and power to her community. As she put it, ‘Caring for myself is not self-indulgence; it is selfpreservation, and that is an act of political warfare’ (Lorde 2017a: 130). Such a model of self-care means that one cannot be expected to give everything to the work of social reconstruction; one must, after all, live another day if one is to continue to give. This is what Lorde means when she distinguishes between ‘stretching myself ’ and ‘overextension’ (Lorde 2017a:  130). And as her friend Rhea recounts in Zami, ‘Just because you’re strong doesn’t mean you can let other people depend on you too much. It’s not fair to them, because when you can’t be what they want they’re disappointed, and you feel bad’ (Lorde 1982: 153). Lorde’s vision of self-care as political, notably, dovetails with her thought on race and what will later be described as intersectionality. She depicts black women’s experience as epistemologically privileged, and therefore strategically important for the wider project of social transformation. Black women who survive have a ‘head start’ on thinking through and engaging in other-focused strategies and tactics for survival, and this is one sense in which their very vulnerability constitutes both an advantage and a precious political resource: For Black women, learning to consciously extend ourselves to each other and to call upon each other’s strengths is a life-saving strategy. In the best of circumstances surrounding our lives, it requires an enormous amount of mutual, consistent support for us to be emotionally able to look straight into the face of the powers aligned against us and still do our work with joy. It takes determination and practice. Black women who survive have a head start in learning how to be open and self-protective at the same time. One secret is to ask as many people as possible for help, depending on all of them and on none of them at the same time. Some will help, others cannot. For the time being. (Lorde 2017a: 122)

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This centring of black women’s experience is further complicated, however, by the necessity for Lorde to frequently defend her sexuality and other aspects of her life from the judgement of the very black sisters she most ardently seeks to reach through her writings and speeches.18 Facing up to their sexual conservatism as she sees it, Lorde’s program of other-centred self-care entails that she must repeatedly and very publically ask for help even from those who either cannot or will not help her – at least, ‘for the time being’. The issue of self-care is a vital and recurrent issue in Lorde’s writings for the further reason that for many years she lived with and ultimately succumbed to cancer. As she insinuates in Zami, her cancer was most likely of social and political origin: specifically, she ties it to her role as a young woman of colour in the American post-war capitalist economy. Lorde did piecework with a commercial x-ray machine in a plant where carbon tetrachloride was used to process quartz crystals. She recalls flipping down the protective shield on her machine, like many of her co-workers, to increase her speed. This caused dark marks on the women’s fingertips that were either permanent or, in Lorde’s case, took a long time to fade (Lorde 1982: 145). ‘Nobody mentioned’, she tells us, ‘that carbon tet destroys the liver and causes cancer of the kidneys. Nobody mentioned that the X-ray machines, when used unshielded, delivered doses of constant low radiation far in excess of what was considered safe even in those days’ (Lorde 1982: 126). And Lorde’s analysis of cancer as a social phenomenon goes considerably further, tracing links between phenomena that might be considered to be widely disparate on first blush. She suggests, for example, that her life as a woman living with cancer is put at risk by specific policy decisions: ‘When I speak out against the cynical U.S. intervention in Central America, I am working to save my life in every sense. Government research grants to the National Cancer Institute were cut in 1986 by the exact amount illegally turned over to the contras in Nicaragua. One hundred and five million dollars. It gives yet another meaning to the personal as the political’ (Lorde 2017a: 132–3). Thus, Lorde conceives of her continuing survival as an act of

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resistance; it allows her to continue her work in social justice, which in The Cancer Journals (1980) and A Burst of Light (2017a) is construed along the lines of the politics of illness. The writings on living with cancer also shed considerable light on the dialectic between self and community as sources of care and resources for survival. Writing movingly about her treatment and recovery from breast cancer (which included a mastectomy and a campaign by her healthcare providers and volunteers at the hospital to shame her into wearing a prosthesis), Lorde illustrates the concept of support in these terms: support will always have a special and vividly erotic set of image/meanings for me now, one of which is floating upon a sea within a ring of women like warm bubbles keeping me afloat upon the surface of that sea. I can feel the texture of inviting water just beneath their eyes, and do not fear it. It is the sweet smell of their breath and laughter and voices calling my name that gives me volition, helps me remember I want to turn away from looking down. These images flow quickly, the tangible floods of energy rolling off these women toward me that I converted into power to heal myself. (Lorde 1980: 39) Lorde’s dream-like image of support from others finds echoes and variations throughout her poems, for example, when she tells of ‘a warm pool / of dark women’s faces / in the sea listening’ (Lorde 2000: 397–8). In a further variation of the image that depicts the circle as being trapped on a precarious ice floe, Lorde warns us to ‘Step lightly / all around us / words are cracking / off we drift / separate and syllabic / if we survive at all’ (Lorde 2000: 429). Further still, those whose survival is most precarious and solitary ‘live at the shoreline’ of decision in Lorde’s imaginary (Lorde 2000:  255). Women moreover are characteristic in their solicitude, inasmuch as they ‘learn / to love / children / building sand castles / by the rising sea’ (Lorde 2000: 70). As expressed in the prose of The Cancer Journals, however, the image of the circle of swimmers comes closer perhaps than any other I’ve found to

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capturing what I mean by the social mediation of vulnerability. Each of us will one day succumb to the waters through exhaustion and the inescapable weight of our bodies. But assuming we have a dedicated circle of swimmers around us to help us stay afloat, we can live long and happy lives before this happens (perhaps even letting go with a measure of peace, and with few regrets). Lorde in fact returns to the theme of going alone into the water as a metaphor for death in one of her final poems: This could be the day. I could slip anchor and wander to the end of the jetty uncoil into the waters a vessel of light moonglade ride the freshets to sundown and when I am gone another stranger will find you coiled on the warm sand beached treasure and I love you for the different stories your seas tell. (Lorde 2000: 472) Those who lack affiliation in Nussbaum’s sense – that is, those who lack social support networks and sources of significant meaning and confidence  – can be pictured as treading water alone, or with only the occasional helping hand from a largely disinterested or disdainful bureaucratic other. Further, those who are actively targeted through slow death or debility or outright destruction may be pictured as having weights tied to them or having lifesaving pieces of driftwood pushed just out of reach. I don’t want to belabour the metaphor, and we must grant that Lorde’s image drastically simplifies the social dimension of vulnerability. She was in fact exceptionally vulnerable when she composed it; normally, or at least in a healthy society, each individual above a certain basic

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threshold of capacity would receive help from other swimmers and also help the other swimmers in turn (thus complicating the imagery). What is inspiring about the image as well as Lorde’s struggle with cancer in general, however, is how she makes it mostly about others while never becoming self-abnegating. Just as she insists that one can mine one’s privilege to contribute to the project of social justice, Lorde also gives myriad examples of turning to one’s weaknesses for strength – with the crucial caveat that the strength that one knits out of one’s own weakness, in conjunction with the weaknesses of others, is not an end in itself. Rather, it is a means of addressing the social causes of that weakness and its aggravating factors in a just way. To invoke Plato, with Lorde one ‘returns to the cave’ so to speak, but armed with a program to let the light in and break the chains. She is not content to invite a select few initiates to accompany her outside. Granting then that Lorde’s image of support is highly illustrative of the social dimension of vulnerability, two features of the image leap out as additionally significant. First, there are no men in the circle of swimmers. Is this a function of the daydream’s unique eroticism, of Lorde’s own desires? This could be a factor. But notwithstanding the centrality of the erotic to Lorde’s conception of poetry, I  doubt that it is a sufficient explanation. The image may have also derived from Lorde’s real social circumstances at the time of its composition, in which men played negative roles either directly or indirectly (or, played roles of little significance). It could also be a commentary on the social dimensions of women’s vulnerability in general: in a world where women and women of colour in particular are still disproportionately exposed to gendered violence, there are commonly situations in which they must rely primarily upon each other for social support and survival. As Lorde depicts it in the poem ‘Fishing the White Water’, there are times when ‘we cast into rapids / alone back to back / laboring the current’ (Lorde 2000: 380). Men, by contrast, ‘claim the easiest spots / stand knee-deep in calm dark water / where the trout is proven’ (Lorde

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2000: 379). Social injustice thus described is not, however, inevitable: in ‘some distant summer’, Lorde tells us, ‘working our way farther from the bone / we will lie in the river / silent as caribou / and the children will bring us food’ (Lorde 2000: 380). But this is not the world as Lorde finds it. Second  – but it is necessary to read further into The Cancer Journals to ascertain this  – the circle of swimmers, Lorde’s real support network, is essentially a chosen family. As she put it in the poem ‘Scar’, I have no sister no mother no children left only a tideless ocean of moonlit women in all shades of loving learning a dance of opening and closing learning a dance of electrical tenderness no father no mother would teach them. (Lorde 2000: 221) It is possible to read too much into imagery such as this, despite Lorde’s wellattested differends with her mother, her sisters and her father. It could simply be that she has painted her image of support according to that which was available to her at the time. However, I believe that due to the circumstances of her upbringing, her stance on the family is complex, being at once critical and affirmative. The dimension of family is in any case for Lorde as important and complex as it is in Breillat and Didion; moreover, it plays upon themes of vulnerability and strength in explicit ways. I’ve already mentioned my eldest son’s burgeoning interest in change, and the distressing new idea that his Mom and Dad are vulnerable beings. In this connection, and as a father, I  am particularly touched by Lorde’s writings on her parents. The themes of vulnerability and strength are constantly invoked here. Lorde’s complicated relationship with her mother is explored throughout her writings and is elegantly captured in the following judgement. An adolescent Lorde has just lost her ‘first true friend’ Gennie to suicide (Lorde 1982: 87). She relates to the reader that ‘Gennie was the first

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person in my life that I was ever conscious of loving’ (Lorde 1982: 87). Sitting dejectedly, with her head down on the kitchen table, Lorde listens as her mother’s attempts at comforting her turn quickly to harangues, criticisms and I-told-you-sos. As Lorde put it, ‘The merciless quality of my mother’s fumbling insights turned her attempt at comfort into another assault. As if her harshness could confer invulnerability upon me. As if in the flames of truth as she saw it, I  could eventually be forged into some pain-resistant replica of herself ’ (Lorde 1982: 101). Arguably Lorde’s mother cannot be  – and in Lorde’s writings is never simply – chalked up to a bad mother in light of her oft-noted harshness. But it is evident that Lorde did not have the mother she needed. This idea sheds light on her striking claim that black women, many of whom have reached out to her to express their feelings of isolation and anathema, need to ‘learn to mother ourselves’ (Lorde 2017b: 166). For Lorde, this means that ‘we must establish authority over our own definition, provide an attentive concern and expectation of growth which is the beginning of that acceptance we came to expect only from our mothers’ (Lorde 2017b: 166). Learning to mother oneself means ‘learning to love what we have given birth to by giving definition to, learning how to be both kind and demanding in the teeth of failure as well as in the teeth of success, and not misnaming either’ (Lorde 2017b: 166). Differently put, it means ‘the laying to rest of what is weak, timid, and damaged – without despisal – the protection and support of what is useful for survival and change, and our joint explorations of the difference’ (Lorde 2017b:  167). Lorde is suggesting here a relationship to vulnerability that would neither deny it nor wallow in it. She is sketching a relation of care that is about both love and survival (Lorde 2017b: 47). Lorde has also written on her own mothering, which she construes precisely in terms of teaching the lessons of love and survival to her children (Lorde 2017b:  47). Particularly interesting in this connection is the article wherein she describes her relationship to her son (Lorde 2017b: 45–54). Like

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Breillat, though considerably less often and in considerably different terms, Lorde makes a certain amount of space for the question of specifically male vulnerability in a neoliberal system. As children growing up in an interracial, lesbian-parented household, Jonathan and Beth’s situation is more fraught than that of their peers. But Jonathan’s way is ‘more difficult’ (Lorde 2017b: 46); in particular, his position is one of ‘both power and vulnerability’, since he not only has ‘the advantage of our blueprints for survival’, but he must also ‘take what we know and transpose it into [his] own maleness’ (Lorde 2017b: 46). Lorde is quick to stress that Jonathan’s process of coming to terms with his masculinity  – even with the epistemological benefits of being raised in a lesbian and inter-racial household as she sees them (Lorde 2017b:  48)  – is ultimately his own responsibility. As she stresses, ‘I do not exist to do his feeling for him’ (47). And the importance of this point is quickly generalized:  ‘Men who are afraid to feel must keep women around to do their feeling for them while dismissing us for the same supposedly “inferior” capacity to feel deeply. But in this way also, men deny themselves their own essential humanity, becoming trapped in dependency and fear’ (Lorde 2017b: 47). Lorde, however, is also quick to point out that, responding to a situation in which he was bullied, she can share invaluable emotional lessons with Jonathan by talking about how she herself has been afraid (Lorde 2017b: 49). This allows her to stave off the beginning of the ‘destruction of her son’ through toxic masculinity, by teaching him that he does not always need to fight in order to be strong (Lorde 2017b). To a dad like me, however, Lorde’s account of her own father proves particularly resonant. First of all, it emphasizes a host of themes, fears and anxieties about fatherhood that could be said to be timeless or universal. Lorde speaks, for instance, of her father, ‘whose great hands / weakened in my judgment / whose image broke inside of me / beneath the weight of failure’ (Lorde 2000: 97). But second, Lorde’s account is also evocative of the anxieties of fatherhood that are specific to neoliberalism  – for example, the

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ways in which the relationship between a father and his child can be coloured by distance or aloofness, on account of the interplay of patriarchal norms, the false anthropology of radical autonomy and the grind of everyday economic pressures. Lorde’s account of her father also goes some way in explaining why the image of the swimmers, as a metaphor for support, does not contain any men. Lorde’s relationship to her father is never very deep, and he figures in her memories mostly as distant and intense. As she relates, there were ‘not many’ warm moments with him (Lorde 1982: 67). This hardness or aloofness helps us to understand why at times her encounters with his vulnerability left a disconcerting impression. In particular, Lorde depicts her father’s vulnerability – or as she interprets it, his reticence to display his full humanity – through the activities of sleeping and eating. Note that sleep is also in play in my interpretation of Breillat. Note further, though this point is outside of the scope of my analysis, that Vasse also links the theme of eating to Breillat’s central themes (Vasse 2004: 108–13). Lorde relates how Sometimes when I  came home for lunch my father was asleep in my parents’ bedroom before he returned for work . . . through a crack in the portières [I]‌peeked in upon my sleeping father. The doors seemed to shake with his heavy snoring. I watched his mouth open and close a little with each snore, stentorian rattles erupting below his nuzzled moustache. The covers thrown partially back, to reveal his hands in sleep tucked into the top of his drawstring pajamas. He was lying on his side toward me, and the front of his pajama pants had fallen open. I could see only shadows of the vulnerable secrets shading the gap in his clothing, but I was suddenly shaken by this so-human image of him, and the idea that I could spy upon him and he not be aware of it, even in his sleep. I stepped back and closed the door quickly, embarrassed and ashamed by my own curiosity, but

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wishing his pajamas had gapped more so that I  could finally know what exactly was the mysterious secret men carried between their legs. (Lorde 1982: 62, emphasis added) Later she tells how at the office of her parents’ business where her father often slept and ate, ‘I was never allowed to go upstairs, nor to enter the room where my father slept. I  always wondered what mysteries occurred “upstairs”, and what it was up there my parents never wanted me to see. I think it was that same vulnerability that had so shocked and embarrassed me the day I peered into their bedroom at home. His ordinary humanity’ (Lorde 1982:  66–7, emphasis added). Regarding eating, Lorde relates how ‘If anyone came in to see my father while he was eating, I wrote out a receipt, proudly, or relayed the message to him in the back room. For my father, eating was too human a pastime to allow just anyone to see him at it’ (Lorde 1982: 67). Thus, while Lorde gleans lessons in vulnerability and strength from her father, these are ultimately of a negative kind; he is largely remembered through his absence and through his avoidance of everyday humanity through a lack of self-care and intimacy  – factors which eventually lead to his early death. As Lorde recounts in another beautiful image of the relation of support, My father leaves his psychic print upon me, silent, intense, and unforgiving. But his is a distant lightening. Images of women flaming like torches adorn and define the borders of my journey, stand like dykes between me and the chaos. (Lorde 1982: 3) Thus, while she has ‘always wanted to be both man and woman, to incorporate the strongest and richest parts of my mother and father within/into me’, Lorde has also felt ‘the age-old triangle of mother father and child, with the ‘I’ at its eternal core, elongate and flatten out into the elegantly strong triad of grandmother mother daughter, with the ‘I’ moving back and forth flowing in either or both directions as needed. Woman forever’ (Lorde 1982:  7).

