Outline for Sara Ahmed's Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology

I decided to take a look at Sara Ahmed's Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology for an exploration on The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot for my Victorian Media and the Novel class. I'm interested in Maggie Tulliver's longing throughout the novel that seems to maintain itself towards some horizon, but one that is constantly receding and always out of Maggie's reach to fulfill. I'm interested in how this longing is related to the overarching "haunting" nature of the narrative and perhaps how her unrequited longing actual haunts the text as a life beyond the corporeal. I'm interested in how this longing is distinctly associated with time and the Anthropocene and that her longing only becomes visible/legible when she arrives into the Red Deeps, an old, past, stone quarry that is both provincial, but also has the residue of past industrial activity. This landscape is situated beside the hetero-familial Dorcolte Mill, quite literally on a slope away from it, as if existing as one potential departure from that already demarcated path of marriage, wifehood, motherhood, and conformity.

Sara Ahmed opens her introduction with a question: "What does it mean to be oriented?" (543). In doing so, she not only gives us a little taste of the uneven U that Hayot talks about--putting forth the article's investment or the problem she will take up. She does this without outlining or making explicit how that argument will be taken up or what the answer/solution is to that argument. She also, I think, let's us know who her theoretical kinfolk are. Her question reminds me a lot of Lauren Berlant who seems to also take up certain key terms or phrases that have a lot of exchange value in society, but could perhaps benefit from a deeper analysis. For Ahmed, that word is "orientation." Affect studies seem deeply interested in these kinds of arguments of feelings or impulses with cultural baggage. Her opening paragraph, which is not necessarily her only introductory paragraph sprinkles hints throughout about what will come up in her discussion of orientation and also introduces us to some key terms as well: "objects," "grounds," "turning/to turn," and "toward." It isn't until the second paragraph that we get to see where queerness fits into the argument, and even then, it's still vague enough to beg us to continue reading: "what does it mean for sexuality to be lived as oriented? What difference does it make what or who we are oriented toward in the very direction of our desire?" (544). So, within the introduction we learn that Ahmed is interested in the construction of "orientation" as a means to talk specifically about queerness. She is basically saying, if we look deeply into the meaning and implications of "orientation" as a general concept, we can actually develop and articulate what there is for us in the term "sexual orientation" which tends to be a toss away term, easily conflated with and replaced by sexuality. Ahmed makes a case for why orientation is important: "I would say that being oriented in different ways does matter, precisely because of how spaces are already oriented, which makes some bodies feel in place, or at home, and not others. Orientations can affect what bodies can do" (563).

This slow unfolding within the introduction, moves from orientation to sexual orientation, then to methodology. What does it mean to study orientation, or where to return to in order to study orientation? Ahmed, very comfortably speaking in "I" statements tells us that she starts "here in part because phenomenology makes orientation central...phenomenology emphasizes the lived experience of inhabiting a body" (544). For me, this is Ahmed's gentle "so what" or why her methodological inquiry/engagement is important: by coming at queer studies with the angle of phenomenology, she is situating the argument in something that is of the utmost importance to queer studies: the lived body and the lived experiences attached to those bodies. She then introduces us to her main phenomenological case study: Edmund Husserl as well as the feminist trail she picks up on in regards to phenomenology.

Rather than hopping right into Husserl, Ahmed gives us one of those small transition paragraphs Hayot talks about as a means of getting us at that level 5 at the end of the introduction which widens her scope, re-posits her critical question, and what her aim is: "my aim in this article is not to prescribe what form a queer phenomenology should take" suggesting such an encounter could start from a variety of different places (545). Instead she sets out her task as being "to work from the concept of orientation as it has been elaborated within phenomenology and to make that concept itself the site of an encounter. What happens if we start from this point?" (545). What I like about the end of this introduction is that she makes her task extremely clear. She is not trying to suggest the one way queer phenomenology can/should take place, but instead wants to argue that the very possibility of queer phenomenology can be sussed out of previous, historical concerns surrounding orientation within phenomenology. And that is exactly where she starts.

