‘Of possible futures’

By prof. dr. Rosi Braidotti

Dear Joke, ladies and gentlemen –

It is a great pleasure to be here tonight and share with you a celebration that is also a sort of re-assertion of the method of “thinking back through the women in our past”. This was a political strategy pioneered by the women’s movement that stressed the importance of acknowledging our foremothers. The idea is that by working with and through our identification with the great women of the past we can connect to one of the lifelines of women’s creativity and of feminist intellectual history. It is a formidable genealogical line that reconnects us to Belle van Zuylen and Simone de Beauvoir, via Virginia Woolf and Alice Walker, to mention just some of my favourites. They are all graphomaniacs, capable of covering many different genres and of duplicating their life in and through writing. This time-line of women who write as easily as they breath is a source of enduring inspiration.

It is a relief and a source of great joy therefore to partake of this great tradition here tonight, all the more so in these days of digital networking, sms-sing, blogging and other virtual modes of interconnection which stimulate the imagination but often fail to respect the complexity of the history of intellectual and artistic women. It is moreover politically very comforting to be able to utter in public some classical feminist terms, like identification with great women, solidarity and but also quite simply, pride in and respect for the achievements of those who came before us. This basic sense of connection to great women of the past may introduce a welcome alternative note in an era dominated by neo-liberal refrains about the end of feminist collective actions. In our days mentoring and coaching have replaced more political forms of solidarity, installing a rampant form of hyper-individualism as the dominant social mode of behaviour. This kind of social isolation from each other only makes women more vulnerable in terms of careers, life-choices and emotional fulfilment.

Inter-generational bonding is definitely one of the themes of this evening. This discussion implies a strong woman-led cultural memory and a sense of trans-historical connection, which is not merely a cognitive notion or intellectual position, but also a deeply affective one. This kind of memory works like the echoing chambers of a collective memory that stretches through time and is always already relevant for the present because it resonates with a paradoxical quality of familiarity.

Inter-generational links play at several levels here this evening: between the works and lives of Belle v. Zuylen and Simone de Beauvoir themselves, but also among us all and Belle and Simone respectively or jointly. More importantly for me, having just been ‘outed’ as Joke Hermsen’s former PhD supervisor, the interconnection that also matters is between Belle-and-Simone as a whole and Joke’s own work, which by now constitutes a significant, highly recognized and successful corpus.

Firstly, there is the historical bond to S. de Beauvoir herself and the foundational role she played in the second feminist wave and the momentous changes it brought about in modern societies. The radical politics, the existential ethics, the astounding amount of work she produced, the passionate lifestyle – these were ground-breaking contributions to the struggle for the emancipation of women and minorities in post-war Europe and beyond. Simone de Beauvoir has been recognised since the 1960’s by the leaders of the American movement as the uncontested originator of the second feminist wave. Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Greer herself made Beauvoir into a feminist icon, much to her own surprise at first. They dedicated their books to Simone de Beauvoir, thus establishing existentialist philosophy as the starting point for modern critical theory about the status of women and also for race and postcolonial theory. As I wrote in the preface to Joke’s edited volume on Beauvoir, but by the mid- 1980’s the situation was changing: a new generation of feminist thinkers, soon to become world celebrities – the Belgian-born Irigaray, the Algerian-born Cixous and the Bulgarian-born Kristeva, were turning French feminism into a global brand. They contested the hegemonic hold that Beauvoir’s politics of equality and solidarity had exercised over the women’s movement. The lucid and critical rationality so central to Beauvoir’s mind, however, endured and is all the more relevant in this troubled beginning of the new millennium.

Secondly, there is Isabelle de Charriere – Belle van Zuylen – a more singular but equally extraordinary figure, who worked perennially out of context, on the move from one of her home-bases to another. Although the French language provided her with a powerful and safe location to write from, she exists somehow in-between languages, like a true nomadic European always does. A fugitive at heart, Isabelle de Charriere is a monument of feminist freedom, self-styled as an autonomous subject by her distinct lack of talent for subordination. I find her intriguing, contradictory in a perfectly sensible manner and enchanting as a writer.

