The world in a Geranium pot: Female paranoia and love of detail in Schor,Beauvoir and Arendt

‘Is she a case? Or does she have a case?’ Naomi Schor’s ‘Female Paranoia’

Schor does not only defend paranoia in ‘Female Paranoia’. She also reclaims it for feminism; recommends it. Why? As she explains, Freud and his French readers equated masculine paranoia with theory. As a result, male paranoiacs enjoy a certain intellectual prestige, and Schor thinks that women in general and feminist theorists in particular deserve access to this prestigious club. She asks: ‘Can females theorize, albeit in the caricatural mode of the mad? (1981, 206)’

To outline ‘the specific contribution of women to contemporary theory’ Schor looks at one such ‘caricature of the mad’: Freud’s marginal case history of female paranoia. The subject of the case, Freud’s patient, is a woman in her thirties who in fact seeks legal, not psychological consultation. She suspects that her partner secretly took intimate pictures of her and may use them against her. The reason for her suspicion is the sound of a click that she hears while they are having sex. Her partner assures her that the nagging sound is a ticking clock. But the patient – who upon her departure from her partner’s apartment spots two men in the stairwell carrying a big black box – concludes that the noise must be coming from the shutter of a camera. One hundred years before ‘Believe Women’, her lawyer sends her to Freud, who will have to decide, as Schor puts it, if the woman has a case, or, is herself, a case (208). After interviewing the woman Freud decides that it’s the latter: what clicked, he determines, was neither a camera nor a clock (‘I do not believe that the clock ever ticked!’) but, well, the throbbing of the woman’s excited clitoris (210). In a classical paranoid move, the woman, Freud concludes, has mistaken her inner world (or embodied experience of excitation) for an external reality (of persecution).

Schor notes that Freud’s conclusion about the clitoral origin of the click sound is quite possibly ‘mad’ (206), but finding the truth about Freud’s patient (did the clock really tick? What was in the box? Is she a case or does she have a case?) is not the reason for Schor’s returning to this case history, and this is in my view the essay’s brilliance. In withholding her own judgment on the truth question, Schor opens space for a different type of question – what are the embodied and phenomenological attributes of female paranoia? ⁵ Schor is interested in the clitoris not as a bodily organ per se, but as a metaphor for feminist criticism. She asks: if we were to concede that feminist paranoia/critique is clitoral, what would that mean? What kind of hermeneutics and phenomenology might ‘the clitoral school of feminist theory’ practice? Schor identifies three phenomenological features of what she calls the ‘clitoral school:’ 1) feminist theory is ‘militantly materialist’, ‘riveted to the body, its throbbing, its pulsation, its rhythm’; 2) feminist theory involves ‘the most intense form of sexual pleasure’ (1981, 213); and 3) its hermeneutics is focused on an important but seemingly irrelevant detail which ‘jut[s] out above the plain surface of the text’ (214). ⁶

In paying attention to the phenomenological ‘how’ of paranoia Schor models a shift we desperately need today when much energy in politicians’, journalists’ and academics’ responses to paranoia goes to fact-checking. Still, her account of paranoia misses two key points: centering the intense pleasure of paranoia, Schor sidelines the bad affect that often accompanies the forensic work with the detail. Moreover, in equating attention to detail with the investigative work of tracing and exposing, Schor misses an opportunity to see the detail in its worldly richness, a richness that exceeds its function as a truth-bearer, and that might offset the limitation of forensics for politics. To explore the promises and limitations of Schor’s paranoia with detail, I turn now to Beauvoir and Arendt.

Beauvoir: The housewife’s war on dust

Beauvoir’s housewife is enclosed in patriarchy, and destined to life amidst small detail. Small things with which she surrounds herself, ‘velvets, silks, and china’, are a source of consolation: they ‘assuage [the] grasping sensuality that her erotic life cannot usually satisfy’ (2011, 536). But they are no real substitute for the world that ‘was her kingdom’ as a young girl and that now, says Beauvoir, is ‘reduced to the size of a geranium pot’ (535). The housewife, Beauvoir concludes, ‘gives importance to little things because she lacks access to big ones’ (730). But one such little thing opens her world up: dust.