In order to make her argument, she starts with "orientations," or "starting points"--"how we begin, how we proceed from here" (545). To do such a task Ahmed looks at what Edmund Husserl has said about "orientation." She emphasizes that to start with the point of here suggests then a focus on unfolding, forward, away from the here. She brings in direct evidence from Edmund Husserl and his engagement with the writing table and how though he sees the table, he can only see part of the table from his particular point of view and that he is using mind/memory to fill in the gaps of the parts of the table he cannot see from this vantage point. She uses his example of the table in order to get to one of her main points: the association of temporality in regards to orientation by adding her own narration of Husserl's writing table: "if the table is the same, it is only given we have conjured its behind. What is behind the object for me is not only its missing side, but also its historicity, the conditions of its arrival" (549). This sentence concludes the paragraph, letting us know that the next point she will make has to do with the significance of temporality in regards to orientation. In order to do this, her next paragraph discusses the term "background." Basically suggesting, by situating something behind, we are not just talking spatially, but also temporally--a family's background or how things/objects in the distance foreground other objects. Without explicitly telling the reader, Ahmed is helping to plot out how orientation is associated with the development of a line and a path where certain objects are foregrounded on such a path and others are not.

By this point, we may have long forgotten the table metaphor/analogy from Husserl, but Ahmed ends her paragraph about temporality and backgrounds with: "after all, phenomemology has its own background, its own conditions of emergence, which might include the very matter of the table" (549). This point concludes her section on "Orientations." Her next section, called "Bodily Orientations" starts with "we can stay with the matter of the table" (550). She's pulling this example all the way through her article, but all though Husserl suggests the table is the only thing that remains stable in perception of said object...Ahmed's table does not. She continues to put pressure on the phenomenological by staying with a single object. She traces Heidegger's concerns with the table as one where people sit "in order to do something." This is yet another element of orientation Ahmed sticks in her back pocket. She expands upon what's really behind this idea of orientation and "doing something" suggesting that orientation is based in habitus--the constant repetition of "some actions over others as actions that have certain objects in view" (554). Therefore, the repetition of certain actions towards certain objects creates a particular type of orientation.

These two earlier sections about spatial and temporal orienting are not a part of the forgotten points as Hayot articulates, but the ones that come together and tie together in order for us to actually understand one of her major sections, "Becoming straight." We needed to understand the spatial and temporal qualities in order to understand this section which seeks to answer the question: "what then does it mean to be oriented sexually?" (553). It feels very significant to me that this section is about "becoming straight" as opposed to "becoming queer" which perhaps fits more rhetorically in our culture imaginary. But, to argue that people also "become straight" is not only a provocative point, but one that builds on all the ground work she has laid out in previous paragraphs. We get the same kinds of keywords as before but with a new emphasis. Her new emphasis is that orientation is not random and that we are not randomly accruing objects, but that those objects are there because of a repeated turning towards certain objects and certain paths--those belonging to heterosexual culture. Much like the structure of her argument, we understand that people "become straight" by "reaching certain points along a life course. Such points accumulate, creating the impression of a straight line" (555). So, by being born, going through childhood, adolescence, marriage, reproduction and death, also known as linear/family time and implicitly heterosexual, you are following a path, a straight line. Therefore straightness is a matter of repeatedly choosing or having a certain path chosen for you. The significance of the path, is that it then lends Ahmed to argue for how certain paths are made visible in so far as they possess the trace of being walked upon.

To really hit home what she means by "lines" Ahmed returns us to the table only "this time it is the dining table around which a 'we' gathers" (555). Now the table introduces us to the relational perspective between peoples rather than between a single person and surrounding objects. If someone at the table calls two boys "a little Mark and a little John" referring to the children as mini-versions of their parents, we see a relationship between two lines: the blood line which is vertical (biological connection) and then the horizontal line which reveals connections between a husband and a wife. As Ahmed puts it, "the hope of the family tree...is that the vertical line will produce a horizontal line from which further vertical lines will be drawn," and this point where they meet is the point of reproduction (555). Ahmed is interested in structurally articulating how we become interpolated into sexual identity and how phenomenology helps us articulate not only that process, but what it means to be queer and within such a process.

