Cartesian Egalitarianism Essay Published

As a reader of this blog, you've probably heard that I am working on a book about Jacques Rancière. In the first two chapters, I seek to trace the egalitarian precedents to his work. In doing so, I place Rancière in the Cartesian and existentialist lineages in French philosophy. 

In "Cartesian Egalitarianism: From Poullain de la Barre to Rancière," which is now available in Phaenex 7.1:

I present an overview of what I call “Cartesian egalitarianism,” a current of political thought that runs from François Poullain de la Barre, through Simone de Beauvoir, to Jacques Rancière. The impetus for this egalitarianism, I argue, is derived from Descartes’s supposition that “good sense” or “reason” is equally distributed among all people. Although Descartes himself limits the egalitarian import of this supposition [restricting the import to the evaluation of epistemological and metaphysical claims], I claim that we can nevertheless identify three features of this subsequent tradition. First, Cartesian egalitarians think political agency as a practice of subjectivity. Second, they share the supposition that there is an equality of intelligences and abilities shared by all human beings. Third, these thinkers conceptualize politics as a processing of a wrong, meaning that politics initiates new practices through which those who were previously oppressed assert themselves as self-determining political subjects.

For previous discussions on this blog, see here and here.

Patrik Ourednik, Case Closed

It all began with a late night hyperlink clicking session, and it ended with reviews of all of Patrik Ourednik's books that have been translated into English: The Opportune Moment (here), Europeana (here), and now Case Closed (Dalkey Archive, 2010).

In a letter to his friend Philip Pendleton Cooke, dated August 9th, 1846, Edgar Allan Poe commented on the popularity of his Dupin stories, such as "The Murders in the Rue Morgue":

These tales of ratiocination owe most of their popularity to being something in a new key. I do not mean to say that they are not ingenious — but people think them more ingenious than they are — on account of their method and air of method. In the “Murders in the Rue Morgue”, for instance, where is the ingenuity of unravelling a web which you yourself (the author) have woven for the express purpose of unravelling? The reader is made to confound the ingenuity of the supposititious Dupin with that of the writer of the story.

Passages such as these serve as important reminders of the rules of the detective story genre. For a detective novel to work qua genre, the author must be able to deploy a series of devices to maintain not only suspense, but she must also be able to give good reasons as to why the mystery unravels. As much fun as the reader might have in the process, the author must have all the loose ends tied up. That is, if we're talking about the genre.

In Case Closed, Patrik Ourednik seemingly takes up Poe's gauntlet, and writes a detective story in which the author/narrator (if we can equate them--or am I falling into Poe's trap?) doesn't know how the web unravels, leaving several intrigues to begin only to be left in suspense by the end of the novel. The story--at least most of it--follows the convergence of two characters, Viktor Dyk, a retiree and failed novelist, and Vilém Lebeda, a police inspector in Prague, who not only is charged with following up on a suicide with a few suspicious circumstances, but also pursues with extra-curricular interest a forty-year old murder case that, while out of Lebeda's jurisdiction, seems to have ties to the members of Dyk's retiree's club.

Ourednik drops a few hints about how the suspicious death and the forty-year old murder case tie together, but he's mostly interested in undermining the expectations of the reader who might just get lured into the intrigues--there's also an abundance of red herrings, if it's even possible to separate between lures and leads. And, given that a group of retirees are at the center of the non-action, there's lots of curmudgeonly behavior, as if Ourednik were attempting to master the aches, pains, and casual bigotry of a cynical post-communist generation. At one point, Viktor Dyk reflects on adolescence:

Adolescents were the worst. Formerly known as youth, the vanguard of our society, striding forth in the footsteps of their fathers, who themselves had only managed to make it as far as the rearguard (13).

Though amidst some pointless retiree-banter (and some of that aforementioned casual bigotry), Dyk leaves us a clue:

"Don't you have something to say, Mr. Dyk?"
"Silence is a form of speech," replied Mr. Dyk.
Mrs. Prochazka looked puzzled.
"And the reverse." He couldn't resist.
"The reverse?"
"Speaking is just another form of silence."

It's the first indication that for all the talk and narration, the mysteries and intrigues may never be unraveled.* By the time we get to Chapter 37:

We are born into a novel whose meaning escapes us, and depart from a novel we have never once understood. Now or never! The author has established with his customary skill that he is equally at home in any genre; he has piled plot twist upon plot twist without so much as a second thought; stacked varying styles side by side; stung readers with bitingly sarcastic asides and trenchant social critique; and generously tossed in a thumbnail psychological sketch. Now or never! No one's understood a thing, and even if they had...

When I read passages like these, I want to point out Simone de Beauvoir's distinction between absurdity and ambiguity. I'll let it pass for now, because this passage--especially the part surrounding what I've quoted--seems to be the master key for interpreting the story. Detective novels have long relied on the ingenuity of the author to unravel the case. And while this is hardly going to sound like praise, in subverting expectations in the genre, Case Closed requires the ingenuity of the reader** to follow the clues.