Feminist scholars have singled out Beauvoir’s account of the housewife’s chores as one of the most effective and depressing sections in this 800-page magnum opus. ⁷ Beauvoir writes:

Legions of women have in common only endlessly recurrent fatigue in a battle that never leads to victory. […] Few tasks are more similar to the torment of Sisyphus than those of the housewife; day after day, one must wash dishes, dust furniture, mend clothes that will be dirty, dusty, and torn again. The housewife wears herself out running on the spot; she does nothing. Only perpetuates the present; she never gains the sense that she is conquering positive Good, but struggles indefinitely against Evil. It is a struggle that begins again every day (2011, 539).

Dusting stands out among the housewife’s chores because of the particular features of dust: it is a politicized matter for Beauvoir. ⁸ When Beauvoir calls attention to how, for the housewife, ‘wars with their looting and bombs threaten wardrobes and the home’, the looming disaster is not the grand loss of a world in the wake of a war, but rather the small loss, or ‘small holocausts’ as Beauvoir calls the catastrophes that the housewife must endure: ‘linens turn gray, the roast burns, china breaks’, and, in wartime, we might add, dust falls from the ceiling, or bomb fallout may turn into ‘tufts of dust’ that the housewife then ‘rout[s] out of the dark places behind the wardrobe’ (549, 541). Dust shifts or ridicules the boundary between micro and macro. When she is dusting, the housewife is in sync with worldly realities (the more bombing attacks, the more dust there is to clean).

This capacity of dust to defy boundaries also turns it into a forensic detail that radicalizes the housewife. Dust is a mysterious thing: try to eliminate it and it will ‘creep in’ again and accumulate silently on all surfaces. ‘Where on earth all the dust came from’, wonders James Joyce’s Evelin (1914). This is what makes dusting such a repetitive and oppressive chore, according to Beauvoir. But it also renders dust into an incriminating forensic detail. Anyone the housewife lets into the house is an immediate suspect. ‘The child is the enemy of the waxed floors’, Beauvoir says (647). ‘Whenever a living being enters her sphere, her eye shines with a wicked fire. […] She would like to stop everyone from breathing: the least breath is a threat. Every movement threatens her with more thankless work’. Yet she doesn’t articulate her paranoid suspicion verbally, at least not at first. Instead, she enacts it: ‘her eyes sharpen, her face looks preoccupied and serious, always on guard’ (2011, 541). ⁹ Sooner or later, the housewife adopts an ‘attitude of a Manichaean’: ‘good’, she comes to think, is something one attains only through the indefinite abolition of the evil that constantly creeps in. ‘She attacks the dust, stains, mud, and filth; she fights sin, she fights with Satan’ (ibid).

This domestic ‘housewife-mania’, as Beauvoir calls it, becomes real-world paranoia when the same eliminationist logic into which she is apprenticed by dust shapes her view of worldly political matters: ‘Dust condemns itself. […] Thus the woman thinks that “everything is the Jews’ fault or the Masons’ or the Bolsheviks’ or the government’s.” […] Good government gets rid of the evil principle as one gets rid of dust in the house’. In the meantime, however, since she doesn’t ‘have Jews, Masons, and Bolsheviks to hand’, she rebels against the husband who embodies for her the ‘masculine universe’. ‘It is through him’, the housewife comes to believe, ‘that the male society took the woman in hand and duped her’ (733). ¹⁰

Dusting, then, politicizes the woman. Its routine teaches her body the posture and gesture of paranoia. Beauvoir says that ‘she adopts that Manichean attitude also suggested to her by her experience’ with dust (733). It becomes a form of embodied, non-verbalized critique, part of what we saw Schor calls the female paranoiac’s ‘militant materialism’ (1981, 205). Or, to borrow from Sianne Ngai’s account of paranoia, we might say that dusting is a sort of analysis-enactment (2005, 302–3). It dramatizes the housewife’s oppression in patriarchy, and it also lends her tropes and a framing for understanding what Beauvoir calls – her ‘situation’. Manicheanism becomes the mental and embodied framework through which she rethinks her relationship with her husband and the masculine world.