A reader might presume that her last or final task is to help locate a queer path. However, Ahmed's final point is that she is not interested in demarcating a queer path, with path yet again replicating a linear/progressive connotation. One of her final sections, entitled "Queer Slants" takes up queer moments rather than queer paths. Queer moments are instances where queer subjects are unaligned--or things have gone a bit slant or oblique from the path. The importance of that straight path is to re-align, hence the momentary nature of the queer. Ahmed concludes that "our response need not be to search for permanence, but to listen to the sound of the "what" that fleets" (565). Her conclusion argues for a queer politics interested in disorientation. She brings us back to that seemingly banal straight line: "queer is not available as a line that we can follow, and if we took such a line, we would perform a certain injustice to those queers whose lives are lived for different points. For me, the important task is not so much finding a queer line, but asking what our orientation toward queer moments of deviation will be" (571). Rather than orienting ourselves toward a path, we should be focused on how we will orient ourselves in the fleeting moments off the trajectory.

“Conjecturing Possibilities: Reading and Misreading Texts in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice” by Felicia Bonaparte

I’ve used Hayot’s method to closely outline the introduction of Bonaparte’s article (just to give it a try), and I offer an analysis of how it deviates from Hayot’s ideal Uneven U. For the rest of article, I increase my scale in order to understand more global movements across the argument using Hayot’s 5-level schematic, treating paragraphs, and sometimes sections, as units.

Abbreviations:

P&P: Pride & Prejudice

EB: Elizabeth Bennet

FD: Fitzwilliam Darcy

Introduction Outline:

Bonaparte’s introduction, departing from Hayot’s prescription of the uneven U, opens with a series of [2] sentences, describing the point in P&P where EB receives an important letter from FD in the middle of the novel. She then moves up to [3], observing that the fact that a letter appears in the novel is no surprise (it was originally written as an epistolary novel). The next three sentences fall in line with Hayot’s [4], making more abstract claims about what the letter means and what Austen hopes to achieve through EB’s lettering-reading episode. THESIS: “What she wants to teach Elizabeth, and the reader along with her, is, in the strictest sense of the word, a philosophic understanding of the epistemological grounds that allow us to read at all” (348). She posits Jane Austen as a philosopher. After making her central claim, she moves into two what I would characterize as [2-1] sentences that first list critics and provide examples of how they have implicitly or explicitly refrained from thinking of Austen as a philosophical writer. She then contradicts these critics with a more general [4] claim: “Yet Austen is highly philosophical,” continuing, “What is deceptive is that rarely does she present these theoretically” (348). Next, on to a [3-2] movement in which she posits that Austen’s philosophical insights are embedded in characters and plot, and must be inferred. Then a [1], her most concrete move yet; she offers a scene from Mansfield Park between Mary and Edmund to demonstrate Mary as a skeptic: [2] she explicates the scene, and then offers a [1], a direct quotation from the novel. She interprets the significance of the scene by suggesting that we read situations in Austen for philosophical undertones [2]. And, lastly, moving to a [5], positing a series of questions Austen seems to be asking in her novels: “[i]s there such a thing as truth? Can it be known? And by what means? And with what degree of certainty?” (349).

Analysis:

If we follow Hayot’s levels through Bonaparte’s introduction, we’ll see that it doesn’t conform perfectly to Hayot’s ideal paragraph model, which starts with [4], descends to [1], the most concrete moment in the paragraph, and ascends again to [5], the most abstract moment, which is usually a broad, abstract claim that is made possible by evidence and previous work of the paragraph. Although Bonaparte’s introduction doesn’t perfectly fit Hayot’s mold, it does follow some similar trends. For example, for the most part, it does follow the general descending/ascending frequency, but the paragraph begins on a [2] instead of a [4]. Towards the middle of the paragraph, Bonaparte begins to unfold a series of sentences that looks more like Hayot’s ideal. But the trend is quickly interrupted as she moves from a [2] to [5] for the concluding sentence. As Hayot warns us, his model does not perfectly describe all academic writing but should be considered a tool that offers us insights into the logics of paragraph and argument structures. And once we have a better understanding of how others organize their writing, we’ll be able to more sharply critique and refine our own.

Article Outline:

[4] Introduction: provides context, situates argument in discourse, and makes a claim: Jane Austen is a philosophical writer who asks questions about truth, namely what can we know and how do we know that it’s true?

[3] Bonaparte then introduces some “broad examples” from P&P that might help us reconsider EB, and therefore Austen, in philosophical terms. Rhetorical analysis of Austen’s verbs: uses “suspect,” “presume,” “conjecture,” “guess,” “detect” “surmise” to demonstrate that Austen is interested in epistemological concerns (349). Offers a conceptual summary of essays that have laid a groundwork for her argumentation. Asserts that Austen via EB is an empiricist, not a rationalist, whom she has generally been associated with.

