Read an Excerpt
Foreword
by Anne Summers
We women are so accustomed to having unfriendly or even abu-sive adjectives and epithets hurled at us that it is a rare, and very welcome, experience to be described as ‘thinking’. It is, when you think about, so unusual, contradictory even, that it is startling. Instead of the usual descriptions - ‘bitch’, ‘aggressive’, ‘shrill’, ‘ball-breaking’ - that portrays us as upsetting the natural order of things, we are characterised as thoughtful, as people who want answers to the big questions of life.
This book aims to ‘connect philosophical thinking and every-day life’ and Julienne van Loon has done this in an intriguing way. The book is partly a memoir, telling often disturbing sto-ries of her childhood, becoming a mother, joining the academy, leaving a long-term relationship, losing a best friend to a violent end, travelling, learning, thinking. It is also an exploration of the themes that have preoccupied her in life and at work and which are the organising themes of this book. The six chapters explore love, play, work, fear, wonder and friendship, through interviews with ‘thinking women’ and stories of her own experiences. It is an absorbing and, at times, challenging brew. I found myself stop-ping to think on almost every page as ideas swirled up in new ways, or new contexts, and forced me to ask the same questions of myself that van Loon was asking as part of her meditation. It is an energising and provoking experience and that it is so unfamiliar is a testament to the originality of this book. We are not used to such philosophical explorations being linked to the stuff of everyday existence, yet we should be. How else do we arrive at understanding, or enlightenment? At the insights that brace us to continue to propel ourselves forward? There are many in this book but perhaps the one that resonated most with me was the description of friendship as ‘a project that has no end’. What a perfect way to think about the wonderful, rewarding yet often infuriating relationships we have with our close friends. I am still turning this thought around in my mind and using it to examine the friendships I value.
Of the six thinking women she interviews, only one, Nancy Holmstrom, she says, can be labelled ‘a capital P philosopher’ in that she is employed as such at a university. The others are the novelist Siri Hustvedt, the feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti, the media studies professor Laura Kipnis, the writer and historian Marina Warner and Julia Kristeva, a psychoanalyst, novelist and feminist philosopher. But they are each women who continue to think deeply about the fundamental questions of life and who were willing to share their thoughts, as well as their precious pri-vate time, with their Antipodean interrogator. The result is a fascinating book that will have us all thinking, whether or not we are women.
Introduction
The thinking woman exists: she is alive and well. Browsing through the philosophy sections of some of the world’s best bookshops, and indeed through the staff listings in philosophy departments at any of our most prestigious universities, one has to be sharp-eyed and persistent to find her. Sometimes, she has been cast out from capital-p Philosophy as a discipline and a category. Often, she was never admitted to those schools in the first place. In fact, the thinking woman can frequently be found having a better and more playful time elsewhere: she is with and amongst the novel-ists, artists and activists; she has flourished in the social sciences and humanities more broadly; or she has made it on her own as an independent scholar. Life, for the thinking woman, can be messy and complicated. She is and is not a philosopher. She is rarely a household name. When she gets too powerful, there is a remarkably consistent method for bringing her down: a combination of ridicule, smear campaign and forced exile. These are some of the reasons why her work has so much to offer.
Six years ago, I set out to write a book profiling living female philosophers, a book I hoped would work to connect philosophical thinking and everyday life in a manner that values and validates the work of some of our leading female philosophers, and that speaks to those of us trying to make sense of how to live now. I had particular themes in mind: love, friendship, work, play, fear, and wonder. I had questions, too. Is love a good investment? In what form should women participate in work under capitalism? How necessary, how vital, is friendship? I began reading widely, in earnest. I began to wonder who we might define as a female philosopher.
And then, what is philosophy?
As I write this introduction, sitting at a familiar café benchtop on an ordinary weekday morning, I look to the other end of the long room, and see a woman looking back at me. She is dark-haired and spectacled, her profile eerily similar to my own, and as she leans forward, elbow on the table, she tilts her face slightly to rest against her hand. She is looking back the length of the room at me, not with recognition but with an open, contemplative gaze. She is thinking. For a second, I mistake her for another version of myself.
Philosophy need not be a closed and cloistered corridor. It need not be a space exclusively for the Y chromosome and the elite. In a secular, contemporary world, many of us who are untethered from organised religion - or at least less firmly bound by it than our parents or grandparents might have been - can find both solace and instruction in the rich and rigorous examination of mean-ing that goes on and through the work of philosophy. It is, in its broadest definition, the art of making sense of things. By things, in this instance, we can mean those pertaining to the bigger picture: existence, reality. And yet the work I profile here frequently knits together the big picture and the small: I find the role of lived expe-rience in the work of the women I profile in this book vivid and impactful.
In my view, the purpose of philosophy is to help us to analyse and therefore to understand our experiences of the world in which we live. Those physical, social and institutional structures we find ourselves negotiating every day - work, family, the neighbourhood, domestic coupledom - are themselves the products of particular ways of thinking. Reading the work of the female thinkers I profile in this book has helped me to think more deeply about the circumstances into which I have been cast, and into which I have cast myself. Their work has led me to examine - often with considerable discomfort - not just the choices I have made, but the extent to which those choices have been complicit in furthering forms of thinking that I don’t actually subscribe to myself, includ-ing some that I actually would prefer to outright reject.