However, Beauvoir insists that dust is not only an enabling condition for the woman’s politicization. It is also a site of resignation: ‘because the maniacal housewife detests having negativity, dirt, and evil as her lot, she furiously pursues dust, accepting a condition that revolts her’ (2011, 541). These are the terms of the housewife’s ‘wounded attachment’: she is doomed to overinvest (‘furiously pursue’) in that which oppresses her the most and about which nothing can be done. ¹¹

In tracing the phenomenology of the war on dust, Beauvoir documents the bravery and insight of the dusting critic (aka the housewife), but also the affective downside of critique: the compliance, the fatigue that derive from the futile ambition to leave no detail unaccounted for (or to prevail over dust), the hatred, impotence and the resignation. These elements are missing in Schor who discusses the pleasure of critique but not the pain. From the housewife’s perspective, the pleasure in critique-paranoia is a masochistic pleasure. When her eyes sharpen and her jaw clutches, the housewife ‘loses her joie de vivre’ (542). Dust leaves the housewife defeated.

If the housewife highlights the limitations of Schor’s reclamation of female paranoia qua attention to detail, are there other, perhaps better, feminist ways of relating to the detail in Beauvoir?

Sweeping the pavement with her dress: Beauvoir’s narcissist

There is another woman in The Second Sex who seeks liberation from patriarchy through the detail. Beauvoir calls her ‘the narcissist’, a woman who is her own heroine, or even her own erotic object of desire (756). Narcissism is expressed through the pursuit of aesthetic details: ‘feathers, pearls, brocade, and silks [mingle] with her flesh; their shimmer and their gentle contact compensate for the harshness of the erotic universe that is her lot’ (650).

Phenomenologically, Beauvoir compares the narcissist’s attention to detail in her beauty rituals ‘to the [fight] the housewife engages against dust’ because both involve ‘an object eroded by time’ (656). As her skin wrinkles, or as she scrubs dead skin before applying makeup, the woman’s skin turns into dust. ¹² However, while beauty rituals and dusting both belong in what Arendt would call the human domain of labor, Beauvoir also gives us reason to believe that in her quest for beauty the narcissist finds some relief from labor and comes closer to the permanence of Arendtian work. Men, says Beauvoir, accomplish themselves in worldly projects: ‘the houses [they] build, the forests [they] clear, the patients [they] cure’. Without access to these ‘virile activities’, some women turn toward themselves, treating their own body as a work of art, ‘like a painting, a statute, like an actor on stage’ (653). They take delight in theatrically staging themselves, their ‘life a play offered to public applause’ (765). Comparing the narcissist to the dusting housewife, we might note that if the housewife resents mopping off the dust that amasses on the floors, the narcissist takes pleasure in ‘conscientiously sweeping the pavement’ with the long train of her outlandish ‘amethyst velvet’ dress in quest of the world’s affirmation (651).

Exhausted by the work of forensics, the narcissist cultivates a new – counter-forensic – relationship to the detail. Shifting her attachment from dust to pearls, the narcissist feels better. ‘Every woman drowned in her reflection [in the mirror] reigns over space and time, alone, sovereign; she has total rights over men, fortune, glory, and sensual pleasure’ (758). In light of the tortures of dust, that mood enhancement and capacity for self-overcoming might be the narcissist’s achievement. As Kristana Arp argues, considering Beauvoir’s concern with the ‘othering’ of women in patriarchy, narcissism emerges as a ‘triumph of sorts’ for the woman: ‘Being made object, lo, she becomes an idol in which she recognizes herself with pride’, writes Beauvoir (in: Arp 1995, 169). For our purposes, the narcissist is important because she highlights the emotional costs of critique, and she experiments with a post-forensic attention to detail.

