MORTAL VULNERABILITIES

Abstract

A consideration of some of the embedded themes with which Pamela Sue Anderson was concerned during her career will bear out the suggestion that her approach to enhancing life was richly engaging and distinctive. However, it is perhaps the idea of vulnerability, most of all, that crystallizes this distinctiveness and addresses the aims of the Enhancing Life Project with which she was associated at the time of her death in March 2017, but also brings her philosophy as well as her person most powerfully to mind. In particular I am interested in the way in which, through this focus, she allows us seriously to attend to death (including her own), invoking the positive and life-enhancing implications of our unavoidable vulnerability, for practices of rational affection, without losing sight of the violence and pain of loss and mourning.

Keywords:

• gender
• silencing
• vulnerability
• death
• Pamela Sue Anderson

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 See <http://enhancinglife.uchicago.edu/> (accessed 23 Nov. 2019).

2 William Schweiker and Günter Thomas, “The Enhancing Life Project: Templeton Foundation Proposal.” Topical bibliography with introductory comments, available <http://enhancinglife.uchicago.edu/sites/545eb5a85918adb390000bac/pages/5460849d2c1cc4b90a008400/files/Bibliography_Initial.pdf?1481481241> (accessed 23 Nov. 2019).

3 See Anderson’s discussion within the interdisciplinary space of philosophy of religion and feminist theology in “A Story of Love and Death: Exploring Spaces for the Philosophical Imaginary” in New Interdisciplinary Spaces, ed. Heather Walton (London and New York: Routledge, 2011) 167–86.

4 Pamela Sue Anderson, “Engaging the ‘Forbidden Texts’ of Philosophy: Pamela Sue Anderson Talks to Alison Jasper,” Text Matters 1 (2011): 312–28 (315).

5 Pamela Sue Anderson, “‘A Thoughtful Love of Life’: A Spiritual Turn in Philosophy of Religion,” Svensk Teologisk Kvartalskrift 85 (2009): 119–29. In this context it is worth noting that from 2007 to 2014 she was engaged in a project with the theologian Paul Fiddes at Regent’s Park College under the name “Critical Theory and Spiritual Practice” – a title that she herself formulated.

6 Anderson, “Engaging the ‘Forbidden Texts’ of Philosophy” 325.

7 Ibid. 323.

8 bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (London: Pluto, 2000) 1.

9 See, for example, Pamela Sue Anderson, “Canonicity and Critique: A Feminist Defence of a Post-Kantian Critique,” Literature and Theology 13.3 (1999): 201–10.

10 Anderson, “Engaging the ‘Forbidden Texts’ of Philosophy” 319.

11 See ibid. 321; “Canonicity and Critique” 204.

12 Anderson notes this tendency in respect of Kant’s gendering of the key eighteenth-century concepts of the beautiful and the sublime in ibid.

13 Ibid. 205.

14 Anderson, “Engaging the ‘Forbidden Texts’ of Philosophy” 323.

15 Anderson, “‘A Thoughtful Love of Life’” 123.

16 Anderson, “Engaging the ‘Forbidden Texts’ of Philosophy” 315.

17 Ibid. 322.

18 See Pamela Sue Anderson, “In Conversation with Sophia Blackwell,” The Oxford Muse, available <https://www.oxfordmuse.com/?q=node/147> (accessed 23 Nov. 2019).

19 See also Paul Ricoeur, “Freedom in the Light of Hope” in Essays on Biblical Interpretation, by Paul Ricoeur, ed. Lewis Mudge (London: SPCK, 1981) 155–82.

20 Anderson, “Engaging the ‘Forbidden Texts’ of Philosophy” 314.

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid.

23 See Pamela Sue Anderson, “Myth, Mimesis and Multiple Identities: Feminist Tools for Transforming Theology,” Literature and Theology 10.2 (1996): 112–30.

24 See, for example, Nancy C.M. Hartsock, The Feminist Standpoint Revisited & Other Essays (Boulder: Westview, 1998); Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP; Buckingham: Open UP, 1991).

25 Anderson, “Engaging the ‘Forbidden Texts’ of Philosophy” 312.

26 Ibid. 315.

27 Ibid. 316.

28 Pamela Sue Anderson, “Paul Ricoeur in Dialogue with Theology and Religious Studies: Hermeneutic Hospitality in Contemporary Practice,” Spec. issue of Svensk Teologisk Kvartalskrift 91.1–2 (2015): 202.

29 For a summary of some approaches, see Alison Jasper, Because of Beauvoir: Christianity and the Cultivation of Female Genius (Waco, TX: Baylor UP, 2012) 20–26.

30 See, for example, Judith Butler, “Is Judaism Zionism?” in The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, eds. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan Vanantwerpen (New York: Columbia UP, 2011) 70–91.

31 Pamela Sue Anderson, A Feminist Philosophy of Religion: The Rationality and Myths of Religious Belief (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).

32 Pamela Sue Anderson, Re-visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion: Reason, Love and Epistemic Locatedness (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012).

33 Anderson, “‘A Thoughtful Love of Life’” 123.

34 See Pamela Sue Anderson, “Autonomy, Vulnerability and Gender,” Feminist Theory 4.2 (2003): 149–64.

35 Ibid. 153.

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid. 149.

38 See Paul Ricoeur, “Autonomy and Vulnerability” in Ricoeur, Reflections on the Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007) 72–90.

39 Pamela Sue Anderson, “Silencing and Speaker Vulnerability: Undoing an Oppressive Form of (Wilful) Ignorance,” ed. Nick Bunnin, 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): 36–45. This version of the paper was read for Pamela Sue Anderson at the British Academy conference on “Vulnerability and the Politics of Care: Cross-Disciplinary Dialogues,” 9–10 February 2017. By this time she was too ill to deliver the paper in person. An earlier version was given as the keynote speech at the “International Women’s Day Conference,” Durham University, 8 March 2016.

40 Anderson, “Silencing and Speaker Vulnerability” Abstract (online only); emphasis added.

41 In her paper, Anderson takes the term “the unknown” from the work of Michèle Le Doeuff, The Philosophical Imaginary, trans. Colin Gordon (London: Athlone, 1989).

42 See, for example, Michael P. Johnson, “Patriarchal Terrorism and Common Couple Violