Related and unrelated, as is the way of blogging.
I've been sitting on the harbour beach in Portree, reading this piece in the New Yorker about Judith Butler.
It starts like this:
"In January, the American philosopher Judith Butler and the South African artist William Kentridge took part in a public conversation in Paris about atrocity and its representations. Before an audience at the École Normale Supérieure, they spoke for nearly two hours, in lulling abstraction and murmured mutual regard: Can we give the image the benefit of the doubt? What is the role of the object in thinking? After the event, a woman—a philosopher herself—approached Butler. Tight with tension, she gripped Butler by the arm.
“Vous menacez mes enfants,” she said, in Butler’s recounting. “You are threatening my children.”"
And then, later...
"Still, that evening in Paris, Butler did not flinch or pull away. They responded, in French, “How am I threatening your children?”
“You speak in this way,” the woman replied. “They listen to you. And, if they listen to you, they will stop defending Israel. You’re not a European, you don’t know this, but the Holocaust can come again.”
“I grew up with that fear of it happening again,” Butler said. Most of their maternal line, Hungarian Jews, had been killed in the Holocaust. Butler proposed a conversation “about whether this current state is actually protecting the Jews from harm or exposing the Jews to harm.” The woman refused. Butler persisted—a coffee perhaps? “I’d like to understand more about your fear,” Butler said. “You and I both want to live without fear of violence. We’re just trying to arrive at it in a different way.” The woman started to cry. “We’ll meet, we’ll meet,” she said. Butler asked for permission to embrace her.
“I recognized her,” Butler told me later. “She could have been my aunt. Her fear had been my own. Sometimes it is still my own.”"
I would not have reacted like that. I'm often too angry. I admire that curiosity and empathy.
At the same time I noticed that I was surrounded by bits of glass and pottery that had been tumbled smooth by the sea.
And, earlier in the day, I'd been thinking about a phrase of Danny Meyer's: "
Constant, gentle pressure". It's about something else, but it seems to fit, somehow.
And this, even more unrelated, is just a magnificent bit of writing:
"Butler apologized for the mess in their car, an old BMW, when we went for a drive one day—this amounted to a few books by the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, strewn around the back seat. Butler’s marginalia in those books are in a precise, hunched hand. Merleau-Ponty propounded the idea that the body, not consciousness, is our primary instrument for understanding the world. To be in a body is not to be contained but to be exposed to the world; from our first breath, we are in need of care from other people. Merleau-Ponty is a deep influence; one can feel him tumbling around in the back seat of much of Butler’s thinking. “I am open to a world that acts on me in ways that cannot be fully predicted or controlled in advance, and something about my openness is not, strictly speaking, under my control,” they have said.
And Merleau-Ponty’s style—“so adjectival!” Butler marvelled. Their hands made a quick movement, flowers bursting into bloom. “Subordinate clause upon subordinate clause.”
Butler slid on wire-rimmed sunglasses and began reversing. “The problem is that he loses the verb, and he just keeps proliferating and twisting. You just have to go with it, without any expectation that the verb will take you somewhere. What’s left is a kind of experience, a kind of ride—all right, all right, I see you, go ahead, go ahead.” Butler squinted into the rearview mirror; another driver tried squeezing past. “He’s willing to work several metaphors in the same long sentence.” The driver leaned on his horn.
“My proprioceptive body” is how Butler refers to their car. “I’m surrounded by this clunky thing, and I feel protected,” they’d explained. “I expand. I have this carapace.” They laughed. “But it’s, um, prosthetic.”
