quote | yalpertem

What World Is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology, Judith Butler | Quote

first book I’ve read that focuses on the covid-19 pandemic of 2020 and onwards. butler uses merleau-ponty and critical phenomenology to discuss what happened during those days. the book creates space to think about ‘infection’ in a broader sense, considering all the interactions we humans have with each other and with the world in general. there are also accounts of how the pandemic affected the disadvantaged people and communities all around the world. some people say that the pandemic broke something fundamental in human societies, i’m curious about it.

Butler, J. (2022). What world is this? A pandemic phenomenology. Columbia University press, p. 56-9.

“As I noted earlier, Merleau-Ponty’s posthumously published reflections on tactility rely upon the figure of the “entrelac”—the interlacing. He tells us that when we touch an object, we become aware of ourselves touching as well, and that the tangible world, everything in the world we touch, is always defined in part by the fact that it is touchable by us. At the same time, the tangible world exceeds our touch and establishes the general conditions of tactility. And that excess makes itself known in the touch itself. In this way we cannot conceive of ourselves as beings capable of touch without the tangible objects of the world. And when we near and touch one another, do we always know at that moment who precisely is touching whom? When we say “we touched each other,” and we seem to be reporting on an emotional or physical encounter. If my hand touches another, it is at the very same time touched by that other bodily surface, animate and animating. That means that the other also touches me, whether or not I think of myself as receptive. Of course, receptivity is not the same as passivity, and yet the two are all too often conflated. Further, if activity and passivity are intertwined, as Merleau-Ponty suggests, then both action and receptivity have to be thought outside the logic of mutual exclusion. Following Spinoza, the greater the potentials of receptivity, the greater the powers of action.

This notion of intertwining compels a reformulation of basic questions: Am I subject or object or always both, and what difference does it make to understand one’s body as bound to a tangible world? If, as Merleau-Ponty points out, touching another is also the experience of touching oneself or becoming aware of one’s own skin at the point of contact, is there a way to distinguish between this scene of touching / being touched and a sense of the tactility of the self? Is there, in other words, an equivocation between acting and receiving that marks an embodied and tactile sense of self? There are moments of touch in which one poses questions about oneself: Who am I at this moment of touch, or who am I becoming? Or to follow the question posed by María Lugones, who have I become by virtue of this new tactile encounter with another?5 Any teenager in the course of coming out finds this existential/social quandary emerging precisely then and there, in a proximity and intimacy whose form one could not have fully anticipated. This is how tactility works, Merleau-Ponty tells us, insofar as the porous boundaries of the body mark out paths of relationality; affected by that which we seek to affect, there is no clear way to distinguish activity and passivity as mutually exclusive. Aristotle bites the dust again.

Why bring Scheler and Merleau-Ponty together in the way that I have? Is the destruction of value that defines the tragic for Scheler really something that speaks to us now? Is the notion of the world indicted or laid bare by the tragic event something that we can now bring forward as we seek to understand the coordinates of the world in which we are now asked to live? Is this world inhabitable? If so, for whom? And in what measure? What happens when the destruction of value— such as the value of lives, the values of the earth— drenches the world in sorrow? What happens when we lose touch or can barely remember the proximate breath of another? Who are we then or, rather, what world is it that we then inhabit, if inhabitation is in fact still possible? Perhaps the disorientations of a subject- centered view of the world carries with it signs of hope or promise of another kind of world- making, another way of living in the world of air and earth, architectural enclosures, narrow passageways, as a breathing and tactile creature who requires so many human and nonhuman dimensions of life to live.

Merleau- Ponty thought that the human body was dispersed in time and space in the way that other objects and things were not. What he did not consider, however, was that objects and things carry with them natural histories, to use Theodor Adorno’s phrase, the history of work and consumption, and a mediation by market values.6 This is especially true when we think about extractivism as the plundering of natural resources for the purposes of profit. If the intersubjective relation is formulated without reference to the object world— that is, to the environment, to the complex values of natural goods, and to the broader organization of economic and social reality— then it is no longer possible to understand both the values it produces and those it destroys. If a notion of the inhabitable world fails to include the effects of environmental toxins on breathable air, then what is lost is the very idea of the climate as part of the horizon of the world. Further, without those references, we cannot know how to live well and how best to inhabit the earth or to make an inhabitable world. Living in a livable way requires inhabiting a world— a world that remains inhabitable. Objects can be vectors for all these questions, perhaps more clearly than an exclusive focus on subjectivity or its variant, intersubjectivity. For Merleau- Ponty, the dyadic relation between you and me is both conditioned and exceeded by tangibility itself, by language, but also, we might add, by breathability— the social character of air.”

Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction, Catherine Belsey | Quote

Belsey, C. (2022). Poststructuralism: A very short introduction (Second edition). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780198859963.001.0001

—-

Chapter 6: Dissent

“A common misreading of poststructuralist theory—that it deprives us of the power to choose—is another instance of binary thinking. If the subject is an effect of meaning, if we are not the free, unconstrained origin of our own beliefs and values, if knowledge can’t be relied on, if mastery is an illusion, so the story goes, we cannot regard ourselves as agents in our own lives.

This is not how most poststructuralist thinkers have argued, however. Deconstruction indicates, on the contrary, that meanings, values, and what we (think we) know are all open to pressure for change. Psychoanalysis, meanwhile, sees unconscious desire as defying the values that culture proposes as proper objectives. Foucault also stresses the possibility of resistance—on the basis that power is always authority over something or someone capable of disobeying. (No one, as far as I know, claims sovereignty over turnips.)

In sum, Foucault’s model of social relations is unstable, mobile, transferable: the assumptions that reinforce power can be reversed to undermine it. Derrida’s philosophy, although it removes certainty, still requires choice and responsibility, ethical and political. Jean-François Lyotard argues against bland consensus. Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou, while distancing themselves in some respects from poststructuralism, draw in different ways on its insights to put forward radical views. Both assume that we take sides.

Responsibility

Much of Derrida’s later work has been concerned with ethics, the problem of right action in a world without foundational truths as grounds for choice. Religions, in contrast, depend on such grounding. They determine what we ought to do by appealing in the last instance to the will of God, as revealed to priests or prophets. The will of God is in this sense taken as universal and ultimate, a pure and absolute reality beyond which human enquiry cannot hope to go. Secular beliefs might well find another ultimate reality to occupy the same structural position of authority: reason, for example, or the moral law, or perhaps the laws of nature. Such metaphysical values are taken as the ultimate foundations on which all other values depend.

But if values are shaped by language, and language divides the world differently from culture to culture, there can be no appeal to a universal, grounding reality. The will of God might or might not exist but, as history has shown, it seems in practice to be a site of considerable struggle, since both sides in a conflict commonly claim it for their cause. Something similar goes for reason and nature. They are often cited, in the event, as supporting opposite points of view: right and left, feminist and anti-feminist, queer and homophobic, white supremacist and anti-racist.

Can there be, then, an ethics of deconstruction, an ethics without metaphysics? Derrida’s own work is sceptical and yet, he insists, ‘affirmative’. On the one hand, the element of the other in the selfsame—the difference within cultures, languages, subjects—undermines both totalitarianism and nationalism, as well as all other attempts to bring societies or groups into line with a single identity. On the other hand, Derrida argues, it does not do away with the responsibility to take account of the existing differences. Values not only have a history; they also differ from themselves. They can therefore be modified, if not in the light of a fixed idea of the good, at least in the hope of realizing, one day, the trace of an alternative that also informs them. Derrida calls this way of thinking ‘messianicity’: not the promise of a specific messiah, who would fulfil an individual scripture, Christian, say, or Jewish, but the expectation of a different future ‘to come’ (avenir à venir).”

The patriarchs: the origins of inequality, Angela Saini | Quote

i visited turkey after some time. at the airport, i saw several touristic ads about çatalhöyük. saini also writes about this place in the book. also about the ancient greece, soviets, and contemporary iran together with many other times and places.