Are my key subjects in this book philosophers, then? No and yes. Yes and no. Given the problems of philosophy as a category that so frequently excludes women, and as a discipline so enamoured by logic as method, I came to categorise the women whose work I write about here as, first and foremost, thinkers. Their work prompts insightful questions about the big things and the small, and this too became a key objective for my own book. I wanted to braid their questions with my own. I wanted to try their observations on. Further, I wanted to prompt and provoke my own readers to look at what happens when we apply philosophy to our own everyday circumstances. It’s not an easy thing to do. It can lead to a radical change of attitude to things we have come to accept. It can prompt us to investigate more fully our own motivations, or, as has sometimes happened to me, give us a deeply uncomfortable feeling of anger or shame.
To develop this book, I travelled widely, spending considerable hours with my interviewees. I sat with Siri Hustvedt in her artfully decorated home in Brooklyn as we shared with one another play-ful anecdotes about childhood and parenting. I climbed the stairs to Laura Kipnis’s apartment in Manhattan, and shared a Thai meal with her while talking fidelity and control in domestic partner-ships. In London, the following year, I fell a little bit in love with Marina Warner’s summertime urban garden. I carried the memory of its lively colour with me across continents as I sat down at my kitchen table in Australia to read more deeply her work on botanical artist Maria Merian. Gradually, The Thinking Woman began to take shape. I travelled again, this time to trace a path along the old canals of the Netherlands to the magnificent front room of the Centre for the Humanities at the University of Utrecht, where Rosi Braidotti and I commenced a friendship through intense discussions about the meaning and potential of friendship. Later, I met with Helen Caldicott in her newly planted back garden in the southern highlands of New South Wales, where we talked about what it takes to care so deeply for the planet that you turn to full-time activism for a period of forty years. Finally, I returned to the United States and to Manhattan, where I met with one of the few women in the book to forge a career in a conventional philosophy department: Nancy Holmstrom. In addition to philosophies of work, Nancy and I compared my experiences of road cycling to hers with running marathons. I still remember fondly the beauti-ful poise of her cat. With Julia Kristeva, I exchanged several emails, but, regrettably, we did not meet in person. I still hope one day to change that.
While I was writing this book, there was plenty happening to prompt one’s thinking about feminism in the public sphere. Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign was dogged by gendered discourse, including ridicule, and ultimately failed. Rebecca Solnit published Men Explain Things to Me. Then the #MeToo movement took flight with the outing of Harvey Weinstein, and many other men in positions of privilege who have been revealed to be sexual predators since. As this book goes to press, Julia Kristeva has come under the spotlight due to allegations about her rela-tionship with the Bulgarian government when she was a young student in France. Was she a spy? The facts are still disputed, but my inclination is to see the allegations against her as part of a fairly common trend: she is possibly the most well-known living female philosopher. She has considerable influence. Tracking the work of the women in this book over decades, including the reception of their work in the public sphere, I am inclined to approach attempts at reputational damage with considerable caution. One sees patterns, over time, and the cumulative effect is dispiriting.
As I wrote, the world kept turning. Rosie Batty won some hard-fought battles for domestic violence policy reform in Australia, even while one woman per week in this country continues to be killed by her partner or ex-partner. Rosi Braidotti’s work on posthumanism has found an increasingly widespread audience in recent years, particularly in the light of the serious effects of climate change. My own life circumstances changed too. I left the father of my son. I moved cities. My child grew from preschooler to confident tween.
I stuck to the themes I had begun with - work and play, fear and wonder, love and friendship - and to my original intentions for the book. I wanted to write a companionable book that val-idates the work of living female thinkers and at the same time provides its readers with a sense that the questions those thinkers are asking are not so different from those we all ponder from time to time. I wanted to celebrate the contribution made by women in the intellectual sphere at the same time as considering their ideas thoroughly, by applying them to my set of circumstances. Women like Laura Kipnis and Nancy Holmstrom (to name just two) have thought deeply about such questions as: why do relationships seem like work; what alternatives are there for the way we organise our labour? Their endeavours deserve our serious attention.
The book you hold in your hand has far more of my own story in it than I intended at the start, and, for this reason, it has not been easy to write. The writing has required some deeply reflective thinking of my own, much of which I share with you. I have tried to recreate events, locales and occasional conversations from my memories of them. Sometimes I have changed names and identi-fying details to protect privacy. The eight women I have chosen to profile in the book - both intellectuals and activists - all play themselves, of course, and I generally quote from transcriptions of our conversations, recorded over a three-year period (2014-2016). These women are indeed alive and well, and their thinking speaks to the particular cultural moment we find ourselves in right now. I thank them for their extraordinary work, and also for their support for this project. I urge you to consider their ideas with some depth, to apply their thinking to your (our) own circumstances and to move towards your own mode of answering back, in whatever form that may take.
The woman I observed earlier at the other end of the long room has moved on, and I watch as another takes her place. Younger, the new visitor sports short spiky hair, a dark floral print on her dress, boots. She puts down her heavy backpack and takes off her headphones. She looks at the menu a moment, then glances towards the window. I wonder what she is thinking, and further, where her thinking might take her next.