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Her father forms a link in a lineage that remains, for her, both socially and mythically female. Speaking of Carriacou, Lorde recounts that ‘[t]‌here it is said that the desire to lie with other women is a drive from the mother’s blood’ (Lorde 1982: 256). Finally we should consider how, quite strikingly, Lorde invokes her father’s image in the context of swimming, or more accurately in the context of learning how to swim. It is worth citing the poem ‘A Question of Climate’ in its entirety here: I learned to be honest the way I learned to swim dropped into the inevitable my father’s thumbs in my hairless armpits about to give way I am trying to surface carefully remembering the water’s shadow-legged musk cannons of salt exploding my nostrils’ rage and for years my powerful breast stroke was a declaration of war. (Lorde 2000: 390) The imagery here is absolutely compatible with that of the circle of swimmers described in The Cancer Journals. The water is ‘the inevitable’, which calls to mind Lorde’s mortality as well as her vulnerability more broadly conceived. But if the water is the inevitable, Lorde still mightily resists it – first, through what we surmise are her panicked thrashings, but later, by means of her ‘powerful breast stroke’. Against whom or what, though, does the breast stroke constitute a ‘declaration of war?’ Certainly it is a declaration of war against the inevitable as such, though as we have seen, the sick and dying Lorde would re-evaluate

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the wisdom of taking such a posture of omnipotence. But the breast stroke is also arguably a declaration of war against the man who first dropped her, thrashing, into the waters. Significantly, the very same man who terrifies Lorde through his brutal lesson is the one who thereby teaches her how to be strong. As Lorde expresses it through the title of a different poem: ‘A Rock Thrown into the Water Does Not Fear the Cold’ (Lorde 2000: 238). This, then is another way in which the lessons of her father – perhaps the lessons learned from men in general – serve as a powerful but ultimately negative moment in the development of Lorde’s character, wisdom and strength. In sum, Lorde makes room in her image of support for men, and for family – but only indirectly or in principle, and on the condition of healthier, more fulfilling and mutually nourishing relationships that are in large part, even decades on, still aspirational. This would help us to conceive of why there is no paradox in Lorde, interpreted here as a philosopher, depicting or supporting or calling for more exclusionary, tighter networks of support than one might think appropriate, given philosophy’s implicitly universal and egalitarian address. As she put it, ‘our own spaces are essential for developing and recharging’ (Lorde 2017b: 52). But this realism about the work of existential care and social reconstruction by no means marks her as a ‘separatist’ in any strict sense, since as she put it, ‘having a male child helps to keep me honest’ about the limits of her activism (Lorde 2017b:  52). Lorde recounts a time when she and her partner Frances declined to participate in lesbian/feminist conference because Jonathan was thirteen at the time, and there would be a policy in effect that no boys over ten were allowed. As Lorde and Frances expressed to the organizers in a letter, Our 13-year-old son represents as much hope for our future world as does our 15-year-old daughter, and we are not willing to abandon him to the killing streets of New  York City while we journey west to help form a lesbian feminist vision of the future world in which we can all survive and

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flourish. I hope we can continue this dialogue in the near future, as I feel it is important to our vision and our survival. (Lorde 2017b)

Counting the living: Lorde and Didion revisited Let us return finally to Didion’s complaint about the attribution of privilege and, belatedly, to the meaning of this chapter’s title. Given the relations of care that sustain us and drive us as particular beings – not to mention the broader social labours that sustain us through deeper historical time  – an ethics of memory is perhaps integral to an ethical approach to the world in general. It cannot however be sufficient, both for reasons we have seen in discussing Didion, and more importantly, perhaps because the rightful claims of the living still clamour for our attention. While it is perhaps unfair to demand that someone in mourning turn their attentions too quickly back to the living, to go back into the world and continue to sustain, repair and build the conditions of a just or at least fairer mediation of human vulnerability, Lorde’s writings as well as the very trajectory of her life show us why some people cannot stop long to mourn. Notwithstanding struggles with trauma, depression and other socially debilitating factors (which warrant their own philosophical treatments: Kristeva 1989; Cvetkovich 2012), ceasing to work on the betterment of the world when one has suffered too much, retreating into oneself and giving up, may sometimes fairly be interpreted as signs of privilege. And I believe Didion herself knows this. Well into her 80s, and having already lost what was most important to her, she has recently made a small contribution to the analytical work that is vitally necessary in a divided and ‘post-truth’ America:  having published in 2017 South and West, decades-old travel notes on the notion of the American south as ‘the future, the secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy,

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the psychic center’ (Didion 2017: 14). To this extent, Didion has continued to contribute – even by mining notes from the past – to the analysis and possibly the betterment of her society. Lorde might conceive of this gesture as a positive appropriation of privilege, given over to the use of others.

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5 Catherine Breillat II: Embrace of Weakness?

II To briefly recap my reading of Breillat in Chapter 2, I hold her to be an exemplar of militant existential or pre-disciplinary philosophy. She conceives of her work in film and literature as comprising a personal project of self-discovery and self-mastery, aiming at the transcendence of not only social strictures but also of subjective structures of shame and, at the very core of her efforts, the chaos and drift of the unconscious itself. Notwithstanding my provocation of reading her primarily in terms of vulnerability and its constitutive role in the practice of philosophy, I concurred with Breillat and her interpreters that sex and sexuality play a fundamental role in her thought. Breillat’s specificity as a thinker, as well as her notoriety, derives from the fact that she wrestles with finitude largely in and through artistic depictions of the sexual encounter. These do not shy away from either the viscous materiality of the human body, or what she holds to be the pleasures of self-mastery and self-assertion through voluntary debasement. Following the interpretations of Bélot, Clouzot, Keesey, Vasse and Vassé, I noted the ways in which Breillat’s struggle not only always aims at transcendence, but also resists sublimation by directly incorporating violence, pollution and a qualified

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masochism, as a means to subjective fulfilment and an integral, dialectical vision of purity. The key to my reading, however, was in the distinction between the physical act of sex and the process of falling in love, which I  approached obliquely through the theme of the vulnerability of the sleeping body. To recall the argument, Breillat not only conceives of physical love as love tout court (Breillat 2006: 224), but she also distinguishes physical love from mere sex, inasmuch as love always involves an ideal. In physical love the subject labours towards that ideal in parallel with the lover  – that is, with them but combatively, so also fundamentally alone, in the suspension of the ethical. Falling in love is therefore destined to fail, inasmuch as its means are incompatible with its end. Breillat admits though that it is human both to deny this failure (Breillat 2006:  201) and to always be ready in one’s heart to begin again:  ‘When we subsequently meet a new person, it’s not a second love – we’re always in the first love. Love is like prime numbers. One [love] isn’t divisible by the other. One’s previous history is abolished, it lends you no experience whatsoever’ (Breillat 2006: 217, my translation). Sometimes love fails spectacularly, as Breillat demonstrates for example with the murderous outcomes of Perfect Love, Romance (Breillat 1999c), and Bad Love (whose titles reflect the obsessive working through of basic ideas or insights that is a hallmark of Breillat’s work). In a more common and everyday sense, however, love fails when the lovers’ work of accession to their ideal becomes mired in vanities and trivial power games. What all such failures have in common is the imperative for both subjects to be strong and unyielding.1 According to such a vision of parallel strength, the act of sleeping with a person, in the sense of spending the night asleep next to them, would appear to be a quintessential act of opening oneself to them and letting one’s guard down both symbolically and quite concretely. But it might also, after all, be a ruse to expose one’s vulnerability in this way; sleeping with a person could be viewed as playing one’s second

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strongest hand in the tactic of vulnerability as strength (the strongest ruse of vulnerability in Breillat’s picture being the provocation of violence, up to and including one’s own murder, as per Vivian Parker). Thus, while the absolute exposure of oneself to the other does exist in Breillat, it serves a paradoxically self-serving and aspirationally self-preserving function in her work at least up to Bad Love. One gets the impression, however, that if Breillat’s struggle is indeed philosophical in my sense, it is also particularly quixotic and sterile. Though quite clearly comprising an endless process in the self-conscious mastery of being mastered, and though foregrounding vulnerability in a striking way, Breillat’s thought, by way of her quest, runs in circles to the extent that it doesn’t appear to link vulnerability to the social (in the sense of Lorde, e.g.). In terms that I have used previously, her project risks amounting to a spurious, merely additive infinity of sexual and/or amorous encounters rather than the integral achievement of self-knowledge or self-transcendence. We should question, however, the force of this ‘rather than’, since the problem as I see it here is not with the ‘infinitude’ of Breillat’s project, which she in any case self-consciously affirms. In this sense, throughout the book I  have employed the terms ‘bad infinity’ or ‘spurious infinity’ with tongue firmly in cheek. As I hope to have made clear in the Introduction, I am much more a partisan of infinity than I am of totality (Levinas 1988); for example, I explicitly maintain that the philosopher’s work is never finished, and I agree with Levinas, Critchley and Lyotard that ethical obligation is infinite. In fact, I hold Breillat’s dogged insistence on re-approaching her issues from different angles or at different levels of abstraction to be in general something that is quite admirable. The sense in which I use the terms ‘bad infinity’ or ‘spurious infinity’ in connection with her is actually social as opposed to metaphysical. My impression is that her personal project, if generalized to a larger group of people, could only amount to something like a series in Sartre’s sense

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(Sartre 2004:  256–69). At the end of the day, Breillat is building a monadic subjectivity, and it is doubtful whether even a plurality of such deeply personal projects could amount to anything greater than their sum. A key element in the argument of this book, rather, has been that the building of subjectivity depends upon social supports. It would be fair to question whether a community of egoists could ever do justice to our interdependency, or whether any such serial, quintessentially personal project ought rather be reconceived along more communitarian lines. Cutting things more finely, the problem lies in the insufficiently social and therefore insufficiently egalitarian conceptions that Breillat puts forth of weakness, power and strength. For the Breillat of 2006, power is conceived in terms of scarcity rather than abundance. Having power means ‘self-elevation’, and one is ultimately always elevated over others (Breillat 2006:  165–6). Thus, power as Breillat construes it is by definition powerover rather than power-with. It is necessarily subtractive, in the sense that my having power takes some amount of capacity or potential away from another person, rather than being mutually uplifting, or enabling, or productive – unless, that is, one has power as a group or class over another, dominated person or class, in which case one could have a measure of power-with, but only at the expense of others (this being the situation of men as a class both in reality and in Breillat’s films and novels). Power, according to Breillat’s conception, is therefore on the balance something that is hierarchical and disjunctive, rather than egalitarian and conjunctive (or, if one prefers, capillary and productive). There are no doubt times when it is politically expedient and/or ethically necessary to name and to fight manifestations of hierarchical, disjunctive power as such. But as Spade has persuasively argued, misconstruing power solely along the ‘perpetrator/ victim’ axis can have a distorting effect, both on our understanding of power and on the strategic and tactical dimensions of addressing its role in the maldistribution of life chances (Spade 2015: 50–72).

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Similar problems attenuate Breillat’s conception of strength. Recall that for Breillat, a woman can have strength in and through her vulnerability, even if technically she doesn’t (yet) have power – precisely, by being obliged, through her domination by men, to achieve a heightened consciousness and cultivate sophistical ruses (in the broadest sense of the term). In this connection, Breillat has not shied away from describing the ways in which she has ‘intellectually dominated all of the men who have been at [her] side’ (Breillat 2006:  208, my translation.). The alternative, if one is a woman in a relationship with a man, thus appears to be  – as I  explained in tracking the brutal arc of Bad Love – either being crushed under his power or undoing him with the strength of one’s weakness (or both, if the love in question is particularly ‘bad’). As I explained, this oppositional stance, which plays out in the erotic sphere in Breillat’s corpus, suspends the ethical by repeating the idea that power is a zero-sum game. While I have noted its resonance with Hegel’s master–slave dialectic, and while I have mentioned that Breillat strives to take down servile representations of women in general, an element that one would apparently look for in Breillat’s corpus in vain is the idea that women as a class could band together or with other classes and, on account of the strength of their weakness, transform the social world in a coordinated, ameliorative manner. Indeed, if women’s weakness is potentially the very source of their strength, then one could conceivably derive therefrom an anti-solidary principle to the effect that women who are truly victimized are simply women who have failed.2 Thus finally, it can be argued that Breillat’s conception of weakness itself is in some sense insufficient. If one follows Vasse in interpreting her works before her stroke in terms of progressively abstract, profound or purified stagings of a mythic logic of initiation, transgression and transcendence (Vasse 2004), then weakness strictly speaking cannot even exist in her universe. I don’t mean to suggest that there are no manifestations of weakness in her characters, for example. What I mean, rather, is that in her works, either weakness is purely negative, in which case it is there to be overcome and in any case it cannot

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survive, or weakness manifests as strength, in which case it is not actually weakness. If we hold Breillat to the norm of a basic social responsibility for artists  – which she explicitly rejects  – then it should be noted how her approach entails dangerous ideological consequences. It is in fact difficult if not impossible to conceive through her works up to 2007 a situation in which pure victimization, or even victimization of any kind whatsoever, is even possible; a woman or girl is always, in some sense, responsible for what befalls her (a case in point in this discussion would be the rape of Anaïs at the end of Fat Girl). I have already discussed Badiou’s worries about defining humans as victims (Badiou 2002); here the worry is that Breillat defines humanity in such terms as to exclude the case of the victim from its ranks altogether. What happens, then, between this decades-long artistic journey of a transcendence premised on individual strength and the simultaneously ethical and legal claim that Breillat herself has made: that she has been victimized, that she has suffered an ‘abuse of weakness’ (Breillat 2009a: 253) at the hands of a well-known con man? The answer, from a biographical point of view, is both mundane and obvious: what happened was merely an accident of biology, ‘a natural event, finally’ (Breillat 2009a: 9) which wreaked havoc with Breillat’s bodily capacity and cognition and, in my terms, drastically exacerbated her vulnerability qua condition of human finitude. Breillat’s recovery from her stroke, her continuing philosophical engagement through artistic production and, ultimately, the social aspect of her vulnerability through the titular ‘abuse of weakness’ that she suffered all become relevant and evocative of a more ethical approach to philosophical practice, the glimmers of which I detect in her more recent work. At this point it will therefore be necessary to unpack the memoir Abus de faiblesse (Breillat 2009a) and its filmic version Abuse of Weakness (Breillat 2013). Though these are not the only works Breillat has created since her life was indelibly altered by exposure to accident, they are certainly the most directly relevant to the topic at hand and will therefore set the tone for the discussion that follows.