However, the pleasure and the pride are short-lived. It turns out the narcissist too – like the conspiracist housewife – is prone to paranoia: ‘the older she grows, the more anxiously she seeks praise and success, the more she suspects plots around her’, often ending up ‘building a paranoid delirium around herself’ (2011, 772). The paranoia, Beauvoir tells us, results from the paradox of her attitude: ‘she demands to be valued by a world to which she denies all value, since she alone counts in her own eyes’ (ibid). In other words, the narcissist’s worldly project of turning herself into a work of art fails because she is interested in the world and in other people only as ‘instrument[s] of doubling’: ‘Better than in mirrors, it is in others’ admiring eyes she sees her double haloed in glory’ (760, 764–5). She does not care about establishing any real relationships because she is the ‘absolute center of the world’ (770). ¹³

If for the housewife dust is an incriminating detail that exposes a hostile world, the narcissist uses the aesthetic detail as a substitute for a world to which she ‘denies all value’. Both women end up despairing and removed from a world to which they once sought access. Might Rahel Varnhagen succeed where the housewife and the narcissist fail? Hannah Arendt may think so. But to read Arendt as a feminist theorist of the detail may seem questionable. Arendt refused the title feminist, she argued persistently that politics requires the wide-scale dimensions of ‘world’, and she also expressed in different contexts a concern with people’s comfort and pleasure amidst small things. ¹⁴ Still, in her biography of the German Jewish woman Rahel Varnhagen Arendt becomes, perhaps reluctantly, a theorist of female paranoia with the detail. From a housewife’s paranoia with dust due to war, we now turn to Rahel’s paranoia with tea due to military invasion. From the narcissist who instrumentalizes the world, we turn now to the salonnière who seeks to host it.

The pavement of Berlin as a world: Rahel Varnhagen’s paranoia with tea

Arendt provides her own phenomenology of housework in The Human Condition. She calls it the ‘laboring fight’ to keep the world clean. It is curiously similar to Beauvoir’s (Arendt 1958, 100). ¹⁵ Both describe housework as a hopeless and futile work that ‘leaves nothing behind’ as it ‘is finished only with its destruction’ (Arendt 87; Beauvoir 549). As we saw, Beauvoir describes the relentless repetition of the housewife’s daily chores as ‘similar to the torment of Sisyphus’ (539). Arendt turns to Hercules, one of whose 12 heroic labors involved cleaning a stable. Arendt notes sarcastically: ‘it is only the mythological Augean stable that remains clean once the effort is made and the task achieved’ (1958, 100–101).

Unlike Beauvoir, however, Arendt is not particularly interested in the gendered dimension of housework: dust for her is a nuisance, not an incriminating detail that exposes the wrongs of patriarchy. ¹⁶ Still, Arendt offers her own account of systemic oppression elsewhere, in her biography of Rahel Varnhagen, and it is in this context that Arendt vitalizes the detail, reading it as a worlding device.

Varnhagen was an intellectual and a famous hostess in Berlin’s 19^th-century salon society who suffered from a tormented inner life. Like other wealthy Jews in her Berlin milieu, she sought assimilation and ‘wanted to escape from Judaism at any cost’ (125). While enjoying relative well-being in Berlin during the 18^th-century, Jews were nevertheless denied equal citizenship and were subjected to humiliating decrees. In her letters, where she confesses her ‘true and bottomless melancholy’, Rahel attributes her despair not to her political exclusion, but rather, to her ‘infamous birth’ – having been born a Jewess (1974, 118–9).

Like Beauvoir’s narcissist, Rahel believed she could ‘neutralize the bitterness of being involuntarily at a disadvantage’ by focusing on making ‘a work of art of [her] own life’ (xvi, 22-3). Rahel’s turn toward herself likewise offered very little solace to her troubled inner life, and she, too, developed paranoid symptoms in old age. But, Arendt tells us that Rahel’s paranoia empowers her.

