‘Hope can make bad politics’: Jacqueline Rose and Lyndsey Stonebridge in Conversation

Leading cultural critics and feminist thinkers Jacqueline Rose and Lyndsey Stonebridge have profoundly shaped our understanding of feminist thinking and feminist being. In their work, they engage the intertwinement of psychic and political life from different angles, addressing urgent contemporary issues including violence against women; the violence of the nation state; and the complex relations between writing, rights and the law. Crossing disciplinary boundaries, both enact critical reading practices which simultaneously assess such issues in their specificity and situate them in their relation to each other, drawing links across global and historical contexts. Creating dialogues with past and present thinkers and writers, Stonebridge and Rose also highlight the role of creative work and critical thought in exposing the violent conditions of the present, and crucially, imagining modes of living otherwise. As Rose puts it here: ‘what [do] these […] works allow to be spoken that [is] otherwise impossible to hear?’ Concerned with the role of the creative imagination in conceiving new political forms and solidarities, both are committed to articulating a space for a literary ethics and politics.

Jacqueline Rose is Professor of Humanities and Co-Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities and of the London Critical Theory Summer School. A leading feminist literary and cultural critic, she has discussed a wide variety of topics and creative forms, engaging psychoanalytic thought’s political potential to challenge orthodoxies and create spaces of dissent; in recent years, she has written on topics including violence against women; the legacies of apartheid in South Africa; and Israel and Palestine. Recent books include On Violence and On Violence Against Women (2021), The Plague – Living Death in Our Times (2023) and Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty (2019). Internationally acclaimed as a public intellectual, Rose is a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books and The Guardian, among many others.

Lyndsey Stonebridge is Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham. In her wide-ranging, interdisciplinary work, she addresses topics including the legacies of modern violence; histories of placelessness; the dangers of ‘literary humanitarianism’; and the social, political, historical and ethical relationships between rights and writing, through the twentieth century into the present. Recent books include Writing and Righting: Literature in the Age of Human Rights (2020), Refugee Imaginaries: Research Across the Humanities (2019) and Placeless People: Rights, Writing, and Refugees (2018). We are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience will be published in January 2024. She is a regular media commentator and broadcaster and has written for The New Statesman and Prospect Magazine.

This article forms part of the special issue of parallax, ‘Reading Otherwise: Decolonial Feminisms’. The issue features conversations which took place 2021-23. Prompts relating to the speakers’ work and the key terms of the issue were circulated ahead of this conversation. We started the conversation by asking what had brought them to their work.

Jacqueline Rose: For me, it started in Oxford in the late 1960s when the students went into occupation, and there was also the burgeoning of second-wave feminism. A group of women undergraduates got together and started organising with the women who were living on the Cowley Industrial Estate outside Oxford, where swathes of the working-class population had been moved out to a special town which would feed the Cowley Industrial Plant. We started organising with them for childcare. We became quite close to them and there was a sense of real feminist solidarity. It was also my first brush with the question of what mental distress is in a public space because it turned out fifty percent of the women on this estate were on tranquillisers. And they were distressed: there were constant threats of unemployment and there was severe exploitation. There’d been rehousing and displacement, all in the name of the university.

As we’d agitated successfully for childcare with some of these women, to lift the burden of their domestic lives and their working lives, we thought: great, we can move on to the next feminist issue, which is abortion. They really did not want to talk to us about that; it was a Catholic estate. We really blew it.

It was an absolute eye-opener. It was my first lesson in class difference and in the question of subjectivity in relationship to feminism. We had to stop and think that there’s not just the question of class struggle, and gender struggle. There’s also the question of how subjectivities are formed and what matters in the sphere of what would come to be known as the psychosexual. So that set me on a path which was thinking that there was a certain kind of feminist agitation which was only scraping the surface of – to put it very crudely – what it meant to be a woman, what it actually felt like and how ideologies are implanted.

And then, a good few years later, in 1974, Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism was published. I had been spending time in Paris as an MA student, reading Freud and Lacan and thinking, this is a discourse I need to… make the opposite of peace with… this is the discourse I need to think with. When I came back to England in 1973, I was very aware that for feminism, Freud was public enemy number one. I mean, he was just seen as a totally bad thing, and almost at exactly that moment, Mitchell’s book was published. I will be grateful to her for the rest of my life because I just thought, thank goodness, here’s a feminist, and a Marxist feminist at that, for whom psychoanalysis is not only crucial to understanding how women become women or don’t, but who sees that question as a key supplement to Marxism.

At that point I felt something opening up to do with feminism and the psyche. And I knew that’s where I wanted to put myself. Then, throughout the 70s, French feminism started flooding into the UK. I’d already had a taste of it when I was a student in France. Suddenly all these things seemed to fall together in a way that of course has been problematised for all kinds of reasons: the overlooking of different forms of sexuality (though that is always latent to, or present in Freud), the issues of race and colonisation. But that was the germ of it.