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Abus de faiblesse and Abuse of weakness Breillat’s dual recounting of her recovery from stroke and exploitation by Christophe Rocancourt is already an achievement and perhaps signals the possibility of a philosophical shift:  it vacillates between a characteristic toughness and an explicit avowal of the socially determined weakness that I  have analysed as otherwise disavowed and banished from Breillat’s universe. As Breillat relates, being weak is a shame that she never wants to admit, especially to a social order that she believes would want to destroy her (Breillat 2009a:  65). This leads her to downplay the seriousness of the accident and its effects during the period in which Rocancourt exploits her. When a reporter asks her what the stroke has changed about her cinema, Breillat characteristically responds:  ‘the insurance’ (Breillat 2009a, my translation). It is important, however, before unpacking the memoir and the film, to remind the reader of several of Breillat’s methodological commitments. As briefly discussed in Chapter  2, Breillat largely re-works the same ideas over and over, holds the filmic image to be superior to the written or spoken word on account of its ideogrammatic character and, finally, also holds that one should betray textual source material whenever making a movie out of it, so as to create something new and important. While I have already dealt with the question of whether or not we have to strictly abide by these commitments in approaching Breillat as interpreters (e.g. by pointing to the incoherence that follows from taking some of her expressions of them literally), it is good to keep in mind that as Breillat conceives them, Abus de faiblesse and Abuse of Weakness do not simply constitute a memoir and its filmic adaptation. Rather, the two constitute what can be assumed are two steps in an evolving attempt to work through the implications of a traumatic series of experiences. Giving Breillat the benefit of the doubt, I  will therefore comment on the memoir before I comment on the film.

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Abus de faiblesse At the very outset of the memoir, Breillat recalls the event of her stroke in terms that echo several of the philosophical themes referenced or unpacked in this book. The stroke occurred while she was sleeping: ‘Without waking me, without making me suffer, this death passed like a feather’ (Breillat 2009a: 9, my translation). Lying in bed for ten hours upon awakening, staring at the ceiling, trying to mobilize her half-dead body, Breillat is ‘Trying. Trying to do something. Nevertheless. With me. With my body’ (Breillat 2009a: 9, my translation). The description of her state evokes the absolute exposure to natural accident, which can befall a person either violently or ‘like a feather’, if indeed it cannot be both. It also evokes the confusion and pain of the philosophical gesture of beginning, in the sense of beginning to master the accident or the exacerbated finitude that has befallen her from within the very condition of that finitude. Finally, Breillat’s description of her state evokes the self-consciousness of the philosophical endeavour, that is, through taking oneself and one’s finitude as one’s own object. The opening of Abus de faiblesse in this sense promises a philosophical labour of the type I have been describing throughout. As Breillat put it, she is embarking on a ‘new adventure’ (Breillat 2009a: 15, my translation). This new adventure, however, is shot through with Breillat’s usual themes: as she recounts, ‘[t]‌he hemiplegic falls like a stone, and must get up like a man’ (Breillat 2009a: 45, my translation). One worries from the outset that the story will play out in the usual, monadic way: that Breillat will only ever construe herself as ‘alone faced with pain’ (Breillat 2009a: 49, my translation). Let us spend a bit more time, however, with the philosophical aspects of the book’s opening. I  have already unpacked Lyotard’s gloss on Freudian deferred action in Chapter 3. There it was a question of an occurrence that is not really an occurrence – or rather, an occurrence that is not registered and is recognized as an occurrence only after the fact, when what signals is (by

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definition incompletely, inadequately) worked through. Breillat describes her stroke in similar terms: ‘Finally, nothing happened, I went to bed like you and I woke up like me’ (Breillat 2009a: 15, my translation). It is in this night where nothing happens, the epistemological darkness of what one cannot hope to fully master and despairs at being able to even begin mastering, that Breillat’s new ‘adventure’ begins. Breillat initially has difficulty accepting her new infirmity and avoids working out its implications in terms of her vulnerability. Walking slowly and deliberately with a cane in spite of Rocancourt’s visible impatience, she doesn’t care what he thinks of her or of her disability: ‘I’m a film-maker, I’m the one who is the proprietor of bodies’ (Breillat 2009a: 19, my translation). Breillat’s unwillingness to let go of her monadic conception of mastery is palpable: ‘You would never see me whimpering or complaining, but crying, yes. One cries from not asking anything of others. So, it is still a kind of courage. And it empties you’ (Breillat 2009a:  24, my translation). She believes that, in her dealings with Rocancourt surrounding the proposed filming of Bad Love and thereafter, she is running in the latter’s familiar, parallel trajectory:  ‘I, who wanted to steal everything from him [in terms of casting him in my film], never imagined that he would take everything from me. I thought: those who I want, want me. Those who I use, use me’ (Breillat 2009a: 32, my translation). The monadic conception of subjectivation operant in Breillat’s work is apparently premised upon an equal distribution of forces that she has until this time taken for granted. If it is indeed no longer possible to take it for granted, then there is perhaps an opening through which an understanding of victimization as such might finally emerge in her art. When Rocancourt comes into Breillat’s life  – she sees him on television and contacts him immediately to star in the film version of Bad Love – he is a well-known con man. His spectacular depredations are in fact precisely the source of his fame. His biography admittedly fascinates her, and he establishes himself in Breillat’s life by positioning himself as a lost son in need of a mother

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(Breillat 2009a: 44). While Breillat seems often in her telling to have not taken his tactics in this regard very seriously, she eventually avows that she had come to mirror him by positioning herself as his saviour. As she relates later in the memoir, addressing the reader directly in defence of her having been taken in by a serial predator, she claims that ‘with me, Christophe Rocancourt became a person. I  was proud of it . . . What woman would refuse to save a man?’ (Breillat 2009a:  180, my translation). Breillat’s acquiescence to Rocancourt’s increasingly outrageous requests for money and other forms of material and emotional support in any case suggests that he had insinuated himself into her life by establishing precisely this kind of relation. Rocancourt immediately begins testing Breillat’s psychological defences, teasing her for example about her ‘masochism’, which she questionably denies (Breillat 2009a: 50). But it seems that what really gets him past her defences is – unsurprisingly perhaps – his ability to play upon her pretentions of strength. As Rocancourt tells her, ‘You have too much courage.’ ‘I have none, I’m infirm.’ ‘I forbid you from saying that word!’ So he got angry. The upper lip of his small mouth began to tremble. And I felt that he loved me. At this moment, and perhaps not a moment longer, I counted for him more than my bank accounts. And this second was iron to me. A branch I could hold on to. (Breillat 2009a: 50, my translation) From this moment on, Rocancourt begins to treat Breillat not only as the mother he never had, but also as a disabled child (Breillat 2009a:  54). This allows him to demand certain kinds of care from her while systematically and insidiously sapping her agency. As a defence mechanism, Breillat increasingly retreats into laughter (Breillat 2009a), and this only cements the impression of her diminishment to Rocancourt and others. While she claims never to have succumbed to his tenderness – claiming in fact to ‘detest’ tenderness in

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general (Breillat 2009a:  82)  – Rocancourt comes to occupy an increasingly large part of her life. He becomes the only person to whom she can speak ‘man to man’ (Breillat 2009a:  87), and he instinctively seems to know what she needs to support her body as she adapts to its new condition (Breillat 2009a:  89–90). As he takes her in hand, he displays his characteristic and aggressive neediness: ‘Tell me that I will be your last love’, he murmurs into her ear, though Breillat claims to have known all along that she was no more and no less than his current means of supporting himself (Breillat 2009a: 90, my translation). She claims to have no recollection of giving in to this demand. But she hints, in any case – since ‘gestures and thoughts are the same thing’ – that she may not have had to have actually uttered the words for the thought they express to be understood (Breillat 2009a: 91, my translation). During the period of exploitation, Breillat was far from unaware that something was wrong. As their relationship progresses, she starts to be bothered, but not terrified, by the sums of money she lends him (Breillat 2009a:  88–9). He normalizes his extravagant demands through the sheer constancy of his presence; as Breillat relates, ‘intimacy is repetition’ (Breillat 2009a:  100, my translation). She also begins to buck against the efforts of others to intervene, or to take care of her needs more generally. There is a fascinating sequence where Breillat recounts something of ‘the interminable end of life of an Alzheimer’s patient’ (Breillat 2009a: 114, my translation). She fears that similar to the latter – for example, through the fact of her daughter now having to take her to the toilet – she has become ‘this body that is the work of others’ (Breillat 2009a: 115, my translation). Breillat’s formulation here is highly important to the view of vulnerability I have defended, and therefore some comment is required before I continue to unpack the memoir. While respecting greatly the shock that she must have undergone when her cerebral accident befell her, I must object to Breillat’s statement that she has only now become such a body. All human bodies are literally the works of others, though in a range of different senses and to greater or lesser degrees.

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When parents or caregivers nurture a child, for example, the continued existence and flourishing of this radically dependent body is in a very real sense their work (and their work can of course be shoddy). But even an adult body such as Breillat’s, that is, the body of the independent and tough-minded artist, remains the work of others throughout her entire life. Sometimes this is difficult to see on account of one’s privilege (as discussed at some length in Chapter 4). A person who has a wealth of opportunities and who uses them to strive hard and to achieve great things might claim to be ‘self-made’ in some sense  – but consider for example what food systems, health systems, city infrastructure and public safety, to name but a few social factors, have contributed to her sustenance and therefore to her success. Though Breillat has finally owned up here to the fundamentally social nature of her body, she appears to interpret this condition on first blush as something shameful or undesirable, and which has only befallen her along with her stroke. But she does not, apparently, see this debasement as a gratuitous condition; it is one that comes with age, if not infirmity. She appears to be aware, by bringing up her daughter in this connection, that the work of the other’s body is something that is passed down through generations. As I will describe when commenting on the film below, Breillat evocatively sketches the body as being at a minimum something that is achieved through the temporal succession of the family (if not the non-familial network of care). Such considerations aside, the memoir continues to detail the escalating pattern of exploitation until the inevitable rupture with Rocancourt. Possibly under the effects of the drug Rivotril, taken to counteract the seizures which followed in the wake of her stroke,3 Breillat begins to lose track of her finances and Rocancourt offers to take them in hand, literally, by physically facilitating her signing of cheques and the like (Breillat 2009a: 131, 133). She continues to deny his claims that she can do nothing without him (138), but she continues to comply as well – disarmed by his ‘infantile transparence’ (144, my translation). Rocancourt triangulates and compromises Breillat by making

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her complicit in keeping the secret of their financial arrangements from his wife Sonia (153–4), of whom she grows fond by spending time in their home (163). Though she comes to like Sonia even more than Rocancourt, she feels as though held by the ‘leash’ of his enormous debts to her, having become the prisoner of their mutual, shameful secret. At this point she almost never contacts her family. As she describes her financial bottoming-out, Breillat delivers a moving assessment of how she was swallowed up by her silence (and indicates something of the effort of self-mastery that must have been required of her to write the memoir): I would speak of it to no one, not even to Christophe. Victims of abuse of weakness are mute because they are ridiculous. And this woman, this big, rattled doll that I had become at his side – I would never forgive myself on account of her. . . . This woman stretched out next to Rocancourt, who is she? I  look at her. It’s me. Now, today, this very night, I don’t recognize her. What did I want? Where was I going? Did I want her to die, like in my films? I wanted him to kill her. To kill me? Not for a second, never, have I caught wind of my wanting to kill myself. But maybe, in the deepest fold of what I am, perhaps I was ready. . . . I am nothing but the sun to my own self, and I will no longer warm anyone. The pond in which I drowned myself is an execrable and bedazzling bath. A dead sea. The insubmersibility of tears and the bed of salt where, with Rocancourt, I went off to join the long idiotic cohort of abused women. Poor idiot. (Breillat 2009a: 166–7, my translation) During the time described, Breillat also gives the arresting metaphor of her ‘lounging’ inside of a cocoon, but without developing (Breillat 2009a: 164) – a state that would be anathema to the tireless artist I have described. The key here is that her life with Rocancourt was ‘regular’, like the life of those who love each other (apparently in a non-sexual sense; Breillat 2009a: 164). It gave her a

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measure of perceived safety in retreat from her cerebral accident, but without the spur to overcome her condition through the movement of transcendence she had followed all through her previous life. In spite of the mire Rocancourt pulls her into, Breillat continues to minimally resist; she laughs to unnerve him (Breillat 2009a: 170), and she hits and bites him when he physically ‘takes her by the nose’ (which she interprets to be an insulting metaphor for their relationship; 171). Yet, even as Rocancourt cleans her out and his marriage to Sonia collapses before her eyes, Breillat clings to him for a time longer as ‘the ultimate feeling of security in face of the absolute void’ (173, my translation). The narrative is not solely apologetic, however. It is also pedagogical. And one of the pedagogical points of Breillat’s narrative, especially through her direct addresses to the reader, is doubtless to show how commonplace her otherwise outrageous story could be. She claims the fact that it is her story to be simply ‘anecdotal’ (Breillat 2009a: 181). Thus, she believes she is delivering a lesson, both to herself and to others evidently, on characteristically human finitude and exposure to accident. This makes her memoir a philosophical engagement, as I  understand it, moreover one that is to some extent otherdirected. Breillat in fact gives a particularly scathing rebuke to those who would fail to heed this lesson: You who this morning still turned your glance away from the infirm as they walked by you from fear of contagion, I want nothing to do with you either. You are ignorant of the principles of life. I simply want you to know that one night in April 2005 I was like you and the next morning I was like me. (Breillat 2009a: 181, my translation) At this point however, Breillat casts doubt on my tentative interpretation of the arc of her works – specifically, on the idea that she has developed on the question of vulnerability through the experience of stroke and exploitation. As she put it, in terms right out of her 2006 interview with Vassé, ‘My strength and my extreme weakness are perhaps one and the same thing’. Moreover, she

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commits herself to surviving through the activity of defending her honour and tarnishing Rocancourt’s reputation (Breillat 2009a, my translation). Tellingly, she perceives this task to have costs, to the effect of further monadic entrenchment. As she put it at the close of the memoir: ‘He will have made me more alone, harder perhaps . . . I look at him and I see myself. So I say – get lost!’ (Breillat 2009a: 251, my translation).