Thirdly and most importantly for me is the location where these two striking female figures meet, which for the purposes of this evening is the complex psychic landscape and rich body of work that is Joke Hermsen. The distinctive qualities of this landscape are: erudition with a lightness of touch; bibliographies co-existing with great fictional creativity and an elegance of style that is pure 18th century in inspiration.
Let us explore the different aspects of this complex landscape.

Passions
The first great connector between these three women is passion, the ethics of writing and a radical commitment to making a difference. On p.68-9 of De Liefde dus, in her own portrayal of Belle van Zuylen, Hermsen comments on the revolutionary character of love, its violent, disruptive, overwhelming otherness.
“ Liefde is volgens mij eerder revolutionnair van aard. Liefde wil iets als een omwenteling in ons leven teweegbrengen en juist daroom kan ze inzicht verschaffen im wie we zijn en hoe we de duistere paden die we nu eenmaal moeten gaan, moeten bewandelen. (…) Liefde is geen rozengeur en maneschijn, vergeet het maar. Eerder een span paarden dat over je heen rijdt, waarna je zelf maar moeten bekijken wat er nog van je over is”.

Hermsen stresses the extent to which this level of intensity is radically other than the moral, political concerns and deliberations that we all must go through in order to behave in a civilized manner. It is another scene, another economy of emotions, wilder, riskier and somehow more fundamental.
In the same novel, (p.246) Cagliostro sets the record straight: love works through self and other and awakens both to the reality behind screens, masks and pretences:
“De liefde en de politiek zijn helaas geen bondgenoten van elkaar. Integendeel, ze zijn elkaar vijanden. De liefde is namelijk in essentie onwerelds van aard, terwijl de politiek zich juist richt tot de wereld en tot de verhoudingen en patronen die daarbinnen gelden.”

A great love passion is a second birth that re-positions you in life and pierces your soul with an acute awareness that, actually, this is it, this is here and now. Eternity within time, the perfect stillness of that which, retrospectively, one can say was fate – ineluctable and blind. But it is not so – it is just a random patter of coagulated and shared intensities.
In one of her many hot letters to Nelson Algren, Simone de Beauvoir writes (July 3, 1947, p.42):
“Vous savez, pour moi l’existence ne va pas de soi, bien que j’aie toujours été tres hereuse, peur-être parce que je veux tellement être heureuse. J’aime avec passion la vie, j’abomine l’idée de devoir mourir. Je suis terriblement avide, aussi, je veux tout de la vie, être femme et aussi homme, avoir beaucoup d’amis, et aussi la solitude, travailler énormément, écrire de bons livres, at aussi voyager, m’amuser, être égoiste, et aussi généreuse… Vous voyez, ce n’est pas facile d’avoir tout ce que je veux. Or quand je n’y parviens pas, ca me rend folle de colere.”

Just listen to the list of requirements, of expectations voiced by the great Simone: Life is not self-evident, it is a project that needs to be actualized and implemented. Loving life so passionately makes the thought of death unbearable. And the desire for intensity is such that only multiple lives would suffice to do justice to the desire that animates this great woman. Wanting it all: to be a woman and a man, to be surrounded by friends but also to be able to be perfectly alone; to work extremely hard, write great books, but also to travel, to be entertained, to be selfish and also so very generous. How many lives would one need to express this level of intensity? And what is one to do with the impatience, even the rage that arises from the inevitable frustrations of being limited to here and now.
Indeed it is not easy to be a woman, let alone a human being endowed with the intensity, the power as potentia of Simone de Beauvoir, or of Belle v. Zuylen, or their meeting place tonight – Joke Hermsen’s inner landscapes. Lives like these are all but self-evident: they are projects that entail enormous hard work and great endurance.

Passion is the driving force behind these independent, high-powered life-styles. In the case of all three writers, it has produced an experimental way of life that broke taboos and disregarded moral conventions in the pursuit of higher aims: intensity of emotions, authenticity in acknowledging them and freedom in turning them into actual relationships. ‘Grandes amoureuses’ to the end, they put today’s conservative sexual mores to shame. They are passionately opposed to the normality, the banality and tedium of what our society accepts as the culture of love. The sexual revolution of the 1970’s liberated lots of things – including the sex industry and contemporary porn and post-porn cultures- but I am not sure it exactly unleashed the desire to experiment with sustainable forms of alternative ways of loving. One of the great lessons of the three women we are discussing tonight is that desire and experimentation need to be recombined with more creativity and courage.