Lyndsey Stonebridge: And I came to Jacqueline! I left school very early and went into higher education late for lots of reasons. I was lucky enough to go to North London Poly in the 1980s: I literally walked into the student occupations to protest against Patrick Harrington – a student who was a very active member of the National Front – which then ended up with a protracted court case whereby his rights to an education were protected; the students at North London Poly and the staff went into full occupation and fought that.

So, my first experience of coming back into education as a curious post-war child of the 60s, was into that. I always thought that the things I was reading and thinking about were part of that moment of activism. You didn’t need to think about it in terms of ‘activism’ – that’s just where you were, and the two things came together. To go back to Jacqueline’s point about what opened up in that period, I feel like I was walking through the room after Jacqueline’s generation had opened that world up. There was a women’s centre with a library in Peckham where I then lived. I walked in in my first year and borrowed Denise Riley's War in the Nursery (1983) – I remember taking that home, that was the first feminist academic book I had read.

I thought all history books were like that! I thought everything was that good, that engaged, that curious. The question Riley raised, and has been raising since, is: what does history let us be and what does history let us think? That was very much the question that preoccupied me. And then, to get to the crucial field that Jacqueline and Mitchell had opened up through psychoanalysis, the question that followed was: what doesn’t fit in conventional history? Because the Left, certain bits of it, were and are very normative, and there was a sense that there was something about the misfit that was not being acknowledged.

Looking back now, the issue of not quite fitting was generational. Like Jacqueline, I was the grandchild of migrants. My parents were part of the post-war working-class grammar school generation: clever people but new to middle-classness. I had the huge benefit of the welfare state and a free education and so I was looked after, but I never felt that I was at home. I was trying to understand that disconnect. Reading, literature, feminist theory and Marxism, but also psychoanalysis helped me think about the idea of the misfit in ways that weren’t damaging but were actually productive.

Jacqueline: I’m intrigued by what you say about the misfit because my relationship to psychoanalysis is always about the trouble, right? It’s always about the mismatch, the misfit – exactly what you’re saying – which is that women do not successfully make their way into so-called heteronormative femininity.

Just to be a bit psychoanalytic for a second – if you take Freud’s injunction (or what seems like an injunction) to women to shift their erogenous zone from active to passive, and to shift from the mother to the father, and that ‘if not, they will fall ill’ – I always say that if you read Freud carefully he’s saying, even if you do that you will still fall ill, which is to say that the norm is coercive and ruinous for the libidinally flourishing little girl who has to restrict all her options, like a car at a junkyard, being turned into a crushed piece of metal.

I owe an unpayable debt to Mitchell, but we really are on a different page in relationship to this question in so far as she wrote Psychoanalysis and Feminism to drive a coach and horses through the opposition between biologism and social determinism as far as femininity was concerned – to offer a deeper account of how we internalise patriarchal norms. She also did it as a sort of justification for Freud in suggesting he was offering a diagnosis – not an apology – for patriarchal law and its internalisation by the human subject. But if you look at that book, the first two sections – ‘The Making of a Lady, I’ and ‘II’ – they imply that the lady is made, i.e., that femininity is something that the girl more or less fully internalises.

When Mitchell wrote the new edition of Psychoanalysis and Feminism, in her preface, if anything, she asserted even more powerfully the internalisation of the norm. When she had her retirement event in 2009, Judith Butler was the respondent. And for Butler, that ‘internalisation’ of the norm is counterintuitive in relationship to what for them is the performativity of gender, which, by the way, I don’t entirely agree with either – although I respect both of them more than I can say – because I think performativity ignores the deep-seated abject, melancholic aspects of human sexuality, which of course Butler went on to theorise from Bodies that Matter (1993) onwards. Nonetheless, it was fascinating to watch them so clearly reading each other in a certain way: it’s either performative or it’s internalised. What I want is somewhere, or something, else. I want somewhere which is about the partial, failed internalisation of something which never works. That was just inspired by Lyndsey’s point about the misfit. I think that has remained.

If you want us to talk about how things have changed, of course, one huge change could be summed up by the idea of trans narratives or trans experience: the concept of gender difference has been put under pressure over the last ten years in a way that I think none of us in those early stages of feminist querying of gender norms could have possibly anticipated – though maybe we should have.

Lyndsey: The two chapters [‘Trans Voices - Who Do You Think You Are’ and ‘Trans and Sexual Harassment - The Back-story’] on trans experience in Jacqueline’s book On Violence are compulsory reading. They are an archive of the moment and I’m incredibly grateful for that. I remember very vividly in 2017 being told by a man in a debate that trans identity is the ‘biggest existential threat to feminism’ there is now. It’s always very nice to be told what the greatest threat to feminism is by a man. This was literally the day after Trump had signed the Global Gag Rule, which consigned millions of women to pain, death and more poverty – which actually was a grave existential threat to women and, by its blatant aggression, to a variety of feminisms. It was bizarre to be given a definition of feminism by a man – a ‘feminism under threat by trans rights’ – at the very same moment that women’s rights were under direct attack. That’s a long-winded way of saying that I’m more worried about overt misogynistic ‘existential threats’ coming from outside feminism.