Abuse of weakness My overview of the film will be much briefer on account of its largely recapping the same narrative. Here I am more interested in setting out a non-exhaustive list of philosophically pertinent examples of what Breillat does with the story in the filmic medium. I  am also interested in the real-life developments adapted for the film that happened subsequent to the events recounted in the memoir. Of particular relevance is that the film covers a period indicated at the end of, but not included in, the memoir proper: specifically, the legal proceedings that Breillat triggers against Rocancourt on grounds of ‘abuse of weakness’. Breillat first of all transforms her memoir in the 2013 film by giving the principal characters fictional names (Maude Schoenberg and Vilko Piran, played by Isabelle Huppert and Kool Shen, respectively). She also develops several of its themes. Her approach allows her greater artistic freedom, and it is in keeping with her career-long project of self-transcendence through artistic media. According to Breillat’s method, however, the film version is not a falsification but rather a deeper dive into the events of the memoir using the ideogrammatic means that she claims are missing from (non-poetic, Western) writing. For example, Vilko doubles Rocancourt in pointing things out to Maude like ‘Everything makes you laugh’ and ‘Nothing surprises you’ (Breillat 2013). What the film conveys with beautiful economy through the actor Kool Shen’s delivery, however, is the extent to which these observations can

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actually be construed as commands; Vilko is describing but above all ratifying, through a strange temporal logic, what he observes in Maude so as to make her character something of his own fashioning. We see this happen in a more traditional and in any case obvious way later in the film, when the following bit of dialogue occurs: ‘Aren’t you scared?’ ‘No, I’m not.’ ‘No, you’re not.’ (Breillat 2013) We saw how the theme of laughter, of wanting desperately to laugh and using laughter as a tactic of resistance, played a role in the memoir. It is presented in a brutal and arguably much more effective way in the film. Maude is in the hospital, and as a result of her stroke, she has lost control of the muscles in half of her face. She has difficulty speaking. She tells the occupational therapist that ‘What I’d really like is to laugh’. The therapist interprets this request in a purely iatric, mechanical manner4 and coolly instructs her on how to say the vowels EEE and OOO while exaggerating her lip movements. She gives Maude her mirror to practice with and leaves her alone while she labours to produce an obscene simulacrum of laughter. This depiction of the failure of compassion could be argued to drive home Maude’s solitude, to repeat the theme from the memoir that one is alone with one’s pain. The next scene, however, shows Maude with a therapist who is much more compassionate, and this suggests that Breillat’s approach to the medicalization of her injury is more nuanced than the first sequence alone would suggest. A further sequence in the film where Breillat excels at adding depth and condensing ideogrammatically regards her aforementioned realization that, whether through accident or through generational succession, she has become or is in the process of becoming a body that is the work of others. (Recall my objection that, irrespective of the acuteness of this feeling and the heightened efforts of others during her recovery, she has always been such a body.) Maude

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visits with her senile mother, her daughter and her young grandson. Her daughter helps to feed her and give her tea and also suggests the possibility of Maude checking into a nursing home. Maude looks on dejectedly as, peripheral to the conversation, her mother reaches into her pants and tears off her diaper in disgust. What this multi-generational scenario5 drives home is the notion that frailty is a common lot mediated by the succession of the generations – in particular, of the generations of women. Indeed, on account of Maude’s cognitive symptoms, her daughter would appear to count as the only fully mature ‘Kantian’ subject in the assembled family, and this would mirror the general situation of humankind (in which a certain generational wave of rational maturity and relative autonomy is constantly rising up out of childhood, cresting through adulthood and crashing down in old age). This is a stunning recognition of weakness as the common lot of humankind – even of those who currently do the work of caring for others – and it accords with Breillat’s warning to her readers who would deign to turn away from frailty and finitude. To add a final example, Breillat adds to the film a sequence where the protagonist speaks about her abuse with family and lawyers. The scene’s power, conveyed through Huppert’s delivery and the dialogue’s syntax, invokes not only the ‘traumatism and groping’ that Levinas (1997) connects with philosophy, but also the exhaustion and repetition that Kristeva (1989: 33–68) associates with depressive speech: It may seem strange but I can explain all the details except the cheque for 240,000 . . . I knew I had to stop, but I didn’t care, I was lucid but . . . I must have done it, since I did it. . . . I did realize it, but it didn’t matter. I don’t know how to put it. It was me, but it wasn’t me. It was me . . . but it wasn’t me. But it wasn’t anyone else, so it was me. Maybe that’s how I am. But it wasn’t me. It wasn’t me. (Breillat 2013)

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This gives us a nuanced glimpse, perhaps, of how Breillat has fared after the events depicted in the memoir and the film. In the universe of the film, her stated project of defending her honour and tarnishing Rocancourt’s reputation founders performatively on the contraction of her syntax when she faces up to the judgements of others. But through the very gesture of filming Abuse of Weakness as well as her other comparatively recent films, Breillat achieves her goal.

A return to sleep Taken together, Breillat’s meditations on her stroke and her exploitation are powerful philosophical gestures inasmuch as they self-consciously strive for the mastery of an acute and, for her, abnormal situation of being mastered. They demonstrate for example how the subject may take the fluctuation of its own personality and/or the ontological precarity of its own subjectivity as its philosophical material, as the closing bit of dialogue cited above powerfully suggests. But to return to a nagging question:  has Breillat really developed from the combative monadism that I explored in connection with Bad Love? I  believe and hope that Breillat has not given us the last word on her life’s project, but I can here sketch the beginnings of an answer. A crucial piece of the puzzle is how sleep is handled in Abuse of Weakness. Recall from Chapter  2 that Breillat conceives of sleep as a form of selfabandonment – both in itself and when one sleeps with others. If the sexual act can be in a sense rigorously philosophical, the act of literally sleeping with someone ups the ante to the point that one is prepared to totally abandon oneself to achieve oneself. But precisely because one is prepared to do so, it is perhaps impossible to ascertain whether or to what extent one is really in control. Thus, while Maude never has sex with Vilko, she lets him sleep at her house and in this sense, she has let him penetrate further into her world

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than she might have ever ordinarily allowed in the fullness of her powers. The risks for her are in this sense greater than those run with any lover in the traditional sense. Since whom one sleeps with is usually optional, but sleeping itself is an inescapable, anthropological constant, sleep forcefully puts the questions of privacy and trust on the table. In a certain respect, since her stroke and exploitation at the hands of Rocancourt, Breillat might be interpreted as exploring the possibilities inherent in a qualified embrace of weakness  – at least, if we hold her to be making an argument about the necessity as well as the pitfalls of trust when one has been significantly weakened. Breillat and the character Maude are in one sense pre-disciplinary philosophers in that they hit up against a wall of finitude and they struggle from within that finitude to master it. Recall that in Abus de faiblesse, the stroke steals over Breillat in the night without even waking her, while she was absolutely vulnerable; there is no possible flight from such a nameless enemy. But both Breillat and Maude find their activity of self-mastery to be brutally compromised through putting their trust in the wrong person. One is vulnerable in different senses, and some of these involve trust; moreover, the question of whom to trust cannot in the end be elided. The connection to sleep that I  am suggesting is evidently far from speculative. The action in Abuse of Weakness is frequently punctuated by shots of Maude sleeping, or waking, or drifting off to sleep; the corpulent folds of her duvet evoke a funereal shroud and only add to the impression of being deeply ensconced in a privacy that is even beyond privacy. And as Vasse alerts us, colours in Breillat’s films, especially from 36 fillette on, function as part of their symbolic armature (Vasse 2004: 169–74). It is of interest, therefore, to note that Maude’s pure white sheets and white pillow – evocative of the cocoon in which she describes herself as languishing  – give way to different permutations as the narrative of her exploitation develops. In a chaotic house under suspended renovation due to lack of funds, Maude tries to catch a troubled sleep – on

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an orange pillow and white sheets – with Vilko, who has called late at night, bedding down in the other room. After she has finally kicked him out of her house for good, Maude goes back to white sheets and a white pillow. Thus, the privacy beyond privacy that is sleep is an exceptionally fragile privacy. It is uniquely apt to be troubled by intrusions from the outside – that is, if I am reading Breillat’s deployment of colours correctly. There is indeed a sense in which for Breillat, sleep is to be avoided if it is not on one’s own terms. As she recounts her hospital recovery, Breillat relates that she refused sedatives: ‘You won’t touch my brain, you hear? . . . I don’t sleep, I live. It’s not like it used to be, but it’s still me’ (Breillat 2009a: 59, my translation). Could the Breillat who has passed through this recovery, and who begins to explore sleep as a modality or a metaphor of her being, be wrestling now more than ever with this deepest privacy? At least, that is to the extent that it forms a part of her that is distinct from the dolorous privacy of the amorous encounter? If the answer to the question is affirmative, then Abuse of Weakness might not be an exceptional entry in Breillat’s corpus. I am particularly struck by the pertinence of the film The Sleeping Beauty to this discussion (Breillat 2010). The film was created following Abus de faiblesse and also foregrounds sleep, though it handles it in a way that is somewhat different and warrants a brief examination. Breillat plays marvellously and loosely with time in the film; almost immediately, the three fairy godmothers who are to bless the new-born protagonist Anastasia arrive late, hair still dripping from frolicking in a stream. One of them declares that they were ‘overtaken by time’ (Breillat 2010). Their lateness accounts for the girl being cursed by a fourth and much older fairy, Carabosse. Anastasia is slated to die at the age of sixteen, hand pierced by a yew spindle. The three fairies alter the curse, however, so that Anastasia will pierce her hand at age six instead and will dream for a hundred years to awaken finally (in present day) as a sixteen year old. As apparently the

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youngest of the fairies put it, ‘Childhood is interminable’ in any case (Breillat 2010, my translation). Prior to pricking her hand and activating the curse, the six-year-old Anastasia  – clearly a surrogate for Breillat6  – will only settle down to bed after winding an absurd number of alarm clocks, which are those among her possessions that she ‘loves most’ (Breillat 2010). Evidently she is aspirationally wide awake, as are Breillat’s protagonists in general. ‘My brave foot soldiers!’ she addresses the clocks before kissing one of them goodnight; ‘My army against sleep! But I’m the Commander-in-chief ’ (Breillat 2010). Breillat places a characteristic ideogram here: her clocks wound, Anastasia reads aloud from a dictionary, happening upon the word ‘hermaphrodite’: ‘A being who displays the characteristics of both sexes’, she reads, as time clatters by noisily all around her and, implicitly, the imperative to differentiate herself and become a woman draws nearer with the inevitable approach of sleep (Breillat 2010). Breillat herself has confirmed that the film is indeed a coming-of-age story: ‘I wanted to tell the story of this little girl who becomes an adult’ (Breillat in Kohn 2011). As she put it elsewhere, I wanted to show a little girl who dreamed that she was fighting all the worst dangers, who, in childhood, dreams that she’s a great warrior. Then when she becomes an adolescent, she knows nothing. All of her experience doesn’t matter. Like all [stories about] teenagers, it’s a transformation. It’s not the same world. (Breillat in Macaulay 2011) In spite of Anastasia’s best efforts to stay wide awake, she succumbs to the curse and the better part of the film recounts her dreaming. Significantly, this quickly takes on the aspect of a journey and then a quest, when she meets and bonds with the boy Peter. Peter is soon lost to her when he is seduced and taken away by the Snow Queen, whom Sallitt interprets as representing ‘the disenchantment of puberty’ (Sallitt 2011). Her search eventually leads Anastasia to a lonely, frozen steppe where she takes the risk of eating strange

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red berries. Evidently dying in her dream, she wakes up as her sixteen-year-old self in the present day – or at least, the viewer is led to believe she has woken up, though the surreal elements tellingly persist in the film for some time, and to some extent (Sallitt 2011). Anastasia encounters Johan, whom she insists is Peter, despite his protestations;7 consummating their relationship sexually and, we later find out, becoming pregnant, she divulges that ‘the truth about young girls’ is how they doggedly follow their ideals through the ‘nightmare of childhood’ (Breillat 2010, my translation).8 But if Anastasia herself already knows that this is ‘the truth about young girls’, then she is in some sense disenchanted, and therefore no longer a girl: ‘[I still love you] as before’, she tells Johan/Peter, ‘Except now it’s after. You see, I went alone into your world’ (Breillat 2010). In the end, The Sleeping Beauty and Abuse of Weakness each figure the sleeper’s process as something of a journey, though the emphasis in each film is ultimately different. In the former, Breillat centres the shedding of the childhood dreaming that was, in some sense, simultaneously constitutive of but incompatible with the older person; in the latter, she recounts her losing, but then her regaining of the privacy beyond privacy to which she was largely reduced by cerebral accident and putting her trust in the wrong person. One sequence of images from The Sleeping Beauty arguably captures Anastasia’s/Breillat’s process perfectly. At one point the film depicts her wandering through the vast, wintry steppes of her slumber, astride a doe reindeer. Aside from the dream as metaphor for the journey to adulthood, it could be taken to indicate a higher order mastery or a renewed bravery in Breillat’s later period: specifically, and through the metaphor of the sleeper’s journey, it could be taken to represent the solitary work of achieving clarity in a monadic and increasingly hostile and indifferent universe. But, since Breillat’s images are after all ideogrammatic according to her self-interpretation, we might also extract a different or even an opposed meaning from the walk across the steppes. First, and this is perhaps easy to miss on account of our

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tendency to construe the social anthropomorphically, Anastasia is not alone; she is with the reindeer, in whom she places an implicit trust and has moments of calm, mutual tenderness. Moreover, she places an implicit trust in the world both in and outside of the dream, which can be grasped through her setting out upon the quest in the first place, as well as the openness to others she evinces throughout. It is a trust that had to have been there all along, even if perhaps she had never realized it. The images I am describing are lasting ones because each of us makes our journeys across the steppes. No matter how lonely the crossing might seem at a given moment and no matter whether we finally avow it or not, the journey is always premised upon our constitutive and radical openness to others.