Ethics
The intensity is driven also by the quest for ethical truth. We have to recognize the bond to others as constitutive of our identity, but passion teaches us that we also need to overcome it, in order to assert one’s transcendent nature as subject. This paradox, which lies at the core of Beauvoir’s existentialist ethics of ambiguity, is the essence of the question of passion, namely: the erasure of boundaries. It is an unresolved and highly productive tension between self and other that operates on the horizon of our common humanity and hence also of our mortality. Georges Bataille emphasized the point that what we humans most aspire to is the erasure of boundaries and that this ecstatic transgression is the key to higher planes of intensity. Eroticism is the high road into it, but this insight means that desire is not deprived of violence.

Desire is actually first experienced as a violent eruption, a traumatic impact with external agents. The violence is quite simply that of a degree of intensity or libidinal energy which goes beyond what one is normally accustomed to. I would sum this up in the cry: ‘I can’t take it anymore’. Uttered in pleasure or in pain, this cry marks the boundary beyond which some extreme state of tension is reached, the borders of the self dissolve and the ego and bodily integrity collapse, causing consciousness to lose its hold. It is just a question of boundaries indeed.

In other words, desire is a principle of anti-life, if by life we mean stasis – stability. Desire is a force that is both vital and dissipative, in that it activates affects but also erases the very boundaries that allow us to experience the presence of the other as necessary, intriguing and pleasurable. Yes another paradox emerges here: that desire is vital and yet it aims at consuming itself. As a consequence of this economy of desire, Freud argued that the death-drive is the constitutive principle of Eros, or libidinal circulation, within the subject. It has nothing to do with death and everything to do with excess. Desire aims at zeroing itself out and consuming the object it covets. Thus, the death principle is relocated at the heart of the unconscious and hence of the subject, so as to become its most radical expression.

This line of reasoning has some spectacular consequences. As Adam Phillips notes: life being desire which essentially aims at extinguishing itself, i.e. reaching its aim and then dissolving, the wish to die is another way to express the desire to live intensely. Therefore, not only is it the case that there no dialectical tension between Eros and Thanet’s, but also that the two forces are really just one. The point is not that the human’s innermost desire is to disappear, but rather that s/he wishes to do so in his/her own way. Experiencing death in life, by transcending the boundaries and yet staying alive to tell the tale, is what the game of passion is all about. For the artists and thinkers devoted to this mission, the aim is a self-fashioned, self-styled death, by over-dosing on the intensities provided by life. Self-fashioning one’s ways of dying while remaining alive means living life to its nth power. Writers know that all too well – that’s why so many of them cannot sustain life at all.

This is the crucial paradox: while at the conscious level all of us struggle for survival, at some deeper level of our unconscious structures, all we long for is to lie down silently and let time wash over us in the perfect stillness of not-life. It is the inability to come to terms with the stillness which lies at the heart of the subject that triggers the repression of desire. This denial in turn gets re-formatted as aggression so as to restore some spurious sense of boundaries. As a result, the ego is the official wrapper of the most aggressive and violent tendencies, while it is structurally empty. It is pure intensity folded upon a nucleus of zero-degree stillness, animated by the entropic drive to lie still and just breath. Violence or aggressions are the failure of that stillness, the betrayal of the acknowledgment that being-folded upon itself is constitutive of the subject: it is an unbearable lightness that makes desire unrepresentable.

Love is the attempt to find an ethical solution for this structural violence, to counteract its most destructive elements. Writing is a way of processing that violence, aspiring to not-being as the highest form of existence, so as to settle very close to that inner core of stillness and just breath as the words align themselves on the page, in an almost impersonal gesture of elegant self-composure. If only it could last forever!

You can see this complex mechanism at work clearly in the ‘grandes amoureuses’ we are discussing here tonight. For Beauvoir, the recognition that all men are mortal, including the one who is writing this very line is a positive force, both epistemologically and emotionally. She produces accordingly ruthlessly honest, implacably lucid accounts of a pitiless truth: that we cannot save, rescue or protect the ones we love. Not because we don’t want or don’t care to, but rather because love is not about saving, rescuing or protecting. Love is about recognition, acknowledgement and truth not as given but as praxis, that is to say as a life-long project that requires material implementation and disillusioned commitment. Love as a project is predicated on the fragility of the flesh and on the ability to assert that, all things said and done, this is what it comes to: this heap of ruins that is the body, the glorious transience of our shared consciousness, the immanence of ’ you-thingy-being-here- for-me-no-matter-what’. That’s it, that’s all. The rest is silence.