The other thing I think is really notable about how the trans debate has transformed the current scene is how committed students and a younger generation – the ‘new people’ as Arendt called them – are to trans causes. I’m talking here mainly about the UK, but also about France where student activism on trans issues is also very strong. Jacqueline and I began this conversation with some early moments of activism. Many early moments of activism right now in universities – not just in universities – are happening around trans issues.

This generation of students simply will not have this fear of the misfit, and I think it’s really interesting to think about why they’re making that move and important to respect that as a significant form of political practice in our current moment. One of the reasons so many are committed to trans rights, and one of the reasons they are implacable, is because it’s one way of saying: this we will change and this we will win. Because there’s so much that it’s so difficult to change right now: the neoliberal shrinking of the opportunities for political community; our current moment of violence; what’s happening in universities both in terms of cutting things down and cutting out opportunity for thought and creativity. There is a way that the defence of trans rights is also a really significant moment in terms of calling out lots of other things at the same time.

Jacqueline: The ‘culture wars’ that are being fought at the moment by the UK government seem to be about sexual identity – i.e., trans experience as a challenge to sexual identity – and racial violence and historical memory: those seem to be the two issues that are at the centre of what’s happening now. But before I say something about that, let’s return to something Lyndsey said about how the hostility to feminism comes from the ‘outside’. I want to challenge you, Lyndsey, that it’s very unlikely that the only challenge comes from the outside. And I would say that one of the things that has happened in the last few years is the flagrant re-visibility of tensions inside feminism in relationship to trans subjects – the ‘terf’ wars.

As far as I can tell, the trans exclusionary radical feminist argument is basically a repetition of the Janice Raymond position in The Transsexual Empire (1979) where she argued that trans women are men pretending to be women, so they can infiltrate female spaces and enact violence against women. The argument is truly chilling because it involves arguing about who is a man and who is a woman, and in the conversations I’ve had about this, in the debates I’ve found myself part of, it’s clear that what the trans-exclusionary radical feminists are saying is that the division between male and female must be preserved for a viable feminism, whereas if you think psychoanalytically, those categories are as precarious as they are enjoined on human subjects, and there will always be some degree of instability, however denied or repressed, or oscillation between the two. I think that rupture inside the debates around trans experience is devastating for feminism, when feminism is for me one of the places where this question could most generatively be talked about. We really need to go on trying to make the lines of conversation possible.

The other thing that has changed for me is to do with the question of violence against women. As I discuss in the chapter on ‘Feminism and the Abomination of Violence’ in On Violence, for a while in the 70s, socialist feminists – who believed that questions of class were a core part of feminism, today we would also say race (though we were not sufficiently alert to that) – and psychoanalytic feminists – who believed that masculinity and femininity were unstable categories – did not talk about violence against women. I think the reason why we didn’t is because it had been co-opted by radical feminism, for whom – I'm thinking here of Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon – violence against women was the unfailing embodiment of masculinity. It felt as if there was no intellectual or political space in which to discuss it differently. I now see that as a failing.

Lyndsey: Of course, as soon as I said from ‘outside feminism’, I thought, why am I saying these words? But my point does relate to the question of violence, and to questions of coloniality. The point at which I was being told what was a threat to feminism was the point at which explicit violence was being done to women by Trump, an explicit violence which is directed at women in the Global South and Black women, particularly.

Ruth Daly: Jacqueline, you consider the question of violence against women, and its interconnections with racism, and with economic, political and historical conditions. Lyndsey, your work is very much concerned with border-spaces, and with how private, psychic relations are also always political. You both seem to negotiate between diagnosis of the often-violent conditions of the present, and the attempt to find spaces for hope and change. This speaks to some of the ways we are thinking about ‘decolonial feminism(s)’, terms we read critically and as always in formation. Could you both say a little about your understanding of decolonial feminism(s), in relation to each other, and also to your own work?

Lyndsey: Feminism, for me, is the quality of truth telling. Historically there was an assumption in British universities – a lazy assumption certainly not shared by people of colour trying to make their way through academic life – especially in the 90s, that decolonisation had ‘somehow already happened’ in the same way people used to say that feminism was no longer an issue. Or, if feminism was an issue, it was part of an identity package that was part of your performative self – an acquisition. This was during that moment of neoliberalism when everything properly political became instead about individualism and identity. The last six years have broken that apart, which may be a small silver lining. Decolonisation had not happened. It had very far from happened, it was ongoing – it still is ongoing.

A comment from Arendt is always in the back of my head, where she describes ‘comprehension’ as ‘the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality – whatever it may be or might not have been’, how you have to be prepared to see what is there, as well as what isn't there, in order to resist.¹ I think feminism is part of that conversation about racism and the living legacies of colonialism. It’s not been terrific in that conversation, and in some ways it’s still not terrific in that conversation.