*

** This might sound like I'm complimenting myself, but I'm not. It's just that you've got to build your own case, which is why I placed the first footnote--given that it's a spoiler--below.
* We'll call this the SPOILER asterisk: I think the statement is also revealing of the failed author Dyk and his role in the intrigues.

De Beauvoir: Participating in Political Life

Last summer, I spent some time reading through Capital, volume 1. This summer, my reading list is in large part organized around preparing for the Rancière book, which includes a cover-to-cover read of the Borde/Malovany-Chevallier translation of The Second Sex (I've already linked to some criticisms of this text, raised by Toril Moi, here).

I've only read through Parts One and Two thus far. But it's a relief to read and not have to worry about omissions à la Parshely. I've also had some fun rediscovering passages such as these (see 146): in the final chapter in the "History" section, de Beauvoir notes that after Germany's defeat in World War I, that women "obtained the right to vote and participated in political life." As for the former, she notes that the "majority of women chose the party of order." But regarding participation in political life, she gives Rosa Luxemburg as an example: "Luxemburg fought next to Liebknecht in the Spartacus group and was assassinated in 1919."

De Beauvoir is often treated as a liberal, politically speaking-- and perhaps sometimes for good reason: I am thinking here of her discomfort with the essay by Sartre, "Élections, piège à cons" (1973; translated as "Elections, A Trap for Fools," which doesn't quite capture the French). Nevertheless, passages such as the one above, wherein the participation in political life is revolutionary struggle, should remind us that she can still be read outside of--or at least not be reduced to--these liberal confines.

On The Second Sex

"There is a good principle which has created order, light, and man, and a bad principle which has created chaos, darkness, and woman." ~Pythagoras

"All that has been written about women by men should be suspect, for men are both judges and interested parties."  ~Poullain de la Barre

So run the two epigrams to The Second Sex, which do not appear in H.M. Parshley's translation. Just as "It is clear that no woman can claim, without bad faith, to situate herself beyond her sex" is deleted from its rightful place after this passage:

Surely woman is, like man, a human being; but such a declaration is abstract. The fact is that every concrete human being is always a singular, separate individual. To decline to accept such notions as the eternal feminine, the black soul, the Jewish character, is not to deny that Jews, Negroes, women exist today – this denial does not represent a liberation for those concerned, but rather a flight from reality (p. xx).  

These omissions, and others (about 15% of the book by Toril Moi's estimation), along with Parshley's lack of command over the 'existentialist' vocabulary detract from such an important work of philosophy. Which is why many de Beauvoir scholars demanded a new, complete translation. In 2007, after years of resistance, the publishers of the English translation announced that a new translation would be forthcoming, and it appears that the news was received with caution. As Toril Moi writes, before the translation  had appeared, "The translators, Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevalier, are best known as cookery book writers. Let's hope they do justice to Beauvoir's masterpiece."

Now, in the London Review of Books, in an article entitled "The Adulteress Wife," Moi renders the verdict:

The best I can say about the new translation of The Second Sex is that it is unabridged, that some of the philosophical vocabulary is more consistent than in Parshley’s version, and that some sections (parts of ‘Myths’, for example), are better than others. The translators claim that their aim was to bring ‘into English the closest version possible of Simone de Beauvoir’s voice, expression and mind’. The ambition is laudable, but the result is what Nabokov, a great champion of literal translation, called ‘false literalism’ (as opposed to ‘absolute accuracy’). The obsessive literalism and countless errors make it no more reliable, and far less readable than Parshley.

Whenever I try to read Borde and Malovany-Chevallier’s translation like an ordinary reader, without constantly checking against the French, I feel as if I were reading underwater. Beauvoir’s French is lucid, powerful and elegantly phrased. Even in Parshley’s translation young women would devour The Second Sex, reading it night and day. It’s hard to imagine anyone doing that with this version.

In her article, she proceeds through a long list of problems with the translation, which I will leave to the reader to explore (they still make me panic about my own translations that I rendered above on the fly...).

Why my interest? I teach de Beauvoir in my "Great Philosophers" class, and this task is rendered a bit more difficult by having to reconstruct her argument, and her philosophical terminology against Parshley's translation. It's not heartening to hear that the trade off of the new translation is that it renders this vocabulary more consistent at the price of readability. It's too bad, because the discussion of de Beauvoir's work often brings the class to life a bit, due to its relevance to contemporary life (which is both good and bad: good because her criticisms remain lively, astute, and, for some, empowering, but bad because many of the problems faced by women-- and others-- sixty years ago are still problems for women today).

I've been thinking of switching to a different text, from the "Introduction" to The Second Sex to something else, more than likely the Ethics of Ambiguity. Any suggestions?