[2-1] “Repeatedly in P&P Austen negates the possibility of anything like genuine knowledge. The very word is considered suspect” (320). Bonaparte offers almost two full paragraphs describing situations and citing direct textual evidence for this claim (350-351)

[2] “Austen, indeed, takes visible pains to discredit other assumptions especially the faith in reason still left over from Enlightenment” (352). After the previous section, where Bonaparte offers extensive textual evidence for her claim, she moves ‘up’ (or zooms out?) to discuss what the significance of concrete examples. She wants to resituate Austen as an empiricist thinker, showing how she rejected Enlightenment’s blind allegiance to the power of reason. Her next move into the following paragraph is also a [2]. She continues her explication of the why the examples from the previous section are significant and what they mean for her argument. She begins, “Equally, Austen in this novel rejects the idea of authority, the notion that there are truths to be had from the wise or from the past, from elders, or from religion” (353). Provides examples, e.g. EB’s interactions with Lady Catherine and Mr. Collins.

[3-4] The next section moves ‘upward’ again, following Hayot’s uneven U. It revolves around this assertion: “And Austen is well aware that inference is nothing more than interpretation” (354). All the previous concrete textual examples come to bear here as Bonaparte shows the precarious nature of interpretive knowledge. Demonstrated mostly clearly in EB’s misreading of FD’s character, and her realization that her interpretation of has led her astray. EB must reorient her outlook based on new information. Bonaparte transitions to [4] with “One of the things that makes it difficult to interpret in empiricism is that there are no paradigms to guide us in ordering our data” (355), a statement “oriented towards a problem.”

[5] Resolution and conclusion: Bonaparte aligns Austen with modern and postmodern philosophies that recognize and embrace uncertainty, skepticism, and doubt. Austen as a progressive philosopher before her time, steeped in Enlightenment thought. “Indeed, what makes [Austen’s] epistemology not only modern but postmodern is the fact that, on the contrary, she seeks an answer not beyond but within skepticism and that she is prepared, in the end, to accept a hypothesis in which knowledge and understanding are partial, imperfect, and indistinct” (357).

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At a mirco-level, Bonaparte’s argument doesn’t exactly conform to Hayot’s ideal, but we see that when the scale is changed, the larger movements of her argument fit squarely into what Hayot describes as the uneven U.

Week 6: Article Outline using Hayot

This week’s blogpost will use Hayot’s Uneven U schema to break down Leonard Neufeldt’s “Praetextus as Text: Editor-Critic Responses to Thoreau’s Journal” published by Johns Hopkins University Press in the Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, Volume 46, Number 4, Winter 1990, pp. 27-72 (Article). Neufeldt’s article collapses the distinction between editor and literary critic and argues for a reading of Thoreau’s Journal that integrates the history of textual editing practices—ones that make certain assumptions about the accessibility, readability, and authenticity of the Journal—into conventional literary criticism. Although I will most likely not be including the article in my seminar paper, it represents a new methodology to complicate literary criticism and theory as I understand it, and I hope to be able to use it in the future.

I will begin on the level of the paragraph and then work my way up to increasingly abstract units of Neufeldt’s argument. The first couple of paragraphs I will examine are located in the introduction section of the article, and so frames the argument that follows. Neufeldt has conveniently broken down his article into 6 different section, demarked by roman numerals I-V. The first section is an unmarked introduction. The bracketed numbers below are my additions:

[1] To give practitioners in the fields of textual editing, literary criticism, and theory separate and autonomous domains may be tactically expedient in protecting preserves of scholarship with their distinctive conventions, taxonomies, discourse, disciplinary status, professional associations, economic welfare, and so on, but one should not attribute ontological significance to such a marking and fencing of borders. [2] Although the focus of my attention in the final section is on the kinds of thinking and procedural operations germane to the production of the Princeton University Press Edition of Thoreau’s Journal, I am implicitly arguing a general position, and thus, by extension, questioning the borders we have tended to recognize between textual editing, literary criticism, and literary theory and some of the practical consequences of such professional insularity.