A writer from whom I've learned so much in the last five years is Claudia Rankine. She shares a quality with two of my other favourite writers, including Simone Weil and Arendt: a quality of attention in her work, a determination to let reality in so as to resist it. It is truth telling of a high order.

Jacqueline: I'm with you in relationship to a lot of that. In terms of my own work, considering Israel/Palestine and then South Africa has made such a dramatic difference to my thinking about these issues – both crises in which Britain has been deeply implicated. The anti-apartheid struggle, which could be said to have succeeded, has left us with Black male middle-class empowerment on the one hand, and an exacerbation of racial discrimination, racism and inequality on the other. It has also left us with Cape Town as the rape capital of the world. The South African journalist Margie Orford has written brilliantly about this: how the resentment and the rage against the failure of apartheid to end in such key ways is leading to the increased violence against women.² Women become the fall guys for what is effectively a failure of decolonisation in South Africa, i.e., racism is still there, and apartheid has not been solved economically for the majority of Black people. And of course, the argument made by the new generation that apartheid is not over – the ‘born frees’, as they were meant to be – is in itself a way of remembering British colonialism.

I attended a wonderful debate at the Wiser (Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research), involving Sisonke Msimang – the author of a powerful new assessment of Winnie Mandela which says in its final chapter: ‘Look, just look, at what lies behind us. Just there, in the recent past, like the body of a wounded animal hit by a speeding car, there lies the corpse of justice’ – and people like Simamkele Dlakavu, who said, they are having to ask whether South African women were wrong to believe they could rest their future in the hands of the state; whether it was impossible to transform state power in a way that would allow for racial equality?³ And if the price, or one key extortionate, price, has been gender violence against women?

I much appreciated what you said, Lyndsey, about Simone Weil’s concept of attention, as a way of being present and acknowledging the point at which you don’t understand and can’t make it all add up, because I really think that’s the most generative way to think and to write.

Lyndsey: I would agree. As you were speaking, I was thinking about Weil as an anti-imperialist, and Arendt. There are other mid-century women who were all making the same point, which was that state sovereignty, absolutism, imperialism, colonialism, feed into fascism. That is the end result. Fanon made this point very cogently. Aimé Césaire did it at the same time. Suzanne Césaire also made that point in her writing. And what we had after that – and this is why I think Weil and Arendt’s critique of human rights are important – was a constitutional moment where we’d put human rights after totalitarianism after World War Two. The new human rights order, as articulated by the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights and other innovations, was supposed to put the brakes on fascism and totalitarianism. And then you have women and anti-colonialists going: mmm I’m not so sure that’s going to hack it – there’s something that hasn’t been acknowledged here about power and absolutism and sovereignty and the tradition.

And so, as you are talking about the failure of apartheid to end, I think in some ways it’s the same mistake; we look at the rainbows not at the structural injustices. As you said, apartheid hadn’t ended economically. Nor did the history of violent state formation end with the publication of the UDHR in 1948. Indeed, in many places both economic violence and colonial violence got much worse after the war.

Mid-century writers, thinkers and activists were having those conversations about legacies and structural violence, but we don’t seem to have learned from them and are now having to learn again. I just want to emphasise the importance of the continuation of economic inequality in this conversation. The words ‘economic inequality’ are too tame for what is actually at issue here – which is the grinding suffering which comes with being poor, which is ‘just living’. When she writes about this kind of suffering, Weil is very clear: she thinks it is obscene and, for her, against the will of God. This is the poverty that pushes people into merely existing – the poverty of having to choose whether to put the heating on or feed your children. If you do not address that issue of economic suffering, I’m not sure we will ever get beyond the apartheids and the totalitarianisms. Women especially pick up the price ticket for that, not just because they tend to be the main victims of economic violence but because, as Jacqueline says, that’s where the rage tends to go.

Jacqueline: I think you say it very well in your discussion of Palestine in Placeless People: one of the shifts that Dorothy Thompson exposes very clearly is the way in which the UDHR’s emphasis on ‘rights’ shifted the question of self-determination for placeless people into a humanitarian… I won’t say, ethic because this is the opposite of ethics in the way we are describing… but it's a humanitarian impulse, which actually obfuscated the political stakes of what mattered at that point. So, the Palestinians have become progressively more and more invisible because the concept of self-determination was not granted to them.

And there’s this hideous expression which is used by the Israeli government of ‘mowing the lawn’ which is when you allow the crisis of economic deprivation and the destruction of the citizens of Gaza and the blockading of the Gaza strip to get to the point at which people are not quite starving. They’re not quite on the edge because then a humanitarian disaster would be declared, and Israel would be criticised in ways that it does not wish to be criticised, although it is now being criticised. Mowing the lawn is when you just keep things at a level where people can barely survive, which Agamben would call bare life.⁴

I think one of the things that has happened to both of our work is an increasing imbrication of those questions of sexuality and equality and violence and injustice in worldwide projects, and I would very much like to ask Lyndsey a question about this: is it exclusively women writers you write about? We both have this in common that we fall in love with our women thinkers, though I wonder if you would agree that, politically, your heroines, or rather some of them, as indeed mine, don’t quite make it.

