Tag Archives: Julia Kristeva

Female Genius

16 Monday Apr 2012

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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“Women today are far better off than women in the past. It’s time they shut up and stopped making so much fuss!”

Many things have changed for the better over the last couple of centuries, but the evidence that women are especially at risk simply because they are women is still available on a daily basis: In 2009-10, for example, about 9 incidents of domestic violence a day were recorded by the Central Scotland Police Force. Of these reported incidents – to say nothing of those that remain unreported – 88% were perpetrated by men against women.

A common response to this kind of evidence is to shift the discussion into comparisons. The suggestion is that much worse violence against women exists in “war-torn Africa” or “Islamic communities” or with people in “fundamentalist sects.” The thought that sexist structures that can breed violence on this scale, continue to characterise even so called progressive societies is quickly displaced, in this example, by a convenient connection between ‘religion’ and patriarchal oppression. In other words, progressive societies are seen to be essentially secular.

Of course, this represents a genuine dilemma for feminist theologians and critical scholars of religion because the case against Christianity is compelling and as feminists, they generally have no desire absolutely to deny this. And yet, dismissing Christianity simply as something to be thankfully consigned to history, means consigning all the achievements of women who have identified themselves as Christian alongside it; from this perspective, all Christian women are victims if not collaborators. Yet in its effects, this approach hardly differs at all from previous attempts by men to deny the achievements of women because of their gender.

To address this dilemma we first have to go back to the relationship between feminisms and the Western Enlightenment. This movement, celebrating the power of human reason to explain and harness the forces of nature, gave a powerful impetus towards feminist thinking by severing the connection between social order and a patriarchal God; without God the Father to give a warrant for the whole hierarchical order of being including women’s subservience to men, there was no reason why women should any longer buy into the myth of male supremacy. On the other hand, the key architects of the Enlightenment were far less successful in taking the divinity out of the human male and all things masculine, including a masculine distain for Christianity as a dangerous and irrational (feminine) superstition.

Moving back to the 1970s and 80s, feminist biblical critics, were still struggling to resolve the dilemma even as they worked to apply second wave feminist theory to Christian scripture. They were stll caught up in the double bind; struggling to draw attention to biblical women and women readers in a positive way, whilst at the same time trying not to let either patriarchal texts or the guild of (male) biblical scholars that interpreted them off the hook. Thus their readings of the bible recorded the presence of biblical women, yet very often these accounts focussed on the Bible’s “texts of terror” – its stories of casual violence, its reduction of women to mere objects or to the empty “otherness” that defined a real male presence. In other words they often ended up playing more strongly on the sense in which Christianity was unsympathetic to women than on the sense in which women might justly take their places as its crafters, sustainers and reformers. Yet, looking at the situation more positively, this was exactly what those scholars were doing in trying to address a complicated set of issues that didn’t respond easily to one approach. Sometimes in the hard-won pleasures of dialogue with these problematic structures they did manage, as writers and readers, to overcome all the built-in disadvantages with which they began as women in the male normative context of Church and academy.

In the last sixty years, there has been a vigorous growth in the kind of work that focuses on the lives of women. And, having so many more narratives about women to draw on, our imaginations are fed and our view of what women can do is dramatically widened. In this way, the scenario with which this piece began is also sharply challenged because we can begin to show that the contrast between the situation of women in the past and in the present is nothing like as polarised or final as this suggests.

Arguably, over the centuries, women have found many ways to negotiate problematic structures such as Christian patriarchy, crafting courageous, creative and at some level, pleasurable forms of engagement without necessarily rejecting it outright. Following the philosopher Julia Kristeva, I would call these women ‘female geniuses’ and have written about four such female geniuses in a forthcoming book Because of Beauvoir: Christianity and the Cultivation of Female Genius to be published this year by Baylor University Press. Look out for it!

The Problem of Evil: Adolf Eichmann and Levi Bellfield

07 Thursday Jul 2011

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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The German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt, first coined the expression ‘the banality of evil’ (Arendt Eichmann in Jerusalem:  A Report on the Banality of Evil, 1963).  She was sent to Jerusalem in 1961 by The New Yorker to cover the trial of the former Nazi, Adolf Eichmann for his role in the practical planning and management of the ‘final solution’.  She concluded that Eichmann was no kind of  grand, operatic or blood-spattered axe-fiend with bloodshot eyes.  He had  undertaken this work because he was  ambitious, hard-working and essentially small-minded.  When she called him ‘terribly and terrifyingly normal’ it was this – in some ways, innocuous – lack of imagination she was thinking about.  The problem was, of course, that in the circumstances in which he found himself, his inability to distance himself from his role, to engage with any sense of what we might call a conscience or perhaps even a consciousness of himself, proved lethal for millions.

In our reactions to Eichmann, there is always some fear that we might also be capable of doing what he has done; of being responsible for so much death and destruction or of having to bear that abysmal shame.  Arendt noted how hard it was for those involved in Eichmann’s trial: ‘it would have been very comforting indeed to believe that [he] was a monster’.  Much time and effort was spent trying to prove that he had actually killed someone himself.  But Eichmann was not a monster and the evidence of individual murder was slight.

Here then are two instances of an impoverished imagination accompanied by deep anxiety.  First, Eichmann, obviously lacked the imagination to comprehend or deal with the appalling consequences of his plans for countless individuals, families and communities. (He had, Arendt said, “a horrible gift of consoling himself with clichés”.)  Second, we often lack the imagination to look steadily at evildoers and accept that though we might never do what Eichmann (or Levi Bellfield) did, we do not belong to a different species.  When it comes to evil we have a tendency to mystify it, that is reproduce unchallenging representations of it  from the monster in the movie with unclean appetites for human flesh and blood, to the monstrous perverts of the tabloid press, who lurk in the darkness of our communities and  prey on our children.  There is visceral satisfaction to be had as a result of these representations perhaps, and money continues to be made, however banal the narrative.  But the problem is, this imaginative impoverishment contributes to the serious underlying problem: a potential to become, through lack of thought – particularly the inability to put ourselves into someone else’s shoes – alienated from both others and  ourselves.  We run the risk of becoming – like Eichmann –  lost to any genuine sense of the demanding presence of others, of their unsettling claims on us or of their problematic existences as independent beings.

The French philosopher Julia Kristeva, dealing with the cinema and its representations of evil (Intimate Revolt, 2002) believes the visual medium in particular may not demand enough of us.  She suggests it runs the risk simply of appeasing us on some level without making us do the vital work of interpretation; putting our emotional responses into forms of language that allow us to become conscious of them and of ourselves as their source.  She has more confidence in the work of creating our own words in order to describe, and crucially  to understand what we experience.  But whatever the relative merits of avant garde literature, popular film or the great works of our cultural traditions such as the Qur’an or the Geneva Convention, the bottom line is that this work of interpretation is central to our well-being as both individuals and communities. Certainly it contributes to our imaginative enrichment but more than this, it gives us the means to make sense of and deal with evil.

What does this have to do with Levi Bellfield, convicted murderer?  There was nothing banal about the brutal way in which  he murdered his victims, of course.  But there are risks in simply relegating him to the realms of the banal – the monster whose existence is mysterious and beyond our comprehension.  We really do need to know why Bellfield became a killer and why a man who has a family, who attended a London comprehensive and became a relatively successful small business man felt he had the right to take the lives of three young women he scarcely knew and to wreak such havoc in the lives of their friends and families.