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6 Conclusion: Vulnerability and the profession

In this book I  have stipulated a definition of philosophy. According to this definition, almost everybody philosophizes at some point in their lives, and at least to some extent. Sometimes their philosophizing  – their existential activity of the self-conscious mastery of their being mastered – slides into a highly recursive, learned and to some degree historically oriented disciplinary approach to such activity. This is a complicated way of saying that some people choose to study philosophy in an academic setting and that a smaller number still will turn this disciplinary engagement into a profession. In what remains I would like to briefly and further reflect upon where disciplinary engagement fits for me – both in terms of the book you have just read and in terms of the future of philosophy as I see it. Situated as I am in the profession, it might strike the reader as surprising or counterintuitive that I have chosen to illustrate my definition with the help of three non-disciplinary thinkers, three ‘non-philosophers’. In the preceding chapters, I  have done my best to explain why they knock at the discipline’s door, as well as the extent to which their works can be mined for philosophical lessons. In the end I hope to have shown why Catherine Breillat, Joan Didion and Audre Lorde blur the border between non-disciplinary and disciplinary philosophy  – or rather, why they help to point out that the professional

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philosopher’s narcissism is only one of minor differences. Moreover, I  have striven to show that Breillat, Didion and Lorde do this while demonstrating the plurality of means or idioms in which philosophical activity as I construe it can actually be pursued, thus inviting the disciplinary philosopher to cross the ‘waterless moat’ (Appiah 2009: 5–32) and to refresh her practice with closely kindred pursuits, sources and models. I believe that the three thinkers I have examined help to make the case that disciplinary philosophy is simply a higher order and specialized version of a common human activity that happens in a wide variety of ways and at varying and fluctuating degrees of sophistication, depth and obstinacy. One of my stated aims herein is to have contributed to the democratization and therefore the survival of philosophy in an economy and an ideological order that puts a price tag on it while overall discouraging it.1 This explains in part my welcoming of three disciplinary ‘non-philosophers’ or borderline philosophers into the fold, since I believe this contributes to the impression that philosophy is present and of vital relevance even outside of the academy. Such a strategy, however, requires further comment. The approach I have taken has struck some early readers and audience members as being dangerous, inasmuch as the positing of an existential or pre-disciplinary philosophical practice risks giving the impression that ‘everything is philosophy’. This is not of course what I  am saying, since clearly not every activity is the selfconscious mastery of one’s being mastered. But if my approach is indeed interpreted as amounting to such an indifferentism, that is, to the view that philosophy is everywhere and that the discipline is only what everyday people are always doing anyway, then it would buttress the idea that disciplinary philosophy is in some sense redundant. This would amount to further imperiling the discipline, and the irony of such a situation would be that in thinking through the connection between philosophy and vulnerability, I would be contributing to making disciplinary philosophy itself even more vulnerable than it already is.2

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What I hope to clarify in what follows is why my levelling of disciplinary philosophy’s longstanding pretentions, far from suggesting its indifference or rendering it redundant, is actually a means of speaking in its favour. In short, and as this Conclusion will hopefully reinforce, my approach aims at dispelling the impression of disciplinary philosophy’s remoteness and hermeticism. Philosophy as I see it is connected to average basic human needs, and to the task of social reconstruction that must be pursued largely, but while respecting the wide range of human diversity, according to their image. Disciplinary philosophy, therefore, can and should be a valued pursuit on account of its well-positioned facilitating role relative to the fulfilment of certain key needs. What then are these needs, and how do I ground the claim that disciplinary philosophy speaks to them, moreover in an exemplary way? Since I  don’t do much to defend my definition of philosophy beyond pointing to different philosophical articulations of the anthropological groundedness of all (human) thought in the Introduction, this book has been more about ‘showing’ than ‘saying’, to once again borrow Wittgenstein’s distinction (Wittgenstein 2000:  26). But while the definition of philosophy in question is certainly stipulative, it is not at all arbitrary. It stems rather from several years of practice in the field.3 In particular, it is inspired by my pedagogical experiences:  working with others in a disciplinary setting and observing how they incorporate whatever small guidance and tools I can hope to offer them into their own existential struggles, while offering me much that is philosophically rich in return. This in the end is what constitutes the perceived needs addressed by disciplinary philosophy as I see it: engaging in variously critical, affirmative, creative and above all self-transcending modes of thought is both typically and recognizably human.4 Moreover, their lack is often perceived as a deficit. In short, I am claiming that there is a characteristic though not universal human need for transcendence. It can be fulfilled in a variety of ways, but on account of her specialized training, the disciplinary philosopher is an

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exceptional guide. To be clear, not every student will recognize or take me up on what I have to offer as a professional philosopher; some have told me flat out, for instance, that philosophy is certainly interesting but is too much effort for seemingly so little reward. In nearly every class though, I encounter students who approach the semester’s topic in terms of it being a vital activity – in the sense of being linked, in some way, to what is important or even of central importance in their lives. Such experiences have convinced me that at the end of the day, I am merely dealing in variations on common struggle. The difference is that I am doing so with the benefit of training in analytical and critical thinking and a vast history of influential and time-tested disciplinary philosophical arguments behind me. Not only do I maintain that this difference is small, but also that it can be immensely helpful to the individual, in the real work of her daily living. And this allows me, finally, to launch a general plea for the cultivation and training of philosophical activity through support for disciplinary philosophy and its close cousins in the humanities. One pedagogical experience in particular has stood out for me in terms of how it has linked up with the themes in this book. In the fall of 2016, and at the recommendation of colleagues who had worked with the programme previously, I  gave a ten-week course for a local project called Discovery University.5 Discovery U is an ongoing joint initiative of the Ottawa Mission, Saint Paul University, the University of Ottawa, Carleton University, the Ottawa First Baptist Church and Dominion-Chalmers United Church. The programme offers free non-credit university courses in the humanities and social sciences to homeless or low-income students. Courses include one lecture and one facilitated group discussion per week. Students are provided with course packs and other materials, bus fare, snacks and a meal during weekly discussion groups. During my time with Discovery U, Program Coordinator Ann Elliott and a group of dedicated volunteers expertly guided the experience both in the classroom and behind the scenes and intervened as needed.

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Each Friday morning for two hours, thirty plus students would join me in a classroom at the University of Ottawa for lessons in philosophy. The course I taught was one of two Discovery U courses offered that fall, and it was titled ‘Wisdom of the Ancients – For Today’. The topic proved to be popular, and when the semester started, there was a waiting list. We began with a class on local Anishinabe creation myths. This was not purely out of interest, though the myths are certainly beautiful and they spoke to the cultural realities of some of the students. The meaning of this exercise was also ethical and political, because Ottawa is built on traditional, unceded Algonquin territory. The students and I then worked our way through ancient Greek, Roman and Chinese schools of thought. Each week we would broach different existential and contemporary social issues like ageing, friendship, poverty, death or the family through our readings of classic sources. Though I put a great deal of effort into serving the students and was honoured by the positive feedback I received from many of them when the course was over, I was unprepared for the extent to which the experience would prove instructive, even formative, for my work as a disciplinary philosopher. And without exaggeration, the experience was absolutely decisive in the story of the composition of this book. Discovery U was not, to be clear, my first collaboration with street-involved and low-income persons. I have commented elsewhere on the very humble contributions I  made, in collaboration with others, to poverty activism in Ottawa during the years when I  was a busker, a teaching assistant and a doctoral student in philosophy (McLennan 2012). Discovery U was, however, my first such collaboration in which philosophy was integrated as both the main focus and the main activity. Whereas my simultaneous commitments to social justice and to philosophy were for many years both precious and central projects, the link between them did not always seem obvious to me. I was more or less running on two parallel tracks and had a tendency to feel some amount of guilt about my pursuit of a vocation so apparently remote from social justice work. The formative aspect of Discovery U was,

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therefore, in its bridging function. The experience starkly demonstrated for me the untidy but dynamic boundary between existential and disciplinary philosophy, and it reinforced my intuition that philosophical activity in general, and even disciplinary philosophy in particular, may present as the object of a deeply seated human need and therefore raise issues of access and equity. My students in the programme came from an extremely diverse set of backgrounds and circumstances, so it is impossible to offer any but the vaguest generalization regarding whom I  was working with. Some of them lacked high school education, and some of them had graduate degrees or decades of professional training under their belts. Some of them were born and raised in Ottawa, and some of them were recent immigrants to Canada with a tenuous grasp of English and French, looking for a means to break out of their isolation. And significantly, the students ran the gamut of diversity when it came to their daily challenges and vulnerabilities. Through conversations with them, and always letting them take the lead on discussions concerning the private aspects of their lives, I gathered that some of the issues they faced included poverty, ill health, advanced age, homelessness, physical disability, cognitive impairment, mental illness, substance dependency, histories of abuse and trauma, social isolation, culture shock, institutionalization, medicalization, histories of incarceration and, of course, discrimination on the basis of sex, race, immigration status, disability, sexuality and gender non-conformity. With such high potential for discouragement and personal disorganization, it immediately became clear to me that for some of the students, their very presence in class each week was already testimony to great effort and an obstinate commitment to learning. But there was more:  their level of preparation and their contributions to class discussion, as well as the way they pressed me on unclear points and offered their own highly pertinent insights on classic philosophical arguments, put them well ahead of the curve of my typical classroom experience. In certain respects, the students of Discovery U

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outperformed my undergraduates and have prompted me to expect more out of the latter at every stage. To a partisan of philosophy, however, this effort on the part of the Discovery U students should not have been all of that surprising. Since disciplinary philosophy, especially the philosophy of everyday life expounded by ancient thinkers, systematically and creatively applies itself to a recursive unpacking of human encounters with finitude and accident, it is no wonder that students who have faced their share of struggles in life would have found many ways in which the material resonated. What was surprising, however, was the frequent levity of the classroom work. Far from being the death march of negativity that forays into ‘life’s biggest questions’ can turn into (Benatar 2017), this disciplinary encounter with universal themes of human vulnerability and suffering was an overall light-hearted and often humorous affair. I made sure to give the last word to the theme of love, working through the fragments of Sappho and related thinkers to the best of my abilities, and leaving the course on what I thought was a more elevating note. But my students good-naturedly outfoxed me on that one too and drove home the wisdom that would not have been out of place in a work of Breillat’s: that love is perhaps one of the greatest human struggles of all. There was, in short, no need to structure a positive spin into the drift of the course. Several of the students were so thrilled to be approaching questions of life’s pains and limitations in a systematic way that I became convinced that disciplinary philosophy – at least, to some extent or in some amount – can be felt as a deep-seated human need. This book, from such a perspective, represents a modest step in the direction of an existential unpacking of that need. True to the book’s centring of the social model of vulnerability, however, the question of access to disciplinary philosophy will have also to be attuned to the myriad and differentially distributed hurtles facing those who would wish to pursue it. While I  have featured three women ‘non-philosophers’ and discussed among other things

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their relation to sexism and misogyny in this book, it should be noted for example that women wishing to pursue philosophy in a disciplinary sense face disproportionate hurdles both as students and as professors.6 The call to further democratize philosophy on the basis of its speaking to a human need cannot, then, be made without acknowledging that both the diversity and the barriers to fulfilling human need are in need of further and rigorous examination. On the broadest assumption of such a need for facilitated philosophical activity, social justice would therefore entail not only equitable access to life chances, material goods and services, but also at least some amount of (equitable) access to training in the humanities (i.e. disciplinary philosophy and its close cousins). If this idea sounds implausible or like putting the cart before the horse, then let my experience recounted here testify to the contrary. And let it stand as a plea for disciplinary philosophy and the humanities in general:  if they can be so cherished and readily engaged in by those who typically lack access to them, then what grave errors might we be making when we permit them to erode by taking them for granted?

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Chapter 1 1 Keith Crome discusses sophistical practice in terms of the ancient Greek concept of ruse or mētis, roughly ‘various practices that concern the contingent and the unforeseeable’ (Crome 2004: 104). In McLennan (2015: 72), I interpret mētis as ‘forms of craftiness tailored to the moment’. It is important to note that not all sophistical ruses are logical, in the sense of belonging to the philosopher’s rationality or logos. They can be, for example, purely rhetorical or affective. But the sophist is indeed prepared to use the philosopher’s own tools against her. 2 To further trouble the facile distinction between philosophy and sophistry, we could note how for some thinkers the philosopher and the sophist come as a pair: for Badiou, for example, the sophist figures as an indispensable discourse partner who keeps the philosopher honest about the scope of her powers and saves her from the ‘disaster’ of dogmatism and terrorism (Badiou 2008: 15–20). 3 Crome centres his analysis of Lyotard and sophistry on the concept of ‘retorsion’, which has three interconnected aspects: (a) the sophist teaches the principle of arguing both sides, so that one is always able to retort; (b) the sophist shows that it is always possible to make another turn in the argument, specifically to turn the opponent’s argument back on her; (c) the sophist always manages a retort against the ‘last word’, thus implicitly destabilizing the notion of an absolute (Crome 2004: 96–100). 4 See McLennan and Guvenc (2015) for a discussion of Emmanuel Levinas, Judaism and antiphilosophy. 5 The point here about philosophical recursivity can be extended beyond the narrow discussion of antiphilosophy in Badiou’s sense. In general, any attempt to articulate why philosophy is useless, distracting or pernicious calls up questions of value and the ground of value, which ultimately beg philosophical articulation. For example, popular natural scientists such as Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye and Stephen Hawking have unfortunately contributed to the attack on philosophy in recent years. While their various misconstruals made from a wide-reaching public platform are doubtless troubling, it is above all noteworthy that they have attacked philosophy by making (meta-)philosophical statements. See Goldhill (2016) for a concise discussion of this trend with a focus on Nye in particular. 6 In an Anglo-American and naturalistic idiom, Noam Chomsky makes a similar point. He distinguishes between problems we are biologically equipped to solve and ‘mysteries’ that may innately lie outside of our grasp (Chomsky 1991).

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7 Simone de Beauvoir construes ageing as a socially mediated process of decline. She calls attention to the fact that one’s exigencies may diminish at the same pace as one’s capacities, therefore allowing old age to sneak up on a person and catch them unawares when it is revealed to them by others (Beauvoir 1970: 350). 8 Cf. Appiah (2009). 9 Two recent examples of how works in the discipline of anthropology dovetail with my concerns herein are Stevenson (2014) and Tsing (2015). 10 The concept of ‘compossibility’ that I use here is a cornerstone of G. W. Leibniz’s metaphysics. Cf. Leibniz (1991). 11 Speculations abound as to the upper limits of human longevity, but as David Benatar points out, so-called medical immortality is a misnomer. At best, there could be extreme longevity achieved through, for example, biomedical means. Ultimately it is reasonable to believe that the long-living human body would continue to be exposed to some forms of irreparable damage, and in any case, solar heat death will one day render the Earth and planets like it unfit for life (2017: 148). 12 May breaks down Williams’s forms of moral luck as follows: ‘First, there is constitutive luck, the luck of what kind of person we are . . . Then there is the luck of what kinds of situations a person finds herself in . . . Third, there is the kind of luck involved in the history of how someone comes to be the person he is . . . Finally, there is luck in how things turn out’ (May 2017: 32–3). 13 I am assuming here that to be vulnerable in the sense of having projects that can be disrupted requires a minimum of consciousness. But this does not necessarily mean that non-conscious human beings are not vulnerable in non-material ways. It could be argued, for example, that early foetuses and neocortically dead individuals possess a fragile potential, or a fragile inherent value, or that their value for others is fragile. 14 This fantasy is no straw man, but rather a historically recurring motif of economic and political liberalism that perniciously misconstrues how society functions. Milton Friedman, for instance, states that ‘the simplest form’ of a society organized through voluntary exchange ‘consists of a number of independent households, a collection of Robinson Crusoes, as it were’ (Friedman 1982: 19). The highly questionable postulate that each household is (in the abstract? potentially?) self-sufficient allows him to make the leap that it ‘need not enter into any exchange unless it benefits from it. Hence, no exchange will take place unless both parties do benefit from it. Co-operation is thereby achieved without coercion’ (Friedman 1982: 20). Friedman’s story, which abstracts mightily from the real conditions of capital accumulation and ignores crucial factors like the role of feminized and racialized care work in typically constituting the household unit of such a ‘coercion-free’ society (Davis 1983: 222–44; Barrett and McIntosh 2015: 59–65), is comparatively recent. But already in Marx’s time, it was possible to poke fun at the Robinsonades of liberal political economy (Marx 1990: 169). 15 For expanded, non-anthropocentric models of the social, see Donaldson and Kymlicka (2011), Tsing (2015) and Haraway (2016).