Lyndsey: Women and Samuel Beckett. And I have a place in my heart for Franz Kafka, who I reread in my late 40s and thought that I now get metamorphosis and transformation in a way I did not before.

I think it goes back to the question of thinking. As you know, Jacqueline was my PhD supervisor, and I was trying to think through that learning process. When we talk about relationships between women thinkers and writers and the academy now, we talk a lot about ‘mentoring’, a lot about supporting people to be an academic or writer or an intellectual or a teacher. But the quality that Jacqueline had, the same quality that I find in my women writers, is that attention to thinking. And it doesn’t have to be a thinking in a nice bundled-up and clean category. It’s attention to thinking and seeing where it will take you.

All of my writers do that – although you’re right that politically they do it imperfectly. It is that attempt to find a new language or bend language to talking about experiences that quite often they don’t even know about until they’ve written it.

One of the great lessons I had from Jacqueline is on several occasions her saying to me when I was a student: yeah, that’s great but you can go further. I was thinking, where does she want me to go? And of course, she would never tell me where she wanted me to go, because that would defeat the point of her pedagogy. The point is: go further.

So, I think it is that kind of connection between language as expressing and sometimes even creating experience as a feminist project, and also as an existential project – the project of being a person with a psyche and wanting to know.

Jacqueline: I thought you were going to say being alive, because you were talking about an existential project…What we have in common is that we have made the life of the mind, as Arendt would put it, central to our writing lives. When you were talking about Arendt, I was thinking of her distinction between Verstand and Vernunft. Verstand is the desire to know, right? The idea of a knowledge that in some sense you control. And Vernunft is the urgent need to think. I think it's terribly important that she makes that distinction, because she is concerned about something that escapes the mastery of the human mind, which is anti-totalitarian. That is why natality, as you write about beautifully, is key; and why ‘impotent bigness’ is central to my analysis of her. Impotent bigness is a form of self-knowing masculinity: it’s Trump; it’s Trump and the Gag Rule, his first law after becoming President which withdrew all financial support from any NGO even counselling on abortion, and thinking you can literally rule the world. Edward Said wrote brilliantly all through his career about the relationship between the modernist project and the decolonial project insofar as the modernist project suggested the meanings were unstable, and if they’re unstable they couldn’t control themselves or the future they may want to secure or predict. For Said, this was central to the work of someone like Joseph Conrad. What F. R. Leavis hated in Heart of Darkness – the endless repetition of the incomprehensible mysterious – was for Said where the politics were located.⁵

On the other hand, and I think this does link us, I made an argument that I realise is really high risk in Women in Dark Times, which was that somebody like Rosa Luxemburg was crucial because she webbed together the bruises on her soul with her anti-totalitarian, anti-night-watchman politics, the idea of the party playing schoolmaster with the revolution (that’s her critique of Leninism). She wedded that politics with her sense of something moving inside her, ‘a totally new, original form’ ‘ripening in me’ ‘that ignores all rules and conventions… I want to affect people like a clap of thunder, to inflame their minds not by speechifying but with the breadth of my vision, the strength of my conviction, the power of my expression.’⁶ There was obviously a parallel between her utterly tortured relationship with Leo Jogiches – who ended up following her down the street with a gun and would not give her back the keys to their flat when she booted him out – her desire to be something outside his remit, and her critique of Leninism.

And, as I discuss, you can then also leap to Marilyn Monroe. Monroe was refusing the perfectibility of America in post-war American culture – the idea that post-war America was the hero that saved Europe, and the idea that you could export American beauty across the Atlantic. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) was literally ferrying American beauty across the ocean to save Europe from the ravages of the war, and also from any potential inkling of socialism as a viable destiny for the people. Monroe was wretched. And her wretchedness spoke the truth to that fantasy of beauty, as the solace of memory, and of inequality, and so on. Of course, it went straight into the Cold War after that. So, for me, what these women have in common is that they’re suffering psychically, they’re in touch with the complexity of their own inner lives, and their political insights or revelations are absolutely inseparable from that.

Mothers makes the same argument. Women are being murdered by their partners because the myth that mothers can keep the world safe has collapsed, because death has come too close. So, it’s very clear women can’t do what they are being required to do. They never could. It’s complete nonsense, although I will say that one of the first things I realised when I became a mother was that the task of a mother is to keep your child alive. I mean, the rest is a luxury. And women’s relationship to that reality is one which is idealised whereas, in fact, I would say mothers’ relationship to that facet of being human means that they know the frailty of life. They know the precariousness. They know they're not knowing; they know all the fear; they know all of that.

