Abstract
I am thankful to the Editors of the journal for the suggestion that I write a response to Farhad Dalal’s wide ranging and thought provoking article: Intimate Others and the Othering of intimates (Dalal, 2020) that is published in this journal. It is difficult for me to know how to speak of Farhad Dalal—to use the conventional family name—Dalal—feels absurd as I have known Farhad for many years. In turn, though to name him as—Farhad—feels disrespectful as if I am stripping him of credibility as just using a first name runs counter to established academic custom. How to name him is unsettling as it raises questions such as: how well do I know him? Am I claiming an intimacy that exists in my imagination but not in actuality? Naming another human being is never neutral as the act of naming is laden with emotion, investment (social, political, emotional), power, imaginings (conscious and unconscious), the fantasized act of recognition and the necessity of recognition. Perhaps, it is always an act of colonizing the other.
Farhad Dalal (note that I have not resolved how to name him) is preoccupied with how to respond ethically to another and is a theme that runs throughout his article and he explores helpfully ethical relatedness, ethical distress and the aggressions, if not violence, that is done to another. I perceive the acts of non-recognition: stripping the other of complexity, rendering other human beings as invisible and as positioning the other as inferior and thereby the self as superior as colonizing practices. To take an example, Dalal draws on the commonplace grasp of empathy as ‘the capacity to feel for the suffering of another’ and following Elisabeth Young-Bruehl I argue that this understanding of empathy conceals that it can be a profound psychic act of incorporation (1998). Empathy, as Young-Bruehl writes involves ‘putting another in yourself’, entails knowing the place of the other in one’s psychic life (1998: 22) and this is crucial especially in ethical relatedness. True ethical relatedness involves knowing, as Dalal asserts, that we are embroiled with the other, knowing that we all have the self-serving capacity to use other human beings, and that we all render others as invisible objects. In short, we all have to know, even if reluctantly, the role that others play in our fragmented psychic lives.
Dalal thoughtfully unpicks the various ways that the socio-political spheres impact on all of us and the persistent impact of colonization that forms us as human beings unrelentingly. Anish Nandy (1983) and Fanon (1995) are preoccupied with the damage wrought on human beings and the violence that permeates socio-political relations, professional and personal relatedness. A personal example: I was getting ready to go to a Black Lives Matters protest when I suddenly realized that I did not have time to go as I had to write a report on harassment and sexual violence for a faculty committee. I was shocked, it was visceral, as I knew once again how violence pervades so much of living a life. Visceral, because it took my breath away and it was one of those moments, as Claudia Rankine expresses it, that sends adrenaline to the heart, dries out the tongue and clogs the lungs (Rankine, 2015: 7). The point here, as Farhad Dalal, asserts is that violence, contempt and hatred permeates all aspects of identities and all facets of inter-relatedness. This violence should cause all of us ethical distress so that we are perturbed profoundly by the socio-political-emotional conditions that we live by and inhabit.
As Dalal pithily states, ‘we are all broken’ which he understands as arising through our gender, sexuality, race and class positioning. Farhad Dalal focuses on gender in the early section of this article while later he concentrates on unpicking the tight web of masculinity and militarization. He is concerned with hegemonic ‘ideals’ of gendered identities and the consequences of dominant masculinity on female identities. A theme throughout this article focuses on the projections that men place on women so that women are denigrated and treated as objects of contempt. In short, men bolster their fragile egos by perceiving women as weak, irrational and inferior. Dalal has a point that he asserts unashamedly and while I agree with him I do have some disquiets that refuse to disappear. Farhad Dalal emphazises that ‘Men have to live on Mars and only on Mars. Women have to live on Venus and only on Venus’ but I question such a rigid divide as I perceive gendered identifications as more fluid and unpredictable than that statement implies. If we take the unconscious seriously, and I happen to think we should, then such rigid dichotomies cannot hold. Current theorizations of gender emphasize the fluidity of gendered identifications and Judith Butler especially the melancholy that affects us all as we take up a gendered position as male or female (see the nuanced debate between Judith Butler and Adam Philips in The Psychic Life of Power (Butler, 1997)). We cannot, should not, read off straightforwardly, gendered identifications as if we all fall in line willingly with what society demands of us in relation to gender, sexuality or anything else for that matter. Dalal draws on quite dated theory on gender and yet those theoretical frameworks cannot be dismissed as the question of what persists and what is different is still a troubling and challenging topic of debate.