[1] Current speculations about literary theory, theory of language, theory of discourse, and historiography have threatened a number of models that formerly offered a satisfactory starting point, modus operandi, and conceptual focus for producing and critically discussing texts. [2] Developments in these fields have alerted us to the pluralistic possibilities, heterogeneous elements, and dispersive energies in literary works; our culturally derived and arbitrary, if useful, taxonomies (including generic classifications); and the nature of the rules by which we as institutional scholars conduct our descriptive and analytic business. [3] Whatever the case has been to our sense of order, status, and security, post-structural developments (principally deconstruction, cultural criticism, and new historicism) have encouraged textual editors and critics to examine their assumptions and to pay new or different kinds of attention to texts as well as to the editorial production of texts, without many of the reassuring supports of the serviceable models of the last four decades or, more precisely put, without their epistemological functions and ontological status (Neufeldt 28).

As you can see, one of the many challenges of reading Neufeldt is his long, sprawling sentences. For this reason, I have included 2 paragraphs to plot out the Uneven U instead of just 1. Sentence [1] establishes the argument that he wants to depart from—the idea that textual editing, literary criticism, and literary theory are autonomous domains as a matter of expediency—and introduces one of his central claims: that we have no good or self-evident reason to keep these domains separate. This sentence meets Hayot’s criteria for level 4, sentences that are “less general; oriented toward a problem; pulls ideas together” (Hayot 60). We can see that the first sentences orients us toward the problem of autonomous critical domains, but is too specific to be classified a level 5 (e.g. it lists specific problems, taxonomies, discourses, etc.) Sentence [2], however, does fall under the level 5 category, which is characterized as “abstract, general; oriented toward a solution or a conclusion” (60). In [2] Neufeldt uses the claim that he makes in [1] as a “solution” to his broader project of not only reading the Princeton Edition of Thoreau’s Journal but also breaking down divisions between critical practices. Therefore, we may observe a level 4 to level 5 movement within the paragraph that may not best illustrate Hayot’s Uneven U schema but nevertheless conforms to its model.

Instead of replicating the same kind of close reading that I did above, I’ll pull back a bit and look at the relation between the two paragraphs. If the first paragraph introduces the problem of separating the domains of editing, theory, and criticism, and begins to question the justification of the separation, the second paragraph attempts to explain the reasons that lead Neufeldt to question in the first place. He points to theoretical developments in the field that have destabilized the models of literary criticism maintaining the autonomy between the domains. Then, he pivots to the possibilities that that destabilization has enabled. Between the 2 paragraphs, Neufeldt has moved toward a more concrete, evidentiary level, perhaps a 3. This would probably situate the first paragraph as a level 4. And sure enough the next paragraph begins to specify which models of literary criticism have become destabilized—“the autonomous aesthetics” of Baumgarten, the transcendental organcism of Coleridge, the textual metaphysics of New Criticism, etc (Neufeldt 28-29)—but that have been nonetheless influential to the production of the Princeton Edition of Thoreau’s Journal.

The downward sweep of the Uneven U cuts into the “I” section as Neufeldt begins to elucidate the textual problems that Thoreau’s Journal has presented to the above models of literary criticism—“loose manuscript pages; page fragments; cannibalized notebooks; intact notebooks; non-authorially tipped-in pages of authorial material that may or may not have been composed as Journal…” (29). Perhaps we may classify this as a level 2 or even 1 unit of argument. Neufeldt’s argument then tracks up when he poses a question related to the fragmentary nature of Thoreau’s Journal: “What kind of text have literary scholars, acting as editors, made of the Journal” (30)? This question functions as a means to pivot toward his level 5 claim that closes the Uneven U on this scale of the argument. He answers his questions at the end of the “I” section:

I suggest that the various editions of the Journal also present us with evidence of the editor-scholar’s need to live coherently, to impose definitions of nature, the nature of a literary work, and the nature of mimesis on the process of editing and, through that editorial process, on the specific work before her or him—a process that determines not only textual changes, alterations, and emendations but also decisions over the format of the edited text, and the provision of particular kinds of introductions, editorial tables, and index (32).