The paranoia starts with a detail that penetrates her consciousness (121). In the aftermath of Prussia’s defeat by Napoleon in 1806, the relative well-being of Jews in Berlin comes to an end. Rahel’s salon, an interracial society and a ‘haven for those who fitted in nowhere’ falls victim to surging antisemitism as her German friends stop showing up. In the wake of the disappearance of the salon, Rahel writes in a letter from 1808: ‘at my “tea table, I sit with nothing but dictionaries; I serve tea no oftener than every week or ten days, when Schack [the family servant], who has not deserted me, asks for some. […] My German friends—how long it is since I have seen them; as if they were dead, scattered!”’ (121, 146).

Gradually, ‘a fragment at a time’, this detail – the declining number of teacups she serves – makes Rahel question everything. With Schor’s clicking clitoris in mind we might say that when Rahel gently places her teacup in the saucer and it clatters, something suddenly ‘clicks’ for her. In the subsequent years after the disappearance of the salon Rahel is radicalized, a fury builds up in her, a ‘passionate protest’ and a new ‘bold’ political insight (1974, 209; 212), which culminates in her own paranoia-critique: Rahel could not help thinking, Arendt writes, that ‘she had been robbed and cheated by a secret, spiteful alliance between state and society which combined to withhold from Jews first civil rights and then social equality’. Recalling the housewife’s suspicion that ‘male society took [her] in hand and duped her’ (733), Rahel, too, comes to believe that deceptively, Jews have been ‘lured out of their two-thousand-year-old badger-hole. Their lives had been poisoned when they were inoculated with the poison of ambition’ (222).

Like Schor, Arendt approves of the paranoia, in which she sees Rahel theorizing and describing the system that oppresses her: Rahel ‘learned to see her own unrelatedness and alienation objectively, to fit them into the vacuity and emptiness of a city that [failed] to assimilate her. Her despair’, says Arendt, ‘was no longer her own private affair; rather, it was merely a reflection of a doomed world’ (167). Counting teacups, then, emerges as a small detail that reveals the workings of the social whole, or – as Schor puts it – it is a synecdoche (1981, 219). ¹⁷ ‘I have investigated it’, says Rahel, the conspiracy theorist; ‘what oppresses me is the world’ (1974, 121).

Arendt wants us to understand the significance of this new forensic orientation to the detail against the background of the inexcusable smallness of Rahel’s pre-or proto paranoid life. Before her tea-epiphany, tea was just tea, a prosaic detail, and Rahel’s ‘fate as a Jew [was, to her, nothing] more than a wholly personal misfortune’. For most of her life, Arendt says, Rahel was unable to ‘fit her private ill luck into a scheme of general social relationships’, or to feel solidarity with those who have been excluded from society like herself (177–8). It took a major catastrophe like military occupation for Rahel to connect the dots and see the big picture: ‘events struck home’, Arendt says, ‘only when Rahel became aware that they were destroying her small personal world’ (121). When Rahel meticulously documents in her letters the declining number of teacups she serves in the wake of Napoleon’s invasion of Berlin, she recalls Beauvoir’s housewife who takes note of the changing pace at which dust accumulates in the corners of the house when war ravages the world outside. Both recognize grand worldly losses only when they converge with their personal losses (Beauvoir’s ‘small holocausts’).

But unlike the housewife and the narcissist, Rahel is not undone by her paranoia. The housewife and the narcissist used the detail to fight lost battles against time and were utterly unnerved by the temporariness of their triumphs against dust or the erosion of their aging body, but Rahel learns in old age that critique is good for the skin. Arendt says that the ‘passionate protest”’against society that Rahel waged in old age ‘preserved an odd youthfulness in her’ (212). Rather than exhausting her, her paranoia energizes her: ‘this anger, I deem my ambition’, Rahel writes (1974: 222). How can we explain that?

It might have to do with Rahel’s taste for gossip.