Saini, A. (2024). Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality: The Origins of Inequality. Beacon Press.

“Division is part of what gives patriarchy its power. The damage wrought by gendered oppression isn’t just economic or physical; it’s emotional and psychological. The effect of alienating daughters from parents, emotionally distancing wives from husbands, and demonizing those who don’t conform to narrow gender norms has been to foster fear and hatred of the very people in whom we might otherwise find comfort. We know that it’s possible to love and trust other human beings—our survival as a social species has depended on it—but one effect of this form of divide and rule has been to make us believe that we can’t.

It subverts our closest relationships.

Patriarchal power is, in one sense, no different from any other system of control. What sets it apart is that it operates even at the level of the family. Its Machiavellian force lies in the fact that it can turn the people nearest to us into the enemy. The evolution of this strategy can be traced through the practices of patriliny and patrilocality, which separated women from their childhood kin, and in the dehumanizing brutality of captive taking. We can draw threads between that history of detachment and control all the way to some of our more recent laws and beliefs. But we can’t assume that this has been the same all over the world. None of it was automatic. In some regions, patriarchal systems are thousands of years old. In others, they’ve become established only in the last few centuries.

Patriarchy as a single phenomenon doesn’t really exist, then. There are instead, more accurately, many patriarchies formed by threads subtly woven through different cultures in their own way, working with local power structures and existing systems of inequality. States institutionalized human categorization and gendered laws; slavery influenced patrilocal marriage; empires exported gendered oppression to nearly every corner of the globe; capitalism exacerbated gender disparities; and religions and traditions are still being manipulated to give psychological force to the notion of male domination. Fresh threads are being woven into our social fabrics even now. If we are ever going to build a truly fair world, everything will need to be unpicked.

Faced with a task this monumental, the fight for our equality can feel like a war of attrition. I myself have spoken at law firms and banks to women who want to know how they can move up the corporate ladder in sexist work environments, all the while oblivious to those cleaning up their offices after them for subsistence wages.

We’re yet to invent political systems that nurture the needs of the individual over the demands of the state, that cushion every one of us from the blows of this world. Even when all our laws are as fair as we can make them, when we’ve moved beyond our gender stereotypes to accept all people as they are, after our languages and cultures reflect values of equality, this doesn’t mean there won’t still be those out there trying to assert power over others in some new way.

As interminable as this struggle might seem, though, there’s a beauty to be found in it nonetheless. When we fight for equality, we don’t just fight for ourselves. We fight for others. And much of the time, that fight does get us somewhere. Without it, our lives could be so much worse. As a science writer who spends most of her time thinking about human nature, I find this to be the most extraordinary part of us. While researching this book, I’ve met and read the work of people who have laid down their lives and careers for the idea of human dignity and freedom. As much as we can’t bear to be treated unfairly, most of us can’t bear for others to be treated unfairly either—including strangers we’ve never met. We share in their pain. We want to help.”

Achille Mbembe, on necropolitics and colonial occupation

I was reading Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics a few days before Hamas attacked Israel and Israel started bombings and blockades in the Gaza Strip. In the book, Mbembe takes the Gaza Strip as a central example, showing the continuities of colonialist practice in the contemporary world. I’ll note it down not to forget.

Mbembe, A. (2019). Necropolitics. Duke University Press.

—

“To return to Fanon’s spatial reading of colonial occupation, the late modern colonial occupation in Gaza and the West Bank presents three major characteristics concerning the working of the specific structure of terror that I have called necropower. The first involves the dynamics of territorial fragmentation—the sealing off and expansion of settlements. This process has a twofold objective: to render all movement impossible and to implement forms of separation on the model of an apartheid state. The occupied territories have thus been divided into a web of intricate internal borders and various isolated cells. According to Eyal Weizman, by departing from a planar division of territory and embracing a principle of creation of three-dimensional boundaries within a territory, dispersal and segmentation clearly redefine the relationship between sovereignty and space.