If we pull back once more the introduction and the first section of the article constitute a downward move toward the second section which specifies the history of the Journal’s principal editors and charts out each imposition and theoretical assumption that these editors have brought to the Journal. Neufeldt’s argument begins to track up in Section III when he singles out Horwarth, an editor who turned the conventional view of the Journal on its head and began to emphasize its singular organic “design.” In Section IV, Neufeldt introduces a critique of Horwarth in the form of another, more recent Journal editor, Cameron, who disputes the Journal’s organic unity and shifts the debate toward the “textuality” of the Journal. Cameron argues that the Journal “textualizes” the ”incompatible claims” (48) that Thoreau makes about his “habitual ways of engaging his world” (48). It is in the very confusion and interstices of those claims that Thoreau is most successful in representing his ways of engaging Nature and the world. By focusing on the textuality of the Journal, Cameron builds a bridge between literary criticism that theorizes on what constitutes text and editing practices of the Journal which makes decisions about what to include in editions of the Journal.

Although Neufeldt critiques Cameron’s assumptions about the textuality of the Journal in Section V (the final section) and ultimately finds her editorial practice and literary criticism of the Journal to be inadequate, he nonetheless uses Cameron as a means to reorient the argument back towards his project of collapsing distinctions between theory, criticism, and editing. This brings up back to Hayot's level 5. In his conclusion, he discusses possible ways forward from Cameron’s shortcomings and lists their advantages and obstacles. He provides no definitive answers but ultimately advocates that an editor edit the Journal “nervously” in such a way that respects the fact that a text will never be “definitive—that is, above culture and time” (66).

I don’t know if I have successfully modelled my “outline” of Neufeldt’s article after Hayot’s Uneven U, but let this stand as a good-faith attempt. I might have bit off more than I could chew (the article is nearly 50 pages long) for the blog post. In any case, I plan on using Hayot’s schema to outline the scholarly articles that I come across in the future. In practicing this exercise, I hope to internalize the Uneven U in order to quickly organize the argument that an article constructs.

'Posthuman Compassions'

Elisabeth Arnould-Bloomfield’s ‘Posthuman Compassions’: Exploring differences between Derrida and Haraway’s deconstructions of traditional understanding of sympathy as well as their respective approaches to compassion

INTRO

(P1) Elisabeth Arnould-Bloomfield (A-B) kicks off her essay with an emotional appeal that she recognizes as somewhat sentimental: “what happens when I watch a creature suffer or when I share in my dog’s joy?”

• Emotions and compassion in particular, have made a comeback in theoretical approaches to nonhuman ethics. She defines compassion as a “deeply affective way of sharing another’s emotion.”
• Invoking Derrida, Donovan, Haraway, and others, she lends their critical klout to the notion that compassion serves as the foundation for human treatment of nonhumans by providing “fundamental means of forging the ethical bond” with nonhumans and a  “new understanding of responsibility and relationships.”

(P2) This notion is not so simple as emotion over reason, differing in critique and nature of sympathies.

• Contemporary theories of compassion are heterogeneous; include:
• ‘Feminist care tradition’ (which has been marginalized)
• Derrida’s aporetic compassion (which has been in the spotlight)
• Mary Midgley’s mix of affect and cognition
• Acampora’s embodied “symphysis”
• ...without much rhyme or reason as to which gets preferential treatment

(P3) Susan Fraiman sees FCT marginalization as a consequence of recent reassessment of animal scholarship under the authority of Derrida’s posthumanist legacy.

• Cary Wolfe and Matthew Calarco have called for a deconstruction of the humanist assumptions still at work in the animal studies model.
• Critiques of cultural studies’ subjects and practices have dismissed ecofeminists

(P4) A-B isn’t sure marginalization of feminist animal ethics is as uniform or unwarranted as Fraiman:

• Popularity of Haraway proves feminist thinking about animals is well received
• Derrida’s appeal is not just fashion but stems from his critique of residual humanism often present in contemporary iterations of sympathy
• Too many fem. symp. theories remain close to subjective/mimetic templates of enlightenment despite affective charge
• Derridean posthumanism and Haraway’s “hybrid” interspecies compassion both combat this:
• Liberate compassion from anthropocentrism; result in “posthuman sympathy dedicated to radical otherness

(P5) Turns to a joint study of Haraway and Derrida due to their willingness to “make a mess” out of affective ethics

• Derrida’s “negative” compassion lies in the inability to identify with another’s pain
• Haraway argues that for sympathy seen in companion species’  “dance of relating”
• Both are willing to deconstruct traditional understandings of sympathy - which is what A-B is setting out to explore

DERRIDA

(P6)In Melancholia’s Dog, Alice Kuzniar critique’s Derrida’s claim that “mortality [is] the most radical means of thinking the finitude that we share with animals” as a too-easy anthropomorphization.