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16 ‘Affiliation. Being able to live with and toward others, to recognize and show concern for other human beings, to engage in various forms of social interaction. Having the social bases of self-respect and non-humiliation. Not being discriminated against on the basis of gender, religion, race, ethnicity, and the like’ (Wolff and De-Shalit 2013: 54). Nussbaum gives a slightly fleshed-out version in Creating Capabilities (2011: 34). It should be noted that affiliation is only one of a list of ten central human capabilities that Wolff and De-Shalit adapt into a list of fourteen key functionings, on the basis of their consultations with disadvantaged persons and the professionals who work with them. 17 The opposite of a corrosive disadvantage is not always a fertile functioning, and vice versa. Wolff and De-Shalit give the examples of bodily integrity and sense of humour to illustrate why. If I lack the functioning of bodily integrity, ‘such as living in constant fear of arbitrary assault’, then this will predictably hamper my other functionings (2013: 134). Having bodily integrity, on the other hand, is not necessarily fertile. Conversely, having a sense of humour might be fertile since it could open numerous doors for me. Lacking one, however, ‘may have relatively few other effects’ (Wolff and De-Shalit 2013: 134). 18 Consider the case of Bianca, a transwoman attempting to escape from an abusive relationship. Apparently having no recourse to stay safely with family or friends, she is forced to navigate a legal, shelter and welfare system in which, because all of her identification documents indicate a male name and gender, she must constantly out herself and therefore expose herself to further violence, harassment, health risks and stigma (Spade 2015: xi–xii). While I am highlighting the importance of affiliation in Bianca’s case, it should be noted that Spade’s focus is rather on ‘administrative violence’, that is, the ‘set of barriers . . . that produce significant vulnerability . . . across subpopulations of trans people’ (Spade 2015: xiii). As Spade puts it, in the context of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, he ‘met an endless stream of people facing a series of interlocking problems related to being basically unfathomable to the administrative systems that govern the distribution of life chances’ (Spade 2015: xii). One’s vulnerability, in short, is very much tied to where one is perceived to fit or not fit according to administrative systems of classification. 19 Cf. Losurdo (2014) for an overview of how such contradictions of humanism manifested in the history of liberalism. While a humanist himself, Margalit (2010: 175– 97) has analysed Stalinism along similar lines. 20 Cf. S. Taylor (2017) for a nuanced account of the connections between animal and disability liberation which bear directly on this question of humanism.

Chapter 2 1 Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (2011) remains an indispensable resource for understanding how neo-Platonism, broadly construed – that is, a philosophical stance

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which posits value in a transcendent reality and denigrates the body – has gone hand in hand with misogyny in the history of the West. 2 ‘Bad’ or ‘spurious’ infinity is a term I borrow from Hegel (2014) and will use from time to time in the book. While Hegel uses it to indicate the infinite as conceived by the understanding – that is to say, a numerical infinite standing over and above, or alienated from, consciousness, that is, an infinite that is not truly infinite – I use it in connection with Breillat to indicate an endless series of repetitive encounters with no progress by the subject. Though by no means a perfect graft, there is some resonance between the two usages. 3 The viral expression ‘Nevertheless, she persisted’ came to prominence in 2017. Scrubbed of its particular political context, it could stand as a philosophical slogan par excellence. 4 While it might seem obvious that Jeanne is Breillat, their identities do not go without saying. Sophie Bélot gives a helpful breakdown of the film that favours the formulation ‘Jeanne/Breillat’ (2017: 18–28). 5 Before the drama with Rocancourt, Breillat claims that she ‘no longer needs’ sexual identity, being ready to move on to the other interesting aspects of human beings (Breillat 2006: 156). This reads in retrospect as chillingly prescient. 6 In the 2011 bonus interview included in the DVD of Dirty Like an Angel (1999a), Breillat expands upon her concept of the cinematic ideogram as ‘something literature could never give’: ‘It’s the idea of having two contrary emotions in the same shot . . . The ideogram is both at the same time and that’s cinema’. 7 Breillat weighs in, for example, on the issue of the Islamic headscarf, which is in her view inherently a tool of domination – notwithstanding, and explicitly disavowing, the testimonies of Muslim women to the contrary. For her there is no question but that the hijab plays into a ‘totalitarian’ mobilization of modesty, in the interests of male dominance. For this reason, Breillat maintains that its very presence in her society poses a risk to her own freedoms (Breillat 2006: 90–1). As she put it regarding religion more generally: ‘There cannot be either a moderate Islam or a moderate Catholicism when it comes to women’ (Breillat 2006: 159, my translation). This point of view places Breillat squarely in the coordinates of the official French tradition of la laïcité, that is, secularism, and it speaks to how the latter has complicated the lives of Muslim (but not so much Catholic) residents of France. For a trenchant, contemporary French take on la laïcité that excoriates it both for its implicit Islamophobia and its tendency to buttress sexism by separating women along religious lines, see Delphy (2015). 8 Real French diversity does crop up to some extent in Breillat’s works, but it tends to be framed in terms of white anxieties. For example, Parisian cops cast suspicious eyes on ‘A-rabs [sic]’ and ‘those Africans’ (Breillat 1999a). 9 We must keep in mind Breillat’s linguistic and national context when judging her on her grasp of concepts like intersectionality and gender. Though the ‘French theory’

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roughly contemporaneous with Breillat’s generation was of enormous importance to the development of Anglophone discourses like gender studies and queer theory, French reaction to these discourses is comparatively recent and to some extent still under development, since many key texts remain untranslated. For an overview of how the French response to American iterations of French ideas has worked out in the case of queer theory, see Perreau (2016). 10 Actual mirrors are persistent in Breillat’s films – for example, Alice’s solitary confrontation with her reflection in Une vraie jeune fille (Breillat 1975), or Barbara gazing at herself, brushing her hair and not listening to Georges as he drones on about himself in Dirty Like an Angel (Breillat 1999a). For a robust philosophical reflection on the mirror function, see Irigaray (1985). 11 In particular, see Irigaray (1993a) and Levinas (1987). 12 Cf. Beauvoir (2012) for a description of Sade’s own ‘autism’, that is, solipsism. Regarding Breillat’s relation to erotic literature more generally, see her curated anthology of erotic writings Le livre du plaisir (Breillat 1999b). 13 Breillat gives a similar depiction of the adulteress: as Barbara tells Georges in Dirty Like an Angel, ‘It’ll be your doing. If I let you, it won’t mean a thing!’ And later: ‘I never wanted to give in . . . you made me.’ Similarly, ‘I’ll do anything you tell me. If you don’t, I’ll do nothing’ (Breillat 1999a). 14 Breillat tells Vassé that it is important to distinguish between a ‘no’ that is really a ‘yes’, and a ‘no’ that is really a ‘no’ because only the latter would really be a case of rape (Breillat 2006: 202). This admission that there are genuine ‘nos’ is of course hard to swallow since it both persists in blurring the issue of consent and fits poorly with Breillat’s claim that young girls, for example, actually desire rape. Moreover, as per her comments on Argento, Breillat seems to accord herself the ability to judge from afar what constitutes a real ‘no’, and this posture should be categorically rejected. 15 Breillat’s recent claim to be a feminist is somewhat surprising since she had previously rejected the label on account of it being too particularistic and essentially a term of abuse (Breillat 2006: 87). This is not to say that Breillat had no sympathy for certain self-identified feminists; quite the contrary (Breillat 2006: 88). Her key differend with them, as she explains it in the interviews with Vassé, was simply that they want to see images of the future, whereas she gives them images of the truth (Breillat 2006: 94). 16 Breillat apparently plays here upon the distinction, widely recognized in French social and political thought, between le politique and la politique. Le politique refers to ‘the political’ as such, that is, ‘the [ineradicable] antagonistic dimension which is inherent to all human societies’; la politique, by contrast, refers to ‘politics’, that is, ‘the ensemble of practices, discourses, and institutions that seeks to establish a certain order and to organize human coexistence in conditions which are always potentially conflicting, since they are affected by the dimension of “the political” ’ (Mouffe 2013: 2–3). Effectively, Breillat is claiming that art as such is always subversive: it is deeply antagonistic and hence of the order of the political (le politique), since it gives

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answers to questions no one even wants to pose (Breillat 2006: 206). She rejects in the same breath, however, the notion that one should use art to push a particular political line (la politique). There is an apparent confusion here: ‘political’ in the sense of le politique does not automatically mean ‘subversive’, but something rather more like ‘conflictual’ or ‘antagonistic’. Art is only ‘subversive’ by being antagonistic to something, namely a given balance of power or a hegemonic set of social and cultural norms. Since they contain more than one aspect or idea, Breillat’s films and novels can not only be both and at the same time subversive, in the sense of challenging norms of sexual decency and proper representation, but also highly conformist, in the sense of transmitting values and ideas that are already hegemonic. This is interesting in connection with Argento, #MeToo and #BalanceTonPorc; Breillat seems to think that her gaslighting and victim-blaming comments are automatically subversive because they are antagonistic, whereas in the actual balance of power, they are objectively quite reactionary and conservative. Despite herself perhaps, Breillat is indeed pushing a particular political, normative line. She is in any case aware of the power of art to do just that, notwithstanding her protestations that it shouldn’t: ‘[to a significant extent] our morality is founded on an aesthetics. If we wish to break up our abominable morality, it is necessary to alter our aesthetic codes’ (Breillat 2006: 120, my translation). 17 Breillat claims in the contemporaneous interviews with Vassé that it is ‘always the man who wants to kill the other’; further, she says that men are in some sense ‘made for this’ (Breillat 2007: 38–9). 18 It is also important to bear in mind that the film Romance (Breillat 1999c) culminates in the female protagonist murdering her husband. 19 Note that Breillat’s 1996 film titled Perfect Love has a similar arc and a similarly brutal ending. An analysis of the two films together would be apt, but is outside the scope of my argument here. 20 Note Breillat’s previous comments to the effect that her film images are ideogrammatic in the nature of Chinese characters. In Louis there is an association at play between the directness of communication and a certain (racialized) conception of simplicity, survival instinct and poverty. It is noteworthy that this association is not entirely foreign to Breillat’s self-conception, and in general it pays to be aware of whether and to what extent she might be expressing her subjective construction through her male characters. 21 This male pretension provokes resistance elsewhere in Breillat’s corpus and manifests as a complicated relation on the part of female protagonists to their own jouissance. As Barbara tells Georges in Dirty Like an Angel, ‘Happy, huh? Just ‘cause you made me come. I hate coming! I hate myself when I come. I don’t want to be loved like that’ (Breillat 1999a). 22 As previously mentioned, Breillat’s characters are aspirationally wide awake in a metaphorical sense, and this often plays out in terms of the nocturnal staging of their labours. Vasse points out how in Breillat’s films, characters generally pass through the

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crucible of night and in the morning reflect upon the transformation that has indelibly marked them (Vasse 2004: 156–9). 23 Though I highlight it here for good reason, the amorous relationship is not the sole location for the parallel work of self-transcendence in Breillat. Sisterhood is also a privileged and well-discussed theme in her films; it is central for example in Fat Girl (2001a) and Bluebeard (Breillat 2009b). It is tempting to interpret Breillat fairly literally on sisterhood on account of her frequent and candid comments about her relationship to her own sister, the actress and writer Marie-Hélène Breillat. I believe, however, that Keesey’s interpretation of ‘sisters as one soul in two bodies’ is also highly compelling (2009: 42–71). On this view as I gloss it, Breillat essentially splits herself into two characters whenever she depicts sisters as protagonists. Each exemplifies conflicting personal traits or different strategies and tactics in the work of self-transcendence. It is striking that at the ends of both Fat Girl and Blue Beard, the part of Breillat that is timid or too other-directed or insufficiently assertive ultimately dies. It is highly suggestive that in Bluebeard, after the timid elder sister Marie-Anne falls to her death and the precocious younger sister Catherine looks down on her weeping, the girls’ mother doesn’t see the body that is apparently lying in plain sight.

