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Abstract
This essay considers Pamela Sue Anderson’s work in relation to her participation in the Enhancing Life Project from 2015 until her death in 2017. Offering a critical interpretation and reconstruction of Anderson’s final work, this essay also gestures beyond it. It begins by narrating her participation in the Enhancing Life Project. Next, it focuses on her treatment of capability and vulnerability, identifying shifts in her thought and bringing theological symbols and a constructive theological interest to the conversation. Anderson depicted the relation of capability and vulnerability as a “threshold for enhancing human life.” This contribution examines her implied metaphor of a spatial or temporal crossing point and evaluates Anderson’s original post-Kantian conceptualization of threshold in relation to the shifts in her thinking. A sympathetic but more adequate approach to enhancing vulnerable life can be informed by Simone de Beauvoir’s phenomenological approach to lived experience and her construal of the body as a lived situation. When vulnerability is interpreted as a situated susceptibility to being changed, for good or for ill, then threshold language can be reintroduced in relation to the intensification, enhancement, and transformation of life, that is, of the “aliveness of life.”
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
I would like to express my gratitude to Pelagia Goulimari and the other organizers of the conference. With fondness and gratitude, I remember the pioneering and passionate work of Pamela Sue Anderson and her generous, unflagging collegiality. Thanks also to William Schweiker and Beverly Clack for their comments. My participation in the conference was partially supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, via the Enhancing Life Project. The opinions expressed in this paper are indebted to these contexts and conversations, but are my own.
1 Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity [1948], trans. Bernard Frechtman (Philosophical Library; New York: Citadel, 1991) 9.
2 “Threshold for enhancing human life” and “key concepts” are phrases from Anderson’s thesis statement of her Enhancing Life Project proposal. See the discussion of these terms and her proposal below.
3 Pamela Sue Anderson, “The Transformative Power of Vulnerability” (4 Feb. 2016), available at <http://enhancinglife.uchicago.edu/blog/the-transformative-power-of-vulnerability> (accessed 23 Dec. 2019).
4 See <http://enhancinglife.uchicago.edu> (accessed 23 Dec. 2019).
5 Pamela Sue Anderson, “Life-Giving Philosophy: A Q&A with Dr. Pamela Sue Anderson” (2 Feb. 2016), available at <http://enhancinglife.uchicago.edu/blog/life-giving-philosophy-a-q-and-a-with-dr-pamela-sue-anderso> (accessed 23 Dec. 2019).
6 See Pamela Sue Anderson, “Capability, Confidence and Creativity: Transforming the Concepts We Live By” in The Enhancing Life Project: Scholars and Research Projects, 2nd ed., eds. William Schweiker and Günter Thomas (n.p.: Enhancing Life Project, 2016) 12.
7 Ibid. See also Anderson’s placement of a feminist philosophy of religion in relation to “conceptual and non-conceptual” philosophies in Pamela Sue Anderson, Re-visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion: Reason, Love and Epistemic Locatedness (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), especially chapters 4, 6, 9.
8 Drawing on my previous account of vulnerability as the susceptibility to being changed, for good and for ill, I argued that “an adequate consideration of glory should illumine and be illumined by vulnerable life rather than obscure or divert attention from it.” See Culp, “Glorious Life?” in Schweiker and Thomas 111; see also Culp, Vulnerability and Glory: A Theological Account (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2010).
9 See, for example, Heike Springhart and Günter Thomas, eds., Exploring Vulnerability (Göttingen and Bristol, CT: Vandenhoeck, 2017). The volume came out of an international symposium entitled “Vulnerability – A New Focus for Theological and Interdisciplinary Anthropology” organized by Springhart and Thomas at the International Academic Forum Heidelberg (IWH), 6–9 September 2015. Contributors include Enhancing Life Project participants Springhart, Thomas, Culp, Bieler, Schweiker, and Dean Bell, Michael Hogue, Stephen Lakkis, among others. Although Professor Anderson did not participate in the symposium, her 2017 essay “Arguing for ‘Ethical’ Vulnerability: Towards a Politics of Care?” (henceforth cited as “‘Ethical’ Vulnerability”) is included in the volume (147–62). See also, for example, the work of Enhancing Life scholar Michael Ing, The Vulnerability of Integrity in Early Confucian Thought (New York: Oxford UP, 2017).
10 We focused on chapters 1, 4, and 6 of Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2015). See Anderson, “‘Ethical’ Vulnerability,” where she frames this line of inquiry, and my discussion of it below. Her published chapter is slightly revised from the paper she presented at our Wuppertal meeting, and that paper was already revised from a January 2016 lecture at Oxford Brookes University on “Vulnerability and the Politics of Care.” Relatedly, note Anderson’s Q&A, published on 2 February 2016 and cited above, which revisits “care” in relation to “life-giving philosophy.”