Of possible futures
For all great women writers including the three we are discussing tonight, writing constitutes an act of faith in the future, as well as a perennial battle against the boredom of the present. They are inter-generational connectors, producing intensity in a reproducible and transmissible form. This is why we can think back through them, even today. Far from grandiose utopian dreams, writing is the patient pursuit of the project of constructing social horizons of hope. It is a basic and rather humble act of faith in the possibility of endurance, in the sense of temporal duration or continuity, which honours our obligation to the generations before us, but also to those to come.

Writing as the project of autopoiesis, that is to say: self-styling one’s death through living intensely, involves the virtual unfolding of the affirmative aspect of the present, of what we managed to actualise here and now. Virtual futures grow out of sustainable presents and vice-versa. This is how qualitative transformations can be actualised and transmitted along the time line. The future is the affirmation of the shared collective imagining of a present that goes on becoming, effecting multiple modes of interaction with heterogeneous others. Feminist genealogies or time-lines are a non-linear form of evolution: an ethics that moves away from the paradigm of reciprocity, the logic of re-cognition and installs instead a relation of mutual affirmation. If we can say or even just think certain things, it’s because others did it before us. They had no guarantee that they would be heard, they sought for no rewards for their courage and expected none – they just did it, like women do so many things, for the hell of it, or out of love. It is that simply, i.e.: immensely complicated.

By targeting those who come after us as the rightful ethical interlocutors and assessors of our own actions, women thinkers are taking seriously the implications of our own situated position. This form of inter-generational justice is crucial. This point about intra-generational fairness need not, however, be expressed or conceptualised in the social imaginary as an oedipal narrative. To do justice to the past, or be concerned about the future need not result in linearity, i.e. in re-stating the unity of space and time as the horizon of subjectivity. On the contrary, non-linear genealogical models of intra-generational decency are a way of displacing the oedipal hierarchy.

They involve a becoming-minoritarian of the elderly, the senior, and the parental figures, but also the de-Oedipalization of the bond of the young to those who preceded them. It calls for new ways of addressing and of solving inter-generational conflicts – other than envy and rivalry. Joining forces across the generational divide by working together towards sustainable futures. By practising an ethics of non-reciprocity in the pursuit of affirmation.

An example: the older feminists may feel the cruel pinch of aging, but some of the young ones suffer from 1970’s envy. The middle aged survivors of the second wave may feel like war veterans, or survivors but some of generation Y, as Iris v.d. Tuin taught me, call themselves ‘born again baby boomers!’. So who’s envying whom?
‘We are in this together, indeed. Those who go through life under the sign of the desire for change need accelerations that jolt them out of set habits: they need to be visionary, prophetic, and upbeat. They aim to introduce change in the present, so as to affect multiple modes of belonging through complex and heterogeneous relations. The two key cries of rebellion: “I hate the thought of having to die”, by Beauvoir and “I’m bored out of my wits”, by Belle, echo each other across space and time. Leading both women to write as the remedy, the solution, the imaginary leap towards resistance.

The hope for better days, for a sustainable future, is a sort of “dreaming forward”, it is an anticipatory virtue that permeates our lives and activates them. It is a powerful motivating force grounded in our collective and shared imaginings. Lest oblivion, greed and individualistic selfishness destroy or diminish it for generations to come. Given that posterity per definition can never pay us back, this gesture is perfectly gratuitous and hence very ethical.

Great women writers and thinkers teach us a deep and careless generosity, the ethics of non-profit at an ontological level. They enact a passion for fashioning the past-future continuum by activating an alternative present. They long to be generous and very selfish and be all that one could become in the zigzagging paths of the existential process of becoming. They teach us how to combine intensity with sustainability. So as to be left alone to write great books and yet still go out there, among other rebellious subjects, to say no to the meanness, vulgarity and violence of the times. And in that simple gesture write the pre-history of a better future for a vibrant inter-generational community of desiring subjects.