Chapter 3 1 The suggestion that Didion was and is perceived as exceptionally frail is pervasive in Daugherty’s biography (Daugherty 2016). 2 Though my emphasis in this chapter is on the parent’s discovery of her frailty as an ethical problem, it would be possible to unpack further aspects of how Didion links vulnerability to time and ethics. For example, Didion writes movingly of discovering the vulnerability of a childhood hero. She recounts how when John Wayne rode through my childhood, and perhaps through yours, he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams. It did not seem possible that such a man could fall ill, could carry within him that most inexplicable and ungovernable of diseases. The rumor struck some obscure anxiety, threw our very childhoods into question . . . in a world we understood early to be characterized by venality and doubt and paralyzing ambiguities, he suggested another world, one which may or may not have existed but in any case existed no more: a place where a man could move free, could make his own code and live by it; a world in which, if a man did what he had to do, he could one day take the girl and go riding through the draw and find himself home free, not in a hospital with something going wrong inside, not in a high bed with the flowers and the drugs and the forced smiles, but there at the bend in the bright river, the cottonwoods shimmering in the early morning sun. (Didion 2006: 30–1, emphasis added)

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Further, Didion writes about the loss of her parents in terms that mirror those in Blue Nights. Here it is also a question of the death of loved ones provoking thoughts about her vulnerability, but this time for her own sake. More precisely, in grieving her parents Didion grieves the loss of her own rootedness, and of the guarantee of her being in the memories of those who knew her best: Flying to Monterey [after the death of my mother] I had a sharp apprehension of the many times before when I had . . . ‘come back’, flown west, followed the sun, each time experiencing a lightening of spirit as the land below opened up, the checkerboards of the midwestern plains giving way to the vast empty reach between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada; then home, there, where I was from, me, California. It would be a while [!]‌before I realized that ‘me’ is what we think when our parents die, even at my age, who will look out for me now, who will remember me as I was, who will know what happens to me now, where will I be from. (Didion 2006: 1089–90, emphasis in original.) 3 While La vieillesse remains one of the most comprehensive Western philosophical treatments of ageing and old age, it is important not to overstate its authority or to give the impression that the elder is doomed to fall into the stereotypical patterns described therein. Martha Nussbaum has recently devoted a few scathing pages to Beauvoir’s study. Claiming that it fails to grasp and perniciously misrepresents her own experience of ageing as well as that of many other people, Nussbaum calls the book ‘worse than preposterous: I see it as an act of collaboration with social stigma and injustice’ (Nussbaum in Nussbaum and Levmore 2017: 20). 4 I am grateful to my son Leo McLennan for (quite insistently) drawing my attention to Coco (Unkrich 2017), his favourite film at the time of writing. Through its largely age-appropriate but serious engagement with questions of death, family, remembrance and mourning, the film provides a delightful illustration of the ethics of memory in Margalit’s sense. It has also, I believe, gone some distance to helping Leo to work through the anxieties of discovering the contingency of his loved ones. 5 Margalit understands the difference between ethics and morality precisely in terms of the duties we owe to our thick, immediate relations versus those we owe to people simply on account of their being human beings (Margalit 2002: 7). I have written elsewhere on the question of how we might account for our duties of remembrance to nonhuman animals on something resembling Margalit’s picture (McLennan 2018). 6 Didion admits to ‘appreciating’, but not adhering to, metaphysical or ideological systems that could assuage her abiding sense of dread by giving an order and a meaning to being. For her such systems are (merely, the reader surmises) ‘opiates’. Writing of militant communist Michael Laski in 1967, Didion tells us that I am comfortable with the Michael Laskis of this world, with those who live outside rather than in, those in whom the sense of dread is so acute that they turn to extreme and doomed commitments; I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void,

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appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History. But of course I did not mention dread to Michael Laski, whose particular opiate is History . . . The world Michael Laski had constructed for himself was one of labyrinthine intricacy and immaculate clarity, a world made meaningful not only by high purpose but by external and internal threats, intrigues and apparatus, an immutably ordered world in which things mattered . . . You see what the world of Michael Laski is: a minor but perilous triumph of being over nothingness. (Didion 2006: 53–5) Noting Didion’s detachment from cosmic opiates is not to suggest that she is a nihilist. She is rather, I believe, an ‘extensive (but not unmitigated)’ pessimist, in David Benatar’s sense (Benatar 2017: 4). As Benatar put it, in terms that are very apposite to the vision of philosophy and vulnerability I have defended herein: I think that there is no cosmic meaning. If I am right about that, then calling me a nihilist about cosmic meaning is entirely appropriate. However, my view is not nihilistic about all meaning because I believe that there is meaning from some perspectives . . . Life is meaningless, but it also has meaning – or, more accurately, meanings. There is no such thing as the meaning of life. Many different meanings are possible. One can transcend the self and make a positive mark on the lives of others in myriad ways. These include nurturing and teaching the young, caring for the sick, bringing relief to the suffering, improving society, creating great art or literature, and advancing knowledge. (Benatar 2017: 62–3) Recall here Critchley’s point (2008: 2) about the philosopher as a thinker who refuses to succumb to nihilism. Didion, echoing Benatar, is exemplary in this regard. Even after a life lived in dread and the loss of what was most meaningful to her, she continues the labour of thinking. 7 The ethics of memory is tied explicitly to public life in Didion. The protagonist of her novel Democracy, for example, worries that memory is a ‘ “major cost” of public life’ and, by extension, a major cost of political intrigue (Didion 1995: 50–1). This basic insight is also spun out among other themes in the novel The Last Thing He Wanted (1996) and in the essay collection Political Fictions, which enacts the ‘Sisyphean aspect’ of writing about politics (Didion 2006: 736). It is also worth emphasizing here how for Didion, the ethics of memory entails that one must guard against nostalgia. The older Didion recognizes that her duty to recount the past faithfully precludes her romanticizing it, and this leads her to engage in a remarkable self-criticism. In 2003’s Where I Was From, Didion comes to terms with the vision of an idealized California in decline that she had created forty years earlier in her first novel Run River (Didion 1994). She had composed the novel in a long and acute period of homesickness and nostalgia while living as a young writer in New York. The novel’s key fault, according to the older Didion, is to have given a vision of California ‘as it was’, its inchoate intent having been ‘to return me to a California I wished had been there to keep me’ (Didion 2006: 1067). As Didion recounts, from

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a settler perspective, California had always been in a state of upheaval, so there was actually no original to pine for: ‘There had been . . . from the beginning, these obliterating increases, rates, of growth that systematically erased freshly laid traces of custom and community’ (Didion 2006: 1069). Didion starkly lays out her ethical failure of remembrance when she speaks of ‘the rivers I had written to replace the rivers I had left’ (Didion 2006: 1100). Revealingly, she will even go so far in the same book of essays (which predates both John’s and Quintana’s deaths) as to suggest that her only real connections are to her loved ones and not to times or to places at all. As she put it, recounting a time she visited her parents with Quintana in the early 1970s, Quintana was adopted. Any ghosts on this wooden sidewalk [in Old Sacramento] were not in fact Quintana’s responsibility. This wooden sidewalk did not in fact represent anywhere Quintana was from. Quintana’s only attachments on this wooden sidewalk were right now, here, me and my mother. In fact I had no more attachment to this wooden sidewalk than Quintana did: it was no more than a theme, a decorative effect. It was only Quintana who was real. (Didion 2006: 1099–100)

Chapter 4 1 The title of this chapter is a quote pulled from Lorde (1980: 54). 2 Blue Nights gives an outline of Quintana’s problems – not only with physical illness, certainly, but also her struggles with mental illness and self-medication. In his biography of Didion, Tracy Daugherty (2016) fleshes out this picture a good deal and paints Quintana in a compassionate light. 3 On the view I am defending here, historic injustices should be recognized and should factor into how we address contemporary maldistributions of life chances. In my home country of Canada, historical genocidal state policies towards First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples continue to resonate via dynamic clusterings of disadvantage. Thus, even if we posit that contemporary settler Canadians are blameless in this situation – which is prima facie absurd, given the prevalence of modern anti-indigenous racism and the necessity, for example, to launch a National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls – we would still have a responsibility to constructively address our privilege on the basis of the unfair ways in which it was historically acquired. For an overview of indigenous issues in Canada, see Vowel (2016), as well as the summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015). 4 Stevenson’s (2014) case study of ‘anonymous care’ focuses on how the Canadian state has intervened in the public health crises of tuberculosis and suicide in Inuit

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communities. Berlant examines ‘slow death’ primarily in terms of obesity under late capitalism (2011). Finally, Puar’s study on ‘debility’ (2017) knots together disability, gender, and the apparently intentional targeting for disablement of African Americans, and Palestinians living in Gaza. 5 When I say that our biology is socially determined, I am making the scientifically uncontroversial point that sexual selection, gene expression, epigenetics, gestational development and the like occur in social contexts and are influenced by social factors. While I don’t deny that ‘innate’ factors play some role in defining our life chances, I am sceptical that they can or should be isolated from our social being in any strict way. It is illuminating in this connection to consider what Sunaura Taylor has said about her ‘naturally’ disabled versus her medically altered disabled body. Thinking back to the surgeries and physical therapy she received as an infant following her medical diagnosis of arthrogryposis multiplex congenita, she asks Where or what is my natural body? At what point – if ever – did I have one? My disability was caused by U.S. military pollution in the town where I was born . . . It is hard for me to imagine my ‘natural’ body – I never had a ‘natural’ body to imagine. Because my mother unknowingly drank toxic waste from the faucet in our kitchen, as a fetus I was already being altered by society, by culture, by ‘manmade’ products. Does this make me altogether unnatural? . . . I see my own body as inseparable from human intervention – but what body isn’t? (S. Taylor 2017: 120–1) The crucial message here is that none of us has a ‘natural’ body, if by this we mean a body prior to or free from social influences. Taylor’s is perhaps an extreme case, but the social distribution of life chances is always operant. Resurgent racialist and geneticaristocratic thinking is therefore on this view false; moreover, since it mystifies the real factors at play in creating disadvantage, it is also perniciously ideological. 6 Elsewhere Collins makes the point that black feminist thought is dialogical, incorporating individual viewpoints to constitute an evolving and democratic rather than essentialist and rigid group knowledge (Collins 2009: 32–4, 279–81). Intersectionality is one of the key concepts in play in this ongoing tradition, and as mentioned, its development can be detected before the coining of the term. See, for example, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (2017) for the centrality of the Combahee River Collective to this story. In fact, among African American women, the tradition of what could be called in retrospect intersectional analysis stems at least as far back as Sojourner Truth and Anna Julia Cooper, as Crenshaw herself attests; see Crenshaw (1989) and hooks (2014). 7 Nancy K. Bereano relates Lorde’s identification as a poet and the claim that she ‘doesn’t write theory’ in the Introduction to Sister Outsider (Lorde 1984: 7). 8 Straw-man takedowns of intersectionality, to the effect that it is inherently some combination of divisive, authoritarian or illogical, are common currency in rightleaning spaces online. The serious question packed into these otherwise hack critiques is to what extent intersectionality may be wielded as a scissional rather

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than a coalitional tool in practice. These concerns, however, are already built into foundational texts of intersectionality such as Crenshaw (1989) and Jagger (1998). As Jagger persuasively argues, there are indeed ‘moral and epistemological hazards of closed communities’ (1998: 14–17). But she also cautions that the very framing of these communities as divisive by ‘outsider feminists’, for example, middle-class feminists intervening in debates over issues like sex work, is idealistic and far from innocuous in that it ignores and replicates the very privileges that intersectional analysis is supposed to address (Jagger 1998: 9–11). 9 Collins and Bilge point out that while intersectionality is increasingly understood as a theory of identity, it is also much more than that (Collins and Bilge 2016: 114–15). While the Combahee River Collective Statement contains arguably the first reference to ‘identity politics’, the members understood identity to be a ‘political location’ rather than a fixed essence (Collins and Bilge 2016: 116). This in turn suggests, for Collins and Bilge, that identity is ‘inherently coalitional’ (2016: 133), providing further evidence that fears over intersectionality’s purported inherently divisive nature are overblown. I am indebted to my former student Emily York for drawing my attention to the coalitional account of identity as per Collins and Bilge. 10 ‘Sadomasochism’ is treated as a simulacrum of power here because it is only the name for a form of sexual play. It doesn’t exist as such. As Deleuze argues, the true sadist would never settle for a masochist as a victim and, less intuitively perhaps, the true masochist would never be satisfied with the sadist (see Deleuze in Deleuze and Sacher-Masoch 1991). Lorde discusses sadomasochism precisely in terms of it being a form of play (Lorde 2017a: 4), but she rules out the notion that how we play can be compartmentalized from the rest of our lives. The fear that it will bleed over into other aspects of our lives by habituating us to ‘the intolerance of difference’ is why she judges sadomasochism to be pernicious (Lorde 2017a: 6). 11 This is in keeping, perhaps, with Lorde’s aforementioned claim that she ‘doesn’t write theory’. I am not, however, the only interpreter to be struck by the philosophical qualities of Lorde’s writings. See Gill (2014) for an understanding of Lorde as a ‘poet philosopher’. 12 I can personally attest to this. I spent a great deal of effort writing terrible poetry in my early twenties, and am much the better for it as a philosopher. My understanding of poetical/philosophical labours has also benefited immensely through my friendship with the talented and under-sung Ottawa poet N. W. Lea. 13 It is worth noting here that there are nonetheless subterranean or minor Western histories of poetry and literature, with which Lorde could and does link up. 14 Rational discourse could of course articulate and convincingly argue why certain possibilities are immanent; for example, it could demonstrate the viability and necessity of socialism. But this articulation would hit at the level of the understanding, not of feeling, and would arguably therefore be insufficient. Thus, even the rationalist

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Marx evokes the revolutionaries of his time to write ‘the poetry of the future’ (Marx 2005: 18). 15 See Ginzberg (1992) and Gill (2018) for subtle meditations on the exact nature of the erotic in Lorde. 16 The pornographic also pales in comparison to the erotic on epistemological grounds, as Lorde understands them. Pornography ‘represents the suppression of true feeling’ and ‘emphasises sensation without feeling’, which has epistemological implications (Lorde 2017b: 23). 17 Representative here is the speech at Medgar Evers College, ‘I am Your Sister: Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities’ (Lorde 2017a: 10–17). 18 I am uncertain as to the cutoff point for this capacity; it could even be as basic as the capacity to express nourishing emotional engagement. At the time of writing, my older son Leo is unquestionably in some sense a part of my circle of supporting swimmers (even though, as is only right, I support him much more than he does me). To take one example, he is kind to me and helps me with the care of his baby brother Moses at certain times of the day when it’s just the three of us – for example, by keeping Moses occupied and happy while I make breakfast. But even Moses, who is only a year old, has for some time now helped me through the days with his laughter, and with the way in which he lights up when he sees his mother and I. To repeat though, Lorde’s metaphor is imperfect. It is precisely our duties of care to others – children, for ­example – that can often grind us down and necessitate the help of our circle. Doubtless, in Lorde’s vision of a better society this would not so often be the case.

Chapter 5 1 As per Breillat’s dialectic, the beloved/antagonist must effectively be unyielding. Otherwise, the lover is without the rough ground that is necessary for her to pursue her self-transcendence. 2 We have already seen, in connection with Breillat’s comments on Asia Argento, #MeToo and #BalanceTonPorc that she runs a remarkable deficit in terms of female class solidarity. 3 As Maude explains in Breillat (2013): ‘That’s the drug that rapists use on their victims. You remember nothing.’ 4 For an overview of the conceptual differences between medicine that is merely ‘iatric’ and medicine that is truly therapeutic, see Gori and Del Volgo (2009: 29–61). 5 Compare Lorde’s ‘elegantly strong triad of grandmother mother daughter’ discussed in Chapter 4.

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6 As Dan Sallitt put it, Anastasia is ‘a Breillat surrogate who is quite reminiscent of the youthful commentator Catherine in Blue Beard’ (Sallitt 2011; see Chapter 2 endnote 21 above for a brief discussion of Catherine’s significance). Anastasia is precocious and a ‘garçon manqué’, as Clouzot (2004: 15) describes Breillat. The first time we see her as a six-year-old, she is getting stuck in a tree playing ‘Sir Vladimir’, ruining her dress and protesting to the grownups around her that she can be a boy and a knight if she decides to. 7 Johan admits that he had a great-grandfather named Peter. 8 I am eliding a good deal that is crucial to the film here for the sake of argument, and that could provide grist for a much richer interpretation than I am giving. There is, for example, the matter of Anastasia’s relationship to the gypsy girl she encounters in her dream, and who follows her to the (putatively) waking world, where she gives the adolescent Anastasia her first sexual experience.