These actions, for Weizman, constitute “the politics of verticality.” The resultant form of sovereignty might be qualified as “vertical sovereignty.” Under a regime of vertical sovereignty, colonial occupation operates through schemes of over- and underpasses, a separation of airspace from the ground. The ground itself is divided between its crust and the subsoil. Colonial occupation is also dictated by the very nature of the terrain and its topographical variations (hilltops and valleys, mountains, and bodies of water). Thus, high ground offers strategic advantages not found in the valleys (better vision and self-protection, a panoptic fortification enabling the gaze to be directed in multiple directions). As Weizman puts it, “Settlements could be seen as urban optical devices for surveillance and the exercise of power.” Under the conditions of late modern colonial occupation, surveillance is oriented both inwardly and outwardly, the eye acting as weapon, and vice versa. Instead of the conclusive division between two nations across a boundary line, Weizman claims, “the organization of the West Bank’s particular terrain has created multiple separations, provisional boundaries, which relate to each other through surveillance and control.” Under these circumstances, colonial occupation not only amounts to control, surveillance, and separation but is also synonymous with isolation. It is a splintering occupation in keeping with the splintering urbanism characteristic of late modernity (suburban enclaves or gated communities).

From an infrastructural point of view, a splintering form of colonial occupation is characterized by a network of fast bypass roads, bridges, and tunnels that weave over and under one another in an attempt to maintain the Fanonian “principle of reciprocal exclusivity.” According to Weizman, “the bypass roads attempt to separate Israeli traffic networks from Palestinian ones, preferably without allowing them ever to cross. They therefore emphasize the overlapping of two separate geographies that inhabit the same landscape. Where the networks do cross, a makeshift separation is created. Most often, small dust roads are dug out to allow Palestinians to cross under the fast, wide highways on which Israeli vans and military vehicles rush between settlements.”

Under these conditions of vertical sovereignty and splintering colonial occupation, communities get separated along a y-axis. The sites of violence duly proliferate. Battlegrounds are not located solely at the Earth’s surface. Underground and airspace are transformed into conflict zones as well. No continuity exists between the ground and the sky. Even the airspace boundaries are divided between lower and upper layers. Everywhere, the symbolics of the top (of who is on top) is reiterated. Occupation of the skies therefore acquires a critical importance, since most of the policing is done from the air. Various other technologies are mobilized to this effect: sensors aboard unmanned air vehicles, aerial reconnaissance jets, early warning Hawkeye planes, assault helicopters, an Earth-observation satellite, techniques of “hologrammatization.” Killing becomes precision-targeted.

Such precision is combined with the tactics of medieval siege warfare adapted to the networked sprawl of urban refugee camps. An orchestrated and systematic sabotage of the enemy’s societal and urban infrastructure network complements the appropriation of land, water, and airspace resources. Critical to these techniques of disabling the enemy is bulldozing: demolishing houses and cities, uprooting olive trees, riddling water tanks with bullets, bombing and jamming electronic communications, digging up roads, destroying electricity transformers, tearing up airport runways, disabling television and radio transmitters, smashing computers, ransacking cultural and politico-bureaucratic symbols of the proto-Palestinian state, and looting medical equipment—in other words, infrastructural warfare. While Apache helicopter gunships are used to police the air and kill from overhead, armored bulldozers (the Caterpillar d-9) are used on the ground as weapons of war and intimidation. In contrast to early modern colonial occupation, both weapons establish the superiority of the high-tech tools of late modern terror.