In a pandemic, nobody is protected from it. Nobody is safe. My argument in Mothers is that women have a kind of knowledge, not only of their mothers, but because they don’t buy into the dominant arguments on strength and invincibility that are supported by many men who are impotently big in any case, which means that deep down men don’t believe in that illusion either. But men are not allowed to admit that they don’t believe in it. They have to pretend they do, which is why they hoist their fears onto women, demand they assuage them, and then become violent when women fail to do so.

When Luxemburg talks about the revolution billowing and going into furrows and then breaking and then flooding, she sounds almost verbatim like Freud, describing the vicissitudes of the human drives… which is to say there's something unpredictable, intangible, scary, slippery about human subjectivity which is revealed in any revolutionary moment – Luxemburg called it ‘spontaneity’ – as well as inside the human mind. You won’t get freedom for women unless you go down both those paths. It’s a little bit of a manifesto, I suppose. I hope it’s not essentialist, but for me there is a belief that women like Weil and Luxemburg, and the women you write about Lyndsey, have the capacity to see what you give them the credit for seeing, at least partly because they're women. I wonder if you agree with that.

Lyndsey: Just this week I was finishing a chapter on Arendt’s On Revolution and I went back to her essay on Luxemburg. Arendt doesn’t often talk about women as other thinkers, or about other women generally – apart from Luxemburg. In her essay she writes the scene at the sham trial of the two men who were charged with killing Luxemburg. The guy who smashed his rifle into her skull got just two years. And the guy who authorised throwing her body in the canal got two months. In the trial, a photograph was given in evidence of the men who killed her having a drink in the hotel which they’d dragged her out of. The photo is of men together, toasting themselves and they’re laughing. When the photo is shown in court, the accused and their supporters start laughing again, right in the courtroom. The judge admonishes them – ‘this is not a laughing matter’. Arendt is an exceptionally good writer, so she gives us a scene of these men, laughing at this photograph; this man who murdered Rosa Luxemburg. And then she says: almost the same scene, with the judge saying the same words at the Auschwitz trial of camp guards, took place twenty years later. And it was that scene – the spectacle of male violence – that Arendt wants us to focus on.

Just as you were speaking, I was thinking that the connection between Arendt and Luxemburg is very strong. And who was the person who introduced Arendt to Luxemburg? Who was the person who dragged the 12-year-old Arendt through the streets of Königsberg in January 1919? It was her mother. And what did she say to Hannah Arendt? She said: pay attention!

So, there is a feminist history buried in this moment, and of course, going back to mothers, it is Arendt and Weil who understand that life is necessity. You can’t not suffer; that’s not part of the deal. I think people who are in proximity to that knowledge are women, are poor, are people in camps, people who know what it means for sheer necessity and the necessity can be: I have to keep my child alive.

Jacqueline: When you talked about these officers laughing at what they’ve done to Luxemburg, it reminded me of Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman – and the men who took selfies alongside their bodies.⁷ And this touches on an element of psychic perversion – I’ll risk calling it male psychic perversion – which again Arendt can be read as alluding to when she writes of ‘the realms in which one cannot change or act, and in which therefore men have a distinct tendency to destroy’. She means that faced with something that they can’t master, they do something very, very ugly.⁸

Lyndsey: I mean, it’s like Trump’s ‘grab her by the pussy’. Because it is the boasting and it’s the performing of that which is deeply fascist.

Jacqueline: There’s an amazing moment in Civilization and its Discontents, where Freud says, the only people who can break the law are criminals or heroes. He doesn’t push it very far, but of course, Trump was not loved by over 70 million people who voted for him in spite of his breaking the law and his repulsive misogyny, but because of it. Which is to say that having a transgressor in the White House is terribly exciting because, as Freud describes – and this is why Freud continues to be so important to me – the agency in the head which enforces the law, is a perverse agency. That’s the key insight of Civilization and its Discontents, that it’s a chastising, punishing sadistic voice which tells you to be a citizen, which is one reason, only one, why ‘training’ for, or ‘induction’ into ‘civilization’ fails.

Lyndsey: That’s so interesting – the idea that only criminals or heroes can transgress or break the law. There’s also a bit in her essay on the nation state where Arendt says that when you, as we do, detain and imprison refugees and asylum seekers, the assumption is that they must have done something wrong, because only a criminal would be in prison.⁹ I’m trying to work out the lines of projection and disavowal here. But we could have on the one hand, the jouissance of lawlessness (which we were also having in a mini pathetic version in Britain during the peak of Johnson’s Brexit) with its triumphantly naked lying, and lying about nakedness, indeed – but on the other hand, you also have a kind of displacement of where criminality is now assumed to be, that is onto the very people you’ve imprisoned, marginalised or demonised.

