Dear Eric,
Perhaps you'll recall that we met in the university library in Amsterdam a number of years ago; I was working on (and continue to work on) early modern women philosophers.
I'm writing to you now because I have been invited by Kluwer to edit a book on feminism and the history of philosophy. One section of this book will be devoted to neglected early modern women philosophers. I would like to include in this section a piece on Sophie de Grouchy de Condorcet, who translated Adam Smiths' The Theory of Moral Sentiments into French, and who appended her own
Lettres sur la Sympathie. I'm wondering if you'd be interested in writing about these letters for the Kluwer volume? I want to get someone who knows Smith well and who can see just where Mme de Condorcet departs from or adds to Smith's views. I also want someone who will be able properly to evaluate the philosophical contribution made by Condorcet. Of course, if after a perusal, you find that her work is totally derivative of Smith, or quite misguided, we'll leave her out of the "neglected figures."....
If you’d like to contribute, all I would need is your cv and a 200-word abstract of your paper by November. The paper itself would not be due until summer 2007. I'll be happy to send more details, a style sheet, etc. in due course.
Let me know if you can sign on. I very much hope so.
All best wishes,
Eileen (August 26, 2006)
I learned this week-end that Eileen O'Neill died (see also Leiterreports). And I was reminded of my magical meeting with her about twenty years ago in the rare books collection of the library of Amsterdam.* I was still a PhD student, but I was in the library researching a possible project on Stevin's natural and political philosophy (and its connection to Spinoza's). In those days, the rare books collection was housed on the Singel near the Koningsplein and flowermarket. When you entered the collection you had to sign your name with affiliation in a big book and add a note about what you were researching. When I signed in, I noticed Eileen O'Neill's name and the UMass, Amherst affiliation. At the time I recognized her name from her papers on Descartes. I made a mental note to introduce myself to her as Dan Garber's student. I scanned the reading room, looking for a distinguished scholar. But to my disappointment I could not locate her. Throughout the day, I did note the assistant librarian of the rare-books collection -- I can't believe I am spacing on his name because he was like a character from a Bordewijk novel -- hovering over an attractive blonde, young woman who was wearing a sturdy, black leather jacket. I was familiar with his hovering having suffered through, a few years before, the indignity of a Summer's worth of hectoring and alerts by him about the proper use of manuscripts.
Near the end of the afternoon, the library had cleaned out. I checked the big sign-in book, and Eileen had not left yet. The only woman in the now near empty room was the young blonde still working on her manuscripts with the assistant librarian nearby. For a second I was baffled, and I wondered if, perhaps, there were two 'Eileen O'Neills" at Amherst. It was, surely, not an uncommon name. I went up to them, and asked her in English if she was Professor O'Neill, the distinguished Descartes scholar. She looked up, and said something to the effect, you may be the first person to call me distinguished; who are you? And I dutifully introduced myself as Dan Garber's student. I looked up at the assistant-librarian, who was then near his pension, and I could tell that despite the fact his English was imperfect, he was shocked by the exchange. Eileen and I went for a drink. She told me about her research on early modern women--a topic I had not heard described at all before let alone with her infectious enthusiasm. I know she piqued my interest because I taught Cavendish's Blazing World in Winter quarter 2001 (as I proudly wrote her in 2002). After a few hours I had to cut our conversation short; my dog needed to be walked.
The previous two paragraphs give sufficient sense of how mesmerized I had been. (In re-reading her note, I also see that she gave me the idea for a focus on neglected figures (see here).)+ Eileen and I did meet a few times again with me being in the audience of her lectures at workshops (etc). But due to her illness and my departure from the US scene these were rare occasions. Even so, Eileen changed my intellectual life with the letter I partially quoted above. Both her student, Marcy Lascano (now a co-author on a project on Cavendish), and Christia Mercer have described the move to me as 'doing an Eileen.' I think the underlying idea is if you wait for people to become interested in early modern female philosophers, you can't wait for them to be persuaded into it by the force of arguments or noble exemplars, but rather you need to rope them in and normalize the topic. And you do so, by giving them a platform or outlet for their new work--this is both savvy and a way to generate a cycle of mutual beneficence and gratitude in the context of advancing a scholarly agenda
As an aside, Eileen's move is topic neutral. And also works for different contexts. So, for example, if you are looking to put together an inclusive conference program, and don't want to invite the usual suspects, looking at scholars in nearby topics is a sensible strategy. For often such an invitation can be a welcome opportunity to broaden or extend one's own projects. Eileen knew that I had been working on Adam Smith, and so working on De Grouchy was a natural extension of my previous research not (to use the language of the economists) an opportunity cost.
As it happens, De Grouchy's work was not derivative from Smith. On the contrary, Smith was merely an occasion for De Grouchy's own distinctive philosophy. I used De Grouchy's critical response to Smith in my monograph and have also made her an increasingly important, independent research topic (thanks to collaboration with Sandrine Berges, who, while reading this, is probably muttering 'yes, and you're way overdue on your draft for our introduction'--Mea Culpa, Sandrine!).