11 This section offers a close interpretation of Anderson’s proposal as published in Schweiker and Thomas 11–23. The executive summary explains:
“Enhancing Capable Life: Transformative Change, Confidence and Creativity” intends to articulate a transformed conceptual scheme, with new concepts for humans to live by, for an ontology of becoming. First of all, I stipulate a concept of capability, which is a priori: we are created capable. This capability is generic, serving as a threshold for enhancing human life. Second, the concept of vulnerability is grasped a posteriori, capturing the precariousness of life as experienced daily; as vulnerable we become undone by one another in grief, rage and desire. Third, the concept of life refers to a continuous process of change; when we are undone by loss a transformative change is not about our choice, but our becoming. Fourth, confidence is a social phenomenon: being utterly changed by grief, we lose confidence in our own capability as bereaved. However, capability is not contingent; we cannot lose it. Yet it can become obscured; if so, it will need to be enhanced. Human enhancement is “measured” by the equalizing threshold of capability, shared by each subject as a birthright. With an engaged grasp of capability, our conceptual scheme can fill out what are variable, human capacities for affection, conation and cognition; these capacities vary according to our social worlds and our bodily specificities. So, we are all capable, even when we are vulnerable and lacking in confidence; enhancing capable life is always possible, not as something we achieve, but as something intuited as the ontological condition for a creative process of life together.
12 Anderson cites Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2004) 21–23. See the discussion below.
13 Anderson cites Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2011), especially chapter 2, “Deleuze, Bergson, and the Concept of Life.”
14 Paul Fiddes, “Editorial Note” in Pamela Sue Anderson, “Creating a New Imaginary for Love in Religion,” ed. Paul S. Fiddes, in Love and Vulnerability: Thinking with Pamela Sue Anderson, ed. Pelagia Goulimari, Spec. issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 25.1–2 (2020) 47.
15 Much of the theological and devotional background to vulnerability also implies positive transformation in spite of or through loss. For instance, at Anderson’s memorial service we sang hymns about excelling divine love coming down in joy and suffusing earthen creatures, fallible, sinful, and stubborn as they may be, rather than of Christ’s scorn and affliction.
16 James W. Alexander, trans., “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded,” public domain. The hymn opens: “O sacred head, now wounded, with grief and shame weighed down; now scornfully surrounded with thorns, thine only crown; how pale though art with anguish, with sore abuse and scorn!” This 1830 translation of the lyric by Alexander, an American Presbyterian, is well known in the United States and is included in many major hymnals.
17 See <https://www.paulsimon.com/track/american-tune-6> (accessed 23 Dec. 2019).
18 Alexander, “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded.”
19 Butler, Precarious Life 25. Despite one’s best efforts to persevere, “one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel” (24). Cf. Augustine, Confessions 10.6, and Colin Thompson’s hymn setting of this text, as sung at Anderson’s memorial service.
20 Butler, Precarious Life 21. Anderson cites this passage in her Enhancing Life proposal. Butler refers to a “common human vulnerability, one that emerges with life itself.” Butler is arguing for an alternative conception of the human to that of autonomy (and also to some versions of sociality and relationality) that does not de-politicize the possibilities and realities of dispossession as individual psychic loss. Butler depicts a “primary condition” of vulnerability that “is not a deprivation” but rather the way “in which we are, from the start, even prior to individuation itself and, by virtue of bodily requirements, given over to some set of primary others” (31).
21 Anderson, “‘Ethical’ Vulnerability” 161.
22 Ibid. See note 26 below.
23 Butler, Precarious Life 24.
24 Ibid. 20; Notes 209.
25 Butler, Notes 210.
26 Ibid. Butler discusses the possibility of morality and the performance of value in chapter 6, “Can One Lead a Good Life in a Bad Life?,” with “bad” here meaning a life that is effaced by exploitation and the “unequal distribution of vulnerability.”
27 Anderson, “‘Ethical’ Vulnerability” 162. She writes:
Butler might be arguing for an ontology – not an ethics – of embodied vulnerability; but this is not clear to me at least, because vulnerability manifests itself in highly materially and socially specific ways; so, basically, vulnerability does not look like the same thing – universally – for everyone. However, even if Butler is unable to establish an ontological vulnerability, which is a universal condition for all of life; she equally does not establish an ethical, or ethics of, vulnerability. (161)
28 Ibid. 149 and passim.
29 Ibid. 153.
30 Ibid. 147.
31 See Simone de Beauvoir, Le Deuxième Sexe: Les Faits et les mythes, Tome 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1949); The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Knopf, 2010).
32 Cf. also Beauvoir’s choice of Destin for the title of the first section, implying a critique of theories that assign a fate and way of being to woman/women, that is, a predestination, while also suggesting (positively) that there is a potentiality for directionality in human existence.
33 The Second Sex 46.
34 Pamela Sue Anderson, “The Subject’s Loss of Self-Confidence in its Own Ability to Understand Itself” in Life and Philosophy: Essays to Honour Alan Montefiore on his 85th Birthday, eds. Catherine Audard-Montefiore et al. (Oxford: FEP, 2011) n. pag.
35 “To imagine a space” is from Anderson’s project proposal in Schweiker and Thomas 14. One might compare, favorably, how Anderson turns to vividly imaged spaces at points in Re-visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion, for example to Adrienne Rich’s image of the sunken wreck from her poem “Diving into the Wreck,” in the Preface ix–xi, and the image of the descending glow of the day on the water from Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves 25–26.
36 Toril Moi, “What is a Woman?” in What is a Woman and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001) 65. See also Iris Marion Young, On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005), especially chapter 1.
37 Moi 81. See Young’s discussion of this passage on 18–19.
38 The Second Sex 45.
39 See Culp, Vulnerability and Glory, for this history of interpretation and for a corresponding construal of theology as involving condensed symbols that take shape in and alter changing sensibilities and interpretations.
40 The Second Sex 645.
41 Ibid. 46.
42 Elizabeth Alexander, “Autumn Passage” in Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems 1999–2010 (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2010) 174. Excerpts published by permission of the author.
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