As the Palestinian case illustrates, late modern colonial occupation is a concatenation of multiple powers: disciplinary, biopolitical, and necro-political. The combination of the three grants the colonial power absolute domination over the inhabitants of the occupied territory. The state of siege is itself a military institution. It allows for a modality of killing that does not distinguish between the external and the internal enemy. Entire populations are the target of the sovereign. Besieged villages and towns are sealed off and isolated from the world. Daily life is militarized. Local military commanders have the discretionary freedom to decide whom to shoot and when. Movement between the territorial cells requires formal permits. Local civil institutions are systematically destroyed. The besieged population is deprived of their means of income. Invisible killing is added to outright executions.” (p. 80-3)

Javier Cercas, on fiction, faking, and Enric Marco

I’ll use the introductory paragraph for Enric Marco article in Wikipedia first:

“Enric Marco (12 April 1921 – 21 May 2022) was a Catalonian impostor who claimed to have been a prisoner in Nazi German concentration camps Mauthausen and Flossenbürg in World War II. He was awarded the Creu de Sant Jordi by the Catalan government in 2001 and wrote a book on his experiences. In 2005 he admitted his claims were false and returned his medal, after his deception was revealed by university researcher Benito Bermejo.”

Javier Cercas takes the case of Enric Marco as intriguing material for a novelist and tells both Marco’s story and the story of the novelist from the moment he encounters Marco. The passage below is one of the examples where the novel adopts an essayistic mode.

Cercas, J. (2017). The Impostor (F. Wynne, Trans.). Maclehose Press.

”

Like Marco, the novelist does not create his fiction out of nothing: he creates it from his own experience; like Marco, the novelist knows that pure fiction does not exist and that, if it did exist, it would not be remotely interesting, and no-one would believe it, because reality is the basis, the fuel that drives fiction: and so, like Marco, the novelist creates his fictions by painting and distorting historical and biographical truth, by mixing truth and lies, what actually happened with what he wished had happened, or what would have seemed interesting or fascinating if it had happened, but did not happen. Like Marco, who studied history and listened carefully to the central characters of history and assimilated their stories, the novelist knows that he needs a foundation for his lies and this is why he researches thoroughly, so that he can thoroughly reinvent reality. Marco, moreover, has all the qualities required of a novelist: energy, fantasy, imagination, memory and, more than anything, a love of words; almost more so for the written than the spoken word: from the first, Marco has not only been an indiscriminate reader, he has also been a compulsive writer, author of countless stories, poems, articles, biographical fragments, manifestos, reports and letters of every kind that clutter his archives and have been sent to countless people and institutions. Vargas Llosa is right: Marco is a genius because he succeeds at everything, in real life and for many years in what great novelists only partly achieve in their novels, and even then only for as long as it takes to read them; that is to say, he deceives thousands and thousands of people, making them believe that he was someone that he was not, that something that did not truly exist actually existed and that what is actually a lie is in fact the truth. But Marco’s genius, of course, is only partial. Unlike great novelists, who in exchange for a factual lie deliver a profound, disturbing, elusive, irreplaceable moral and universal truth, Marco delivers only a sickly, insincere, mawkishly sentimental story that from the historical or moral point of view is pure kitsch, pure lies; unlike Marco, great novelists make it possible, through their paradoxical truth – to know and recognize the real, to know ourselves and recognize ourselves, to gaze into the reflecting waters of Narcissus without dying. So, of Marco is a genius, is he also monstrous? And if he is, why is he?

The answer is obvious: because what he did is something that can be done in novels, but not in life; because the rules of a novel are different from the rules of life. In novels, it is not only acceptable to lie, it is obligatory: the factual lie is the path to literary truth (and this is why Gorgias says that he who deceives is more honest than he who does not deceive); in life, on the other hand, as in history or in journalism, lying is “an accursed vice”, to quote Montaigne, a baseness and an act of violence and a lack of respect and a violation of the first rule of human coexistence. The result of mixing a truth with a lie is always a lie, except in novels, where it is a truth. Marco deliberately confused fiction and life: he should have mixed truth and lies in the former, not the latter: he should have written a novel. Perhaps if he had written a novel he would not have done as he did. Perhaps he is a frustrated novelist. Or perhaps he is not, and perhaps he could not settle for writing a novel but wanted to live it. Marco turned his life into a novel. This is why he seems monstrous: because he did not accept who he was and had the audacity and the effrontery to invent himself out of lies; because in life, lies are a bad thing, whereas they are a good thing in novels. All, needless to say, except a novel without fiction or true story. All novels other than this one.

” (pp. 204-5)