In a letter to her friend, David Veit, when her salon was still thriving, Rahel complains that as a woman, she must ‘accept the pavement of Berlin as the world’ (in: Tewarson 1998, 55). This complaint is reminiscent of Beauvoir’s housewife who accepts her geranium pot as a world while ‘walls block out the horizon’. But the horizon is not entirely blocked from the pavement, and ‘pavement’ might be Rahel’s name for the hermeneutics of the marginalized, what Fredric Jameson calls ‘the poor person’s cognitive mapping’ (1988) and Eve Sedgwick calls nonce taxonomy: the ‘unsystematic resources’ by which people who experience oppression ‘map out the possibilities, dangers, and stimulations of [their] human social landscape’. Highly ranked on the list of these pavement resources, is for Sedgwick, the ‘precious, devalued art of gossip’ (1990, 22–23). Rahel also ranks it high: ‘details were so important to her’, Arendt writes about Rahel’s love of gossip, ‘because she immediately saw them as typical; they communicated much more […] information to her hungry curiosity, revealed far more to her mind, which depended on deduction in its attempts at orientation, than anyone could guess or possibly understand’ (Arendt 1974,18). There is neither indictment of the world here (as in the case of her forensics with tea), nor a narcissistic devaluation of the world (as in her investment in self-fashioning). Instead, Arendt sees here something else: the ‘hungry curiosity’ of a woman who had been confined to the pavement and who is deeply invested in, craving for, intimacy with the world through its details. If the housewife fends off the world by eliminating dust, Rahel acts on her hunger for the world by clinging to details.

After 1806, the salon is lost but the gossip remains, now mostly transmitted via written correspondence, and enriched by the new political insight that ‘penetrated [Rahel’s] consciousness’ (121). ¹⁸ Lillian Weissberg notes that as gentile attendance in the Jewish salon declined ‘a new conversation began to take hold’ (2012, 62) where Rahel and her Jewish friends ‘revealed their common fate’, discussed bodily pains, compared symptoms (menstrual pains, headaches, colds), and worlded them by insisting that the only possible cure for their physical symptoms is the ‘healing power of the world’ as Rahel puts it (69).

Arendt is critical of gossip, because it experiences and expresses ‘public matters […] only in the realm of the intimate’ (1974, 20), reducing pertinent political questions into juicy details. ¹⁹ Politically speaking, she prefers Rahel’s forensic detail (the tea table) over the gossipy one. The tea-epiphany reveals a truth that transforms Rahel from an assimilation-seeking parvenu to a ‘conscious pariah’ who, on her death-bed, declares that she ‘should on no account now wish to have missed’ having been born a Jewess (3). But this narrative of redemption sidelines Rahel’s more prosaic and sustained efforts throughout her life to adhere to details and be worlded by them. Was this effort in vain?

Judith Butler would not think so.

In the 2018 José Esteban Muñoz Memorial Lecture Butler recalls a detail – a photo of a figure walking down a street, which the late Muñoz had took and forwarded to a mutual friend, alleging that ‘this image clearly showed Judith Butler bolting from some exciting night in New York, walking the walk of shame’ (2018, 1–2). The allegation was false, harmful. Still, Butler chooses to refuse the ‘meager satisfactions’ of the forensic, arguing that calling Muñoz’s fictional story ‘a lie [would] deflect from its primary importance’: the pleasure of imagining a world in common (2,4). ‘I did not really mind that the speculation was false’, says Butler, ‘since I saw that the embellishment of reality was the thing’ (2). Butler chooses to not let the pull of the forensic dominate their relationship to the factual on the expanse of world. ²⁰ That Rahel survives her paranoia, unlike Beauvoir’s women who are completely incapacitated, personally and politically, by it, must be because, she, too, made this choice. Rahel built a world around the details, from the curbside of the pavement, in collaboration with her co-conspirators, playfully, imaginatively, viciously, as if she understood what the housewife did not understand: that the detail as a bearer of truth alone, as a forensic device, would not emancipate her. ²¹