Jacqueline: Doesn’t Arendt also say that one of the shocking things about the displaced people post-war is that it would be preferable for them to be incarcerated? And that you really know when a culture is destroying its ethical foundations and destroying its viability when it is preferable to be imprisoned than to be so-called human subjects stripped of rights on order? I think I've heard you speak over the last few years about this question of the border and Arendt and Refugees which has of course become more and more important. Which makes me think of Howard Caygill’s brilliant article in his collection of essays Force and Understanding: Writings on Philosophy and Resistance, about borders and civility where he describes how the philosophical question of doubt was the counterpart to the expulsion of uncertainty about existing social arrangements within the nation state because of their radical injustice.

Displacement to the borders, of the unwanted, allowed the border to become the place where all violence was legitimated in order to conceal the violence of the social arrangements by the state and inside the dominant community. It is at the border that the gender issue turns into the race issue, or rather it is apparent that it was never separable from it.

Lyndsey: It reminds me of Tony Benn’s point years ago which was: watch how your government treats migrants and refugees, because that’s exactly how they will treat you if they get the chance. In the early days of COVID when I was watching the care homes turning into charnel houses: the deliberate netting of the virus into places in which women work and where women went in and left their families and children to attend to the necessities of the elderly and dying, really reminded me of Benn’s point.

To return to the point about the border, Arendt also says that even if you haven’t committed a crime, if you’re in prison you at least have judicial representation. But what happens when you are stripped of any judicial representation? When you’re stateless? The person to my mind who is brilliant on this now is Behrouz Boochani, in his book, No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison (2018). What he shows is how a deliberate letting loose of lawlessness within the law produces its own systems of horror. And what he also does, and this goes back to your point about decolonisation, is make links between Australia’s migration policy; ecocide; and colonisation and occupation, where you can suddenly see those things clicking and clicking and clicking together. We’re in another chapter of the history of placelessness, and I think we should be very alarmed about where it’s going. People call it border hostility, but I think it’s much more than just ‘hostile’. We need another word; it’s not a hostile environment. It’s a violent environment. It’s a lethal environment.

We can also go back here to the problems of what I call literary humanitarianism, which tends to want to represent rather than make way or listen – or simply shut up. There’s a tacit violence of not listening which can come with projects which want to identify with ‘decolonisation’ I think. There’s the violence of the border, and then there’s a kind of blankness about the agency of the people who are working and living on borders, in borderland – in the borderline places.

There’s a young artist filmmaker in Beirut called Marwa Abu Khalil who made a really great film, Witwet, about Beirut and migrants and refugees from Syria, but also from Palestine, and students in their community who were hanging out in Beirut. A lot of that film is about the slow time of waiting, the slow time of existing. ‘We spend so much time in life worshipping what we know about living… but what we really know can disappear in a blink of an eye,’ she said to the Refugee Hosts team when she was introducing us to the film.¹⁰

So, yes, the story is the wall. Yes, the story is the Mexican border. Yes, the story is Greece. Yes, the story is Calais. But so often a concern with the border means a concern with Western borders. We’ve got much more to learn by listening to the stories of what is happening elsewhere about borders, about community, about critical organisation. Lebanon has had a revolution, is having a revolution – it’s ongoing – and has had since 2019, which has barely been acknowledged in the West. Many of the leaders of that revolution are women.

Jacqueline: I’m so intrigued by the creative rewriting of the horrors of the border in what you’re describing, and I think it’s absolutely crucial because the other thing that links all the writers that we write about is a kind of imaginative generosity through which what can be thought is not just freedom against totalitarianism. It’s also the engendering of new imaginative spaces, which is part of the same thing. Of course, Rosa Luxemburg famously said, freedom is the freedom to think otherwise.¹¹

I’m glad you mentioned Boochani; there is also Omid Tofighian, who is his collaborator and edits his work. What is amazing is the way he brings people to life in that story; whatever the level of despair, there is a recording and a form of attention. It’s as if he’s exploring the psychic options for survival in situations which are not survivable, and therefore I think it is an absolutely crucial testament to what we’re talking about. And just on the basis of this conversation, I’m thinking that if you think borders, and you think decolonisation, if you think radical debates within feminism and the way that’s changed, and address gender violence… in all these instances we’re looking for out-clauses; we’re looking for the space in which other forms of lives are possible, either through struggling for justice or through imaginative experimentation.

At this point I want to invoke Roxane Gay, the Haitian-American writer, and Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (2013). And of course, Anna Burns’ Milkman (2018). We’ve both come through the literary tradition. There’s a huge question which is just what do these literary works allow to be spoken that is otherwise impossible to hear?

For me, Gay is terribly important. As a middle-class Haitian-American woman, she – and the narrator of her first novel, An Untamed State (2014) – is subject to racial, sexual and class violence all pretty much at the same time. She charts that in its most vicious graphic details, so that you have to have the experience, which is very different from just reporting or describing what’s happening at a distance, that is, you have to have the experience inside the writing. At the same time, she also gives her characters a kind of a lust for life, which includes all the things you think will be excluded by an experience – or which are perhaps compelled by an experience – like that.