• Question possibility of a sympathy described as powerless participation in the ‘vulnerability of animal existence’  
• What it means to share another’s unknowable suffering
• Reflect on paradoxes of powerless compassion
• A-B finds this provocative, but “would like to propose, instead, that Derrida’s insistence on mortality—the passivity and powerlessness of suffering—changes the nature of compassion.
• It “strips away all the conventional justifications for kindness to animals, [which] are part of the rational, humanist culture that doesn’t get to the heart of the matter,” and:
• Proposes a sympathy that is ethical only because it is aporetic (an impasse/unavoidable/inherent)

(P7) Not alone in finding radical consequences of Derrida’s interpretation

• Instead of asking ‘ can they suffer,’ he asks: ‘can they not suffer?’
• Suggests animal’s ability to suffer is ‘rather the inability not to suffer, not to be wounded and vulnerable in their bodies: being able to suffer is possibility of impossible/nonpower/anguish

(P8) Derrida alters our understanding of compassion and ethics by focusing attention on embodied vulnerability we share with animals

• Anthropocentric ethics only sees animals through capacities they share with us, relies on a sympathy that identifies with the animal’s predicament to assess pain and moral worth
• In this sympathy, suffering is measurable through similarity to human suffering
• Derridean claim that suffering is powerless and therefore not animal or human changes the moral scheme: pain is powerless/incapacitated capacity and cannot be assessed: only measured by affect
• Pain cannot evaluate its own suffering: animal body suffers, not autonomous subject
• Experience of pain is that of being affected by the otherness of mine or another’s body and therefore unsettles autonomous subject/humany - opens to outside/animality of death

(P9) Derrida’s idea that we suffer passively as animals (not just with) implies compassionate experience that challenges humanist sympathy

• Experience questions ‘auto’ (autonomy, autobiography, etc)
• Reminds us we’re always other: in/ahuman in the beginning
• Radically challenges subject experience of compassion theories based on Hume, Schopenhauer, Mercer.
• In their scheme, sympathetic subjects remain the source of knowledge (the animal suffers like them) and the granters of rights
• Ontological difference reduced through imagination, brought to moral similitude
• Derrida’s compassion depends on animal and human pain as ontologically identical, share otherness and unknowability
• Compassionate subjects recognize familiar otherness/powerlessness and only perceive in the other’s pain, the radical inability of their own.

(P10) Durrant, Coetzee, Derrida: compassion is linked to ignorance or aporia.

• COetzee: knowing not to know undoes logic of self certainty
• Derrida: experience is aporetic and interruptive
• Derrida’s nonpower/possibility suggests a sharing that awakens us to impossibility: to the reality of each other’s pain, which calls and eludes us
• Missed experience affects us profoundly in compassion - touched by elusiveness and proximity of each other’s pain
• Compassion has to endure aporia to elicit sympathy - has to remain an ordeal (like sharing mortality) - so the point is that we never know, and never share the meaning, only the passion of meaning in the ordeal of aporia

(P11) Derrida: compassion’s ordeal is condition of responsibility/ethics: in impasse, I encounter impossibility of others’ pain.

• Within impossibility, possibility of justice: permanent call of the other and the subject is always too late or cannot access
• Such compassion is profoundly traumatic: only encounter other’s pain under erasure
• Derrida’s passionate encounter is an important counterpart to humanist sympathies
• Centers on passivity of embodied suffering and gives meta-ethics that goes beyond subjective recognition of moral standing/rational granting of rights
• By focusing on unknowability of animal suffering, provides ethical experience that is truly attentive to the other (even if it is traumatic/under erasure)

HARAWAY

(P12) Derrida’s model negates impact - critics see abstraction and negativity (too focused on ideology rather than lived experience)

• Haraway rails against negativity: obfuscates understanding of finitude and limits  sympathy
• Like Derrida - true ethical encounters put us face to face with passions of finitude
• But objects to idea that death and passivity of suffering are only tropes for these passions
• Passions of embodiment is not just positive pain but openness ‘to the relentless finitude of becoming with.’ - capability and play as much as incapacity and suffering

(P13) Haraway’s compassion does not experience aporia of the traumatic encounter but endures and flourishes in the mundane practices of relating

• Compassion is still alert to limits of finitude but embeds alertness in quotidian relationships
• Locates otherness in ordinary becoming of animal-human relationships
• Regrounds aporia in praxis / emphasizes COM (relate) rather than PASSION (ordeal)
• But what does it mean?
• “How do we remain committed to the radical otherness at the heart of the compassionate relationship while engaging with others in the ordinary entanglements of becoming together?”