In the following paragraph my identity as an Egyptian Muslim is to the fore and my social-political formation forms my perceptions and emotions. So without further procrastination I am profoundly troubled, cross to be more honest, at the positioning of Palestinian women as silent, passive and lacking in agency by Israeli citizens (see Dalal’s article for further detail). Farhad Dalal does critique these perceptions and then he himself leaks into assertions and suppositions when he declares that Israeli women are better off than Palestinian women. I am bewildered—how is this judgement made? On what basis? So Dalal is critical of the Israeli implicit claim that Israeli women are superior because they speak, are vocal and apparently agentic. But then the claim is reiterated by Dalal and we end up in an all too familiar place in which Arab women are perceived as oppressed by patriarchy and religion. Both words—patriarchy and religion—are asserted as if uttering the words delivers understanding. As Lila Abu-Lughod argues it is important to point out that defining patriarchy is not straightforward and cannot be wrapped up as if we all know what patriarchy means and how it functions, as it is not trouble-free ‘to put one’s finger on how power works’ (Abu-Lughod 2013: 6).
Farhad Dalal does prise apart the possible reasons as to why Palestinian women may remain silent and the power relations at work that facilitate, or not, who can speak and who has to remain silent, what can be heard and what has to be rendered absent. I would like to add to Dalal’s analysis the following thoughts. Feminist theory is ambivalent about women and agency as on the one hand feminists advocate that women should pursue freedom from oppression and strive to realize our capacities. Simultaneously, feminist theory is engaged with tracing through the various ways that women are oppressed (through various socio-cultural-political structures) and for some feminist academics emphasis is placed on the internalization, and perpetuation, of these repressive structures. The vexed matter of women, agency, choice and autonomy is at the fore of many debates within feminist postcolonial theory. The tendency is for many western feminists to position women from the Middle East as victims solely of patriarchal and familial structures that are firmly embedded within oppressive socio-political configurations. From this vantage point of superiority ‘brown’ women are perceived and represented as in need of rescuing from ‘dangerous brown men’. The tendency is for feminist theorists to praise women who resist the social-political order and leave stranded women who support and are compliant with existing socio-political structures. Silence can be too easily rendered as passive but as Freud pointed out it takes an awful lot of energy to be passive. But perhaps the most salient understanding of all focuses on why speak when there are no words, indeed, there is nothing left to say.
Jessica Benjamin (2018) and Judith Butler (2004) explore how vulnerability cannot be tolerated and has to be denied, if not expelled from psychic life by any means available. Women are implicated in acts of violence: denigration, contempt, humiliation, de-humanizing, unfortunately, the list of acts of violence is relentless. We can be indifferent to violence (turning on the TV as Farhad honestly tells us) and indifference is violent. Turning away from one’s own acts of violence and/or turning away from the violence done to others by the State, mis-reporting by the media, careless everyday acts of aggression are violent.
I am particularly concerned with indifference. Indifference can have different meanings that are attached to different states of mind. Indifference can be healthy as it can allow self and the other to exist as distinct human beings but linked in a shared humanity. Indifference can also allow the other to exist in an ordinary way and to just walk down the road without scrutiny or the projections and emotions of the other. In these ways indifference can be valuable as it can enable another human being to exist without loading them up with projections, fantasies, affect. Indifference, however, can also be ruthless, aggressive and oddly devoid of emotion marked by an emptiness and coldness. Indifference, paradoxically, can lead to hate and overloaded affect and in a complicated mechanism it can work in an opposite way as hatred can unleash indifference.
Indifference can be empty as it empties out the self and empties out the other human being as nothing happens and there is an indifference to that empty space within the self and between self and other. I want to open up the possibility that some states of mind have no emotions and I think indifference can operate precisely as a void that is devoid of emotion. The problem with perceiving indifference as violence, as hate, as contempt or whatever it is that is loaded and in a way that reassures us that we are still human and while we may feel hate, rather, paradoxically, that proves that we still have a humanness.
The socio-political conditions, partly made out of colonization and imperialism, has made all of us shrink inside and put more starkly has made us ill. We suffer whatever our history that persists unremittingly in present socio-political-psychic life. One way through to ethical relatedness is for all of us to recognize our complicity and compliance with the status quo. This necessary act of recognition is demanding, challenging and while essential we have to tolerate that recognition and mis-recognition are always embroiled.
Farhad Dalal raises important and troubling matters in his latest article as he challenges the reader to reflect on and think through our aggressions, indifferences and everyday acts of carelessness (at best) and violence (at worst). My grateful thanks to him for tackling head on such vital matters.