In a similar way, at the end of McBride’s book, the ‘girl’ goes into the forest looking for the violence to which she’s been subjected. It’s shocking. And I’ve had people when I’ve talked about this say you cannot go with this. It is too disturbing and runs the risk of suggesting women are complicit with the violence against them or even asking for it. My reply is that she can go with that because what she’s saying is not that women are asking for it, but that her behaviour is motivated by trauma. It’s the effect of a preceding act of violence, which she’s contextualising (which of course never happens in narratives that just want to suggest that women take pleasure in the violence they are protesting about). She’s also asking you to go there in order to understand what’s at stake, and the complexity of the mind, which is, for me, another form of feminist freedom. But where that leaves the relationship between that form of feminist freedom and the ugly, misogynist violence of what's happening on the borders…let’s just call it something we need to go on thinking about.

Lyndsey: I agree with all of that, and it’s partly why I think having that literary training in what writing can do is so crucial. But it is asking you to go there. That’s a key phase. I’ve been thinking lately about writing an essay called ‘Hope, the Short History of a Very Bad Idea’. Because there’s also a sense in which hope can be really oppressive. I get very uncomfortable when people talk about hope because they’re usually asking you to do something you don’t want to do or there’s a pathological sense of hope in the way that hope can make bad politics. I think people were very hopeful when they voted for Brexit and voted for Trump.

But there’s another kind of hope which is about asking you to go where you don’t want to. Or asking you to go somewhere difficult, which is maybe something else. The work I’m thinking of is Ernst Bloch’s massive book The Principle of Hope (1986) where he says it’s not desire that’s in the unconscious and we want to watch for, it’s hope. And he finds it everywhere: it’s in writing. It’s in architecture and sport. It’s in politics. But I like the idea of asking you to go there or somewhere that’s going to be uncomfortable as possibly a form of hope.

Jacqueline: It’s the only condition of hope as far as I’m concerned. I also think of Lynne Segal’s book Radical Happiness (2017) which is about utopian thinking. I’m thinking of my students this year who are really pushing their discomfort with Freud because they think he’s so pessimistic. Well of course he is, especially when he’s writing Moses and Monotheism and the world is about to collapse into complete catastrophe. He is not an optimistic utopian thinker.

But the hope is in the clinical situation, the hope is in, he says, in one wonderful quote, ‘We lay a stronger emphasis on what is evil in men, only because other people disavow it, and thereby make the human mind, not better, but incomprehensible.’¹²

I think that’s been a bit of a mantra for me. I also feel that my women writers go one step further – they rip, or they take that at its word. Okay, we’re really going to go in there, to the darkest psychic places, and since they exert such a powerful effect in the real world, especially when they are glossed over or denied in most political vocabularies – we have to make a space for that at the negotiating table. We cannot have a politics that relies on a false idealisation of who people are psychically – it will fail as Brexit and Trump have shown us.

Maya Caspari: In some ways, you’re both imagining hope otherwise than some of the ineffectual, neatly packaged, commodified ways it is sometimes articulated, the progress narratives; you point instead to alternative histories, spaces, forms and literatures of hope – and what these might, in your words, Jacqueline, allow us to hear.

How do you see this in relation to the humanities – and the university – as they are today?

Jacqueline: I would want to point here to the need to defend the humanities, the teaching institutions. It is that space of critical thinking which this UK government is attempting to disband. I really think this is another backlash. Against Black Lives Matter and against the MeToo movement, but also a backlash against the 60s. We are, according to today’s reactionary logic, being asked to deny the colonial past, the slave-owning past of Great Britain. And if we so much as mention it, let alone taking down the statue, we’re distorting or destroying history and degrading the past. The opposite of course is true.

The conversation took place in January 2022.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jacqueline Rose

Jacqueline Rose is Professor of Humanities and Co-Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. Email: [email protected]

Lyndsey Stonebridge

Lyndsey Stonebridge is Professor of Human Rights and Humanities at the University of Birmingham. Email: [email protected]

Maya Caspari

Maya Caspari is a Lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. Email: [email protected]

Ruth Daly

Ruth Daly is a Lecturer in Cultural Studies and Global Creative Industries at the University of Leeds. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, vii.

2 See Orford, ‘The Grammar of Violence, Writing Crime as Fiction’.

3 Msimang, The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela, 151.

4 See Agamben, Homo Sacer.

5 See Leavis, The Great Tradition; Said, Culture and Imperialism.

6 Cited in Rose, Women in Dark Times, 4.

7 Sisters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman were murdered in north-west London in 2020; police officers attending the scene took selfies alongside the sisters’ lifeless bodies and circulated them in a WhatsApp group. The investigation into the murder of Henry and Smallman highlighted, yet again, the institutional racism and sexism of the UK police system.

8 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 301.

9 See Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism.

10 See Stonebridge, ‘Undoing the Meaning of the World’.

11 See Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism?

12 Freud, ‘Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis’, 147.