Despair's a maudlin ecstasy of baroque romanticism. You wait for signs.-Chris Kraus (2000) Aliens & Anorexia (46)
[A]ll these readings deny the possibility of a psychic, intellectual equation between a culture's food and the entire social order. Anorexia is a malady experienced by girls, and it's still impossible to imagine girls moving outside themselves and acting through the culture. All these texts are based on the belief that a well-adjusted, boundaried sense of self is the only worthy female goal…Anorexia is a violent breaking of the chain of desire.—Kraus (161-3; emphasis in original)
Cynicism travels through the food chain. To stop eating is to temporarily withdraw from it. Kraus (173)
Euclid, who wrote only about things which were quite simple and most intelligible, is easily explained by anyone in any language. For to grasp his intention and to be certain of his true meaning it is not necessary to have a complete knowledge of the language in which he wrote, but only a quite common and almost childish knowledge. Nor is it necessary to know the life, concerns and customs of the author, nor in what language, to whom and when he wrote, nor the fate of his book, nor its various readings, nor how nor by whose deliberation it was accepted.—Spinoza, Theological Political Treatise, chapter 7. translated by E. Curley.
One of the threads running through Kraus's Aliens & Anorexia is a re-interpretation of Simone Weil's philosophy and, with it -- and maybe more importantly – the way anorexia is represented and conceived. Apparently, Weil's "writings are often read as biographic keys," (165) and, in so doing her writings are reduced (belittled, and dismissed, etc.). There can be a kind of violence in reductive readings, which can entrench further patterns of harm.
However, reading the writings of somebody as "keys" to their lives need not, in principle, be reductive if the life and text are thought of as exemplars worth emulating or if they have something to teach us about, say, philosophy (art, sport, politics, faith, etc.) or how one ought to live. After all, some authors invite at least partial reflection on their lives through hints or strategic autobiography; even when they do not do so explicitly, often these circumstances are – as Spinoza notes in the passage quoted above -- critical to a contextual understanding of their aims and methods.
That is, there is a complex ethic of reading. Even when we antecedently know, if such knowing is possible, that the life in question is to be censured because the life counts as some kind of consequentialist mark against the all-things-considered-worth of a philosophy (Heidegger, De Man, etc.), such an ethic may, nevertheless, encourage gentle re-readings or, at least, receptiveness to possible new framings.
Kraus encourages her readers to re-think of anorexia as, in part, a kind of moral responsiveness to intolerable cynicism in our culture. And indeed from the moment we are born the way we are oriented toward food is suffused with cultural significance and this often includes acts of violence not just toward the animals we have slaughtered for meat. For example, when my wife was becoming practiced at breastfeeding our then-infant-son when still in the hospital after his birth, I was shocked by the forthright, physical brutality of the attending nurses toward my wife's breasts over and beyond the whole mass of norms and cultural imagery that all seem to conspire to create guilt and self-doubt when mothers/parents feels most vulnerable.
Until reading Kraus's novel it never occurred to me to think of anorexics as seeing through our systematic distrust of each other that makes us view all of other people's acts as incapable of nobility or of generosity. It's not that I couldn't discern that eating disorders may be shaped by the harmful culture we inhabit, but I tended to understand anorexics as passive victims (of their parents, of the media, etc.), to be approached with tact (and maybe humor) and without judgment even if their behavior evidently harms themselves. Not for the first time, I recognize that in trying to resist our culture's flawed categories (after all, it's often said that anorexics just (sub-consciously) want attention or need treatment, etc), I have also reinforced the culture's patterns of harms.*
For, Kraus invites her readers to judge an anorexic's sensitivity and decisiveness as a sign of a life that would require a much-needed recasting of the social order to flourish. (Obviously, it is also dangerously reductive to treat another individual solely as a symbol for all our expressed and suppressed suffering, but to get the conversation started it is a useful corrective.)
At one point Kraus quotes Weil writing "in 1941" that "The idea of value…is at the center of philosophy. All reflection that deals with the idea of value… is philosophy; every effort of thought that deals with another object than value is alien to philosophy." (152) I am, as of yet, incapable or unwilling to embrace the thought that a non-value object is entirely alien to philosophy, although I am entertaining it. In reflecting on Weil's thought I tried to locate the source of Weil's quote; I am not sure I found it. By the magic of google, I was led to the abstract of a translation of Weil's "Some Reflections around the Concept of Value: On Valéry's Claim that Philosophy is Poetry:"
In response to Paul Valéry's claim that "philosophy is poetry," Simone Weil set out to examine the nature of philosophical thinking. She argues that it is above all concerned with value. In the course of her argument, she lays out the grammatical differences between thinking about value, and other epistemological endeavours. These differences mean that inconsistencies are not to be avoided in philosophy, and that philosophy is not a matter of system building. In the end, she also believes that thinking philosophically requires one to possess the value of detachment, and hence a readiness to be transformed.
To be continued...
*It doesn't follow I now know any better what stance I ought to take (working on that).
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