Chapter 6 1 Recall that I not only hold philosophy to be grounded in anthropological constants, but that I also believe these to be insufficient as a guarantee for philosophy’s flourishing. The pursuit of philosophy requires some amount of material support, as I will further discuss. 2 In particular, I am grateful to Jeffrey Reid for his trenchant and well-formulated version of this argument in response to my reading of the Introduction at the conference Actualities: Philosophy and Our Present in the spring of 2018. 3 Recall my proviso about humanism: I am not claiming that to be truly human, a person needs either to express or to fulfil or to be capable of these needs. Rather, I am simply stating that they are by and large characteristic of the species, and therefore they give us some amount of normative guidance, in terms of what is typically good for people. This would only be a loose guidance because humanity is also characterized by a striking diversity at the margins and may therefore also be approached ‘anthro-paralogically’. In any case, the point about robust engagement in thinking as a characteristically human need has been made before me, and in much more eloquent and precise terms. Martha Nussbaum, for example, includes ‘[s]‌enses, imagination, and thought’, as well as ‘[p]ractical reason’ in her list of the ten central human capabilities (2011: 33–4). She also mounts a defence of the humanities by articulating several democratic ‘abilities’ and how the humanities help to cultivate them (2010: 24–6). Though inconclusive on account of their small sample size, Wolff and De-Shalit’s interviews with disadvantaged people and those who work with them bear out Nussbaum’s intuition that ‘Senses, imagination, and thought’ is indeed a highly important and characteristically human functioning. ‘Practical reason’, on the

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other hand, seems to strike people as betraying ‘the philosophers’ intellectualist bias’ (2013: 53). 4 Discovery University was profiled in 2017 by University Affairs. Ann Elliott, Professor Richard Feist and several Discovery University students give eloquent statements on what makes the program so unique and important (Rynor 2017). 5 It should go without saying at this point that what is made socially difficult and complicated for women as a class, including the pursuit of disciplinary philosophy, can be further parsed into how things stand for racialized, queer, disabled, immigrant and other marginalized women, as per intersectional analysis. On the subject of women and philosophy in general, I am grateful to my friend Lesley Jamieson for sharing some of her reflections and for drawing my attention to Michèle Le Doeuff ’s Hipparchia’s Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, etc. (2007). 6 The blog ‘What is it like to be a woman in philosophy?’ contains a wealth of information in the form of first-hand accounts (https://beingawomaninphilosophy. wordpress.com/about-2/).

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178

179

INDEX

ableism 26, 52 ageism 56 amorous encounter 51–2, 59–60, 63, 125, 142 anthro-​paralogy 24, 70, 168n. 3 anthropology 16, 19, 156n. 9 false 108, 117 philosophical 2, 24, 68, 75, 83, 89 antiphilosophy 7–8, 100, 155nn. 4–5 apolitical 56 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 14–15, 148, 156n. 8 Argento, Asia 54–6, 159n. 14, 160n. 16, 167n. 2 autonomy false anthropology of. See myth of radical autonomy myth of radical 2–3, 20, 108, 117, 156n. 14 relative 139 sexual 35 Badiou, Alain 3–4, 6–8, 25, 33, 101–2, 128, 155nn. 2, 5 Bataille, Georges 53 Beauvoir, Simone de 16, 56, 65, 79, 156n. 7, 157n. 1, 159n. 12, 162n. 3 Bélot, Sophie 34–5, 37–8, 41, 44, 123, 158n. 4 Benatar, David 19, 153, 156n. 11, 163n. 6 biomythography 98 biopolitics 94 Breillat, Catherine 27–31, 33–66, 69, 71, 83, 91–2, 99, 106, 114, 116–17, 123–45, 147–8, 153, 158–61nn. 2, 4–10, 12–23, 167–8nn. 1–3, 6 Brison, Susan 13, 20 cancer living with. See struggle with social and political causes of 110 struggle with 28, 31, 107, 111, 113

capabilities, human 20, 157n. 16, 168–9n. 3 censorship 56 Chomsky, Noam 16, 155n. 6 Chuang Tzu 7 class 24, 94, 96–8, 126 economic 12, 166n. 8 homogeneity 47 of human beings 24 underclass 95 women as a 48, 127, 167n. 2, 169n. 5 Clouzot, Claire 34–5, 48, 52, 56, 123, 168n. 6 compossibility 17, 156n. 10 contingency 9, 17–18 ontological 14, 19 of the other 88, 162n. 4 of subjectivity 19, 83 counter-​hegemonic 2–3, 27 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 97, 165–6nn. 6, 8 Critchley, Simon 36–7, 39, 88, 125, 163n. 6 Crome, Keith 6, 155nn. 1, 3 Daugherty, Tracy 96, 161n. 1, 164n. 2 deferred action 69, 72, 74, 83, 130 dehumanisation 105 Deleuze, Gilles 3, 166n. 10 desire 10–11 amorous 34, 38, 51–2, 63–4, 113 erotic. See amorous perverse 61, 159n. 14 sexual. See amorous solipsistic 56 sterile dialectic of 59–60 of women 50, 53–4, 119 dialectic 62–3, 68, 71, 99, 111, 124, 167n. 1 amorous 64 of desire 59–60 of master and slave 50, 64, 127

180

180

Index

Didion, Joan 27–​31, 67–​89, 91–​3, 96, 107, 121–​3, 147–​8 disadvantage 17, 71, 165n. 5 clustering 94–​5, 164n. 3 corrosive 21, 53, 157n. 17 See also risk Discovery University 151–​3, 169n. 4 diversity 16, 24, 28, 149, 152, 154, 158n. 8, 168n. 3 Donner-​Reed Party 67, 71, 76 Duras, Marguerite 80, 87 empowerment 38, 99 erotic 107 mutual 106 eroticism as empowerment 107 ethical 52, 106 self-​regarding 46, 59 solipsistic. See erotic suspension of the ethical ethics 35, 161n. 2 of care 19 erotic suspension of 41, 46, 56–​7, 60, 62, 65, 83, 106 of memory 31, 68–​9, 75, 83–​89, 121, 162n. 4, 163n. 7 necessary for 126 question of 52 fatherhood 95, 114, 116–​20 feminism 55, 65, 71, 97, 120, 159n. 15, 165n. 6, 166n. 8 white 98 femininity 37, 49–​50, 61 struggle of 56 filmmaker 42 filmic medium 36, 43, 137 finitude. See vulnerability fragility. See vulnerability white 93 frailty 67–​89, 139, 161nn. 1–​2 and grief 67–​70, 72, 80, 84, 87–​8, 121 subjective 30 and temporality 107

see also vulnerability Freud, Sigmund 49, 51, 69, 72–​3, 130 Nachträglichkeit. See deferred action metapsychology 72 functioning 20, 22, 157n. 16 fertile 21, 157n. 17 secure 23 social 69 gender 49, 58, 158n. 9 cis-​gender 47, 50 classification 93–​4 discrimination 97, 157nn. 16, 18 non-​conformity 49, 98, 152 organized oppression. See gender discrimination social division. See gender classification studies 49, 159n. 9, 164–​5n. 4 violence. See violence, gendered Hegel, G. W. F. 4, 25, 38, 50, 63–​4, 127, 158n. 2 Heidegger, Martin 100 heterodox 24 Homer 100 humanism 24, 88, 157nn. 19, 20, 168n. 3 illusion of oneself 58–​9 inequality 93 social 94, 97 infinitude 38, 125 infinity bad 38, 65, 125, 158n. 2 spurious. See bad infinity intersectionality 23, 31, 48, 94, 97–​8, 100, 109, 158–​9n. 9, 165–​6nn. 6, 8–​9, 169n. 5 justice 98 struggle 99 innocence 53 intersex 21, 49, 98 Irigaray, Luce 49, 52, 159nn. 10, 11 isolation 114, 152 Kant, Immanuel 11–​12, 86, 139 Kristeva, Julia 80, 87, 121, 139

181

Index

laughter 111, 132, 138 Leibniz, G. W. 156n. 10 Levinas, Emmanuel 16, 36, 52, 88, 125, 139, 155n. 4, 159n. 11 liberalism 20, 156n. 14, 157n. 19 life chances deferrential distribution of 95 equitable access to 154 maldistribution of 26, 30, 91–​9, 126, 157n. 18, 164n. 3 social defining of 165n. 5 logologos 5–​6, 8, 101 Lorde, Audre 27–​31, 91–​122, 125, 147–​8, 164n. 1, 165n. 7, 166n. 10, 167nn. 15–​167, 5 love 40, 52–​3, 58–​9, 64, 106, 115, 124 and sex 47 as a struggle 153 and suicide 65 and violence 62 Lyotard, Jean-​François 4–​6, 8–​12, 14–​15, 39, 51, 72–​3, 81, 101, 125, 130, 155n. 3 Malabou, Catherine 13–​14, 18, 49 Margalit, Avishai 85, 157n. 19, 162nn. 4, 5 masculinity, toxic 116 masochism 30, 56, 124, 132 sadomasochism 107, 166n. 10 sexual 47, 106 May, Todd 18, 37 Memory. See ethics of memory #MeToo 54–​5, 160n. 16, 167n. 2 misogyny 28, 30, 48, 50, 154, 158nn. 1, 7 motherhood 31, 77, 87–​8, 97, 103, 115, 118, 131–​2 Mouffe, Chantal 45 Mourning. See frailty and grief Murdoch, Iris 10 Nelson, Deborah 67–​8, 75 neoliberalism 2–​3, 12, 19–​20, 24, 26–​7, 108, 116–​17 anti-​neoliberal. see socialism neo-​Platonism 37, 157–​8n. 1 nihilism 37, 92, 163n. 6

181

non-​binary. See gender non-​conformity Nussbaum, Martha 17, 20, 112, 157n. 16, 162n. 3, 168n. 3 ontology of the accident 18, 76 openness 145 of oneself 124 to others 145 Parmenides 100 philosophy 3, 7, 9, 28 democratization of 27, 148, 154 disciplinary 3–​4, 9, 15–​16, 26–​9, 32, 44, 91, 101, 105, 147–​54, 169n. 5 existential or pre-​disciplinary 3, 9–​10, 15–​17, 27–​32, 35, 47, 65, 75, 83–​4, 91–​2, 99–​101, 123, 141, 147–​8 as a human need 149, 152–​4, 168 militant activity 4–​6, 37, 101 self-​conscious activity 9–​15, 26–​7, 29, 37, 64–​5, 71, 91, 101, 108, 125, 130, 140, 147–​8 as a struggle 13–​14, 103, 125, 150 and vulnerability 26–​7, 147–​54 Plato 113 neo-​platonism 37, 157–​8n. 1 poetry 9, 28, 100–​7, 113, 165n. 7, 166–​7nn. 11–​13 politics 126 cultural 53 of identity 166n. 9 of illness 111 of poetics 105 and the political 159–​60n. 16 political correctness 55 political responsibility 56 self-​care as 108–​9 pornography 34, 40, 106, 167n. 16 post-​truth 121 power 2, 105–​6, 108–​9, 126–​7 equal 62–​3, 65 hegemonic 3, 160n. 16 organization of 94 over others 106, 126 with others 126

182

182

Index

and vulnerability. See vulnerability and power privacy 31, 141–​2, 144 psychoanalysis 48–​50, 72–​4 psychology 16, 18 privilege 31, 91–​100, 107, 113, 121, 134, 164 appropriation of 122 racism 93, 164n. 3 anti-​racism 97 racialization 2, 24, 47, 93, 95, 97, 156n. 14, 160n. 20, 165n. 5, 169n. 5 rape 13, 53–​5, 60, 63, 128, 159n. 14 culture 53 Ricoeur, Paul 16, 86–​7 risk, social burden of. See vulnerability Rocancourt, Christophe 31, 57–​8, 60, 129–​37, 140–​1, 158n. 5 Sade, Marquis de 53, 159n. 12 sadism 106, 166n. 10 See also masochism, sadomasochism Sartre, Jean-​Paul 126 science, natural 14, 155n. 5 secularism 158n. 7 self-​abandonment 140 self-​abnegating 113 self-​assertion 56, 123 self-​attainment. See self-​knowledge self-​care 31, 99–​100, 110, 118 political 108–​10 self-​conscious mastery. See philosophy, self-​conscious self-​discovery. See self-​transcendence self-​image 35, 52 self-​knowledge 46–​7, 51, 59, 63, 65, 76, 99–​100, 125 self-​mastery. See self-​transcendence self-​pity. See vulnerability and self-​pity self-​preservation 46, 56, 58, 63–​4, 109, 125 self-​sufficiency. See autonomy, myth of radical self-​transcendence 35, 39, 41, 51, 53, 57, 123, 125, 135, 137, 141, 149, 161n. 23, 167n. 1

self-​understanding. See self-​knowledge sexuality 34–​5, 40, 49, 53, 93, 110, 123 sexual identity 40, 42, 45–​6, 48, 51–​2, 158n. 5 sexism. See misogyny Schine, Cathleen 87 sleep 46–​7, 117, 124, 130, 140–​4 and privacy. See privacy solipsism 30, 52–​3, 61–​2, 83, 92, 106, 159n. 12 social goods 21, 93, 95 social identity 48, 98 social justice 16, 97–​8, 111, 113–​14, 151, 154, 162n. 3 movements 96 social injustice. See social justice social responsibility 55, 69, 98, 128 socialism 108, 166n. 14 sociology 48, 77, 93 Socrates 5 sophistry 5–​8, 29, 51, 71, 100–​2, 105, 127, 155nn. 1–​3 Spade, Dean 21, 23, 26, 93, 96, 126, 157n. 18 Spinoza, Baruch 4, 86–​7 Still, Kent 81 subjectivation 35, 40, 42, 47, 103, 106, 131 suicide 65, 114, 164–​5n. 4 suicidal impulse 59 Taylor, Sunaura 20–​1, 165n. 5 transcendence 37–​8, 44, 53, 123, 127–​8, 136, 149 transgender 21, 49, 157n. 18 universalism 3, 16, 33, 120 Vassé, Claire 38, 42–​3, 50, 123, 136, 159nn. 14–​15, 160n. 17 Vasse, David 30, 34–​5, 37–​8, 47, 53, 56, 57, 117, 123, 127, 141, 160–​1n. 22 victim or victimization 60, 63, 128, 131 humans as 25–​6 blaming 53, 76, 127–​8, 160n. 16 violence 76, 123

183

Index

exposure to 95, 157n. 18 gendered 113 intimate partner 63 invitation to 59, 65, 125 provocation of. See invitation to violence vulnerability definition 2–​4, 17–​26 and finitude 5–​9, 11, 16–​21, 24–​26, 35–​36, 39, 47, 69–​70, 76, 88, 91, 93, 95, 99, 108, 123, 128, 130, 136, 139, 141, 153 and fragility 17–​19, 21, 25, 79, 156n. 13 human 2, 4, 8, 18–​21, 24–​8, 37, 50, 88, 91–​3, 95–​6, 98, 108, 117–​18, 121, 128, 136, 153 invulnerability 115

183

mediation of 20, 24, 31, 96, 99, 112, 121, 139, 156n. 7 and ontology 26, 29, 69, 76, 140 and philosophy. See philosophy and vulnerability and power 107–​9, 116, 125, 127 and risk 22–​4 and self-​pity 67–​8 and sleep 124 social nature of 92 as strength. See vulnerability and power weakness. See vulnerability 71, 113 white fragility 9 Whitehead, Alfred North 86–​7 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 5, 7, 11, 44, 149

184

185

186

187

188

189

190