I do not mean to reduce Eileen's significance to being a great intellectual organizer of a now thriving research area. (Regular readers know that I think such philosophical politics is very significant.) As a teacher and scholar, Eileen was not just the starting point and facilitator of scholarly conversations. I have already mentioned her work on Descartes and early modern women, but she also wrote at least one++ truly seminal paper in what is now known as meta-philosophy, "Disappearing Ink: Early Modern Women Philosophers and Their Fate in History." (I have discussed it, recall here and here.) The paper's influence on political philosophy and meta-philosophy have not yet been properly felt. And I would like to close -- by way of homage and a call to action -- by reminding readers of its significance in my own words from memory (with the undeniable risk that in so doing I will be misrepresent it).
In her paper, which shows the marks of prodigious learning and a capacity to assimilate whole dusty libraries (and was designed to overwhelm),*O'Neill shows that despite the brief moment of light, the 1791 Declaration of the Rights of Woman, modern, national democratic politics, which has universalist and inclusivist aspirations too, is founded on gendered acts of exclusion.** This foundational act was inscribed in gendered patterns of scholarship (which she highlighted, also extended to the form of acceptable scholarship/philosophy). Martha Bolton (recall) has described how historical scholarship functions like a cassette player (or walkman), where 'play' is pressed and the familiar story is re-told with a few details carefully adjusted amidst, countless forced (often tacit) moves. The act of exclusion, a 'purification' (see also here) as Eileen notes, meant a structural invisibility of female philosophers. In particular, the often aristocratic women who had been thinking gender (and lots of other important philosophy in lots of guises) were effaced from collective memory and so while national democratic politics may have been -- let's stipulate -- a (moral) advance in one sense, it also meant serious loss. The political point has not lost its urgency yet: with resurgent national democratic politics, we encounter examples of many acts of exclusion in real time and we are reminded of both the brave acts of resistance as well as the servility and quiet of too many.
The gendered act of exclusion also had an effect on how we conceive of feminist thought. The way I put it (not O'Neill, I think, although she has the idea) is that what I call 'Platonic Feminism' (recall) was entirely forgotten (by friends and foes of feminism). This feminism -- shared in differing degrees by Plato, Ibn Rushd, More, De Gournay (recall), Van Schuurman, Cavendish, etc.-- is, in one sense, aristocratic in orientation; it accepted that people were not (created) equal(ly), but that women could be found among the excellent (few) characters and those would be entitled to rule, be philosophers, be properly agents, etc. When feminism was re-founded in the nineteenth century on more egalitarian grounds*** it was decidedly ambivalent about this earlier, more aristocratic tradition (although one finds echoes in it, say, in Woolf's A Room of One's Own).
That modern, national democratic polities are founded on acts of exclusion and accompanied with moral and philosophical losses is the great un-sayable in a progressive conception of history, politics, and scholarship. It is a thought that haunts us who are scrambling to hold on to our slender, democratic faith.
It's a bit macabre (but true) to say that those of us who primarily knew her as a scholarly colleague have gotten used to the thought of trying to anticipate a world without Eileen; and it's too easy to say (even if true) that because of her imprint on many developing scholarly projects, she will be with us for an extended present. For me, Eileen will be the magnanimous exemplar of how politically engaged scholarship can be the best and most beautiful kind of scholarship.
*I am unsure what exact year this meeting was, but it was certainly before 2002.
+I asked her to contribute to that volume, but she had to decline.
**I use the plural to note that non-citizens (refugees, aliens, illigals) are also excluded.
++I use this language because I would argue there are more such works in her ouevre.
***This tradition also has a long history and is often put forward in more Christian tropes.
A nice account, and I'm totally sympathetic to your perspective, but since I'm unfamiliar with the terminology may I ask you to clarify what you mean by "gendered acts of exclusion", and to give us one or two examples? I feel I need to know this in order to have a fuller understanding of the relevance of the philosophical issues you're talking about for the "resurgent national democratic politics".
I'm interested because I think that we are becoming increasingly aware that principles of equality and inclusion, explicit descriptions of which would be the goal of an open-ended inquiry, would be axiomatic in any system of ethical principles, including those that govern the development of political institutions. So "gendered acts of exclusion" sounds like something that would violate these principles and should now be regarded as unacceptable.
Posted by: James Dennis | 12/08/2017 at 12:56 AM
James, for the examples, read Eileen's work--that was the point of the obituary: to send you to the library! Gendered acts of exclusion is shorthand for advancing the interests of men at the expense of women.
What is regarded as unacceptable seems to depend a lot in what circles you travel.
Posted by: Eric Schliesser | 12/08/2017 at 10:36 AM