(P14) Look at two Harawayan encounters:

• Cat’s gaze to Derrida: Derrida figured himself naked and ashamed
• May accurately id inadequacy of thought before the other (ilke compassion’s aporia) but misses obligation to look back and engage.
• Lack of reciprocity and engagement make the encounter a failure
• Social scientist to baboons
• Building a relationship might be more productive than the isolating stance of philosophy - scientific stance disturbed animals and created negative bond
• “Only after she began to share in baboons’ collective semiotics could she become a reliable social being. And only then could she carry on with her science.”

(P15) That study depends on relationship is profound

• Both sides exist only in relation to the other - relationships has precedence over the individuals it constructs
• Not encounter between subjects and objects - fluid and dynamic location where ‘partners’ cocreate each other through intra-action
• Process of internal mutual shaping
• This is how beings become who they are (Haraway)

(P16) To fully grasp - must get that Haraway’s notion of cocreation doesn’t just imply enmeshedness, it also suggests we are provisionally created / incessantly redone by manifold connections

• We are both constructed individuals and the ongoing products of a fluid world of multible becoming

(P17) For Haraway, there are no natural, unchangeable animals.

• Nature and culture are only provisional and local categories whose duality is a potent consequence of species relation, not a preexisting foundation.
• Nature is no less subject to becoming than culture
• Questioning foundation of immutable nature suggests a version of the world in which everything is constantly engaged in symbiotic and semiotic connections
• All of us are hybrids - there are no individuals, only becoming with in correspondence.
• Relationships are the smallest pattern for analysis

PROCESS ONTOLOGY

(P18) For Haraway the priority of relationship over entities changes the narrative of finitude as well as that of the encounter with the other

• Derrida’s approach focuses passive becoming on individual and body
• Haraway thinks finitude trans-individually. Finitude is the relation.
• This does not imply death and suffering aren’t individual ordeals, but does suggest that pain is not the only trope for becoming with that connects individuals as much as it fractures them.
• Suggests an ethics based on relationality that emphasizes different way of looking at compassion in relationships

(P19) What does it mean to be compassionate if the otherness to be embraces is no longer sole passion of the other but the common becoming with of the relationship?

• Derrida should have responded to his cat and performed a greeting with it looked at him
• Greetings are embodied signs devoid of denotative function - acknowledgement of relationships and performance of it's change
• Each greeting reshapes the relationship and so it's enacters
• Greeting would have meant ritually making signs (not sense) about a common becming with
• Abandoning the encounter is more appropriative of the relationship (and of the other) than the greeting bc it ontologizes the impossibility of the encounter instead of leaving it to the difference of the relating

(P20) Compassion for Haraway:

• The ability (for non/humans) to participate in a common becoming and to be present to “who and what are emerging in relationships.”
• Capacity not to know each other, but to pay attention to an otherness in common and to the commonality of otherness
• Commitment to paying attention / remaining open to heterogeneity of other and self in relationship is what constitutes the essence of affective relating in posthuman ethics
• Ensures compassion do not get stuck in fictions of subjective sympathies or radical unknowability but remain dedicated to historical, impure relationships and to finite, hybrid “becoming with.”
• To be compassionate in relationship, “I must continually be affected by the other’s significant otherness, and I must also be moved by the ongoing strangeness of our ‘becoming with’ in relation.”

CONCLUSION

(P21) “What happens when I watch a creature sufer or when I share in my dog’s joy?”

• Derrida and Haraway provide contrasting answers:
• Derrida: compassion for the creature requires acknowledging that we share only in the impossibility of its suffering
• Haraway: sharing one’s dog’s joy demands a greeting that acknowledges our joint involvement in becoming.
• They share a posthuman questioning of the subjective narratives of sympathy theory, and in a way, they need each other.
• Derrida reminds Haraway that death is a part of becoming and that we need its figures in order to remain sympathetic to the opacity of the other’s finitude.
• Haraway reminds Derrida that entering the dance of relating is also a way to be attuned to the unnamable being and “becoming with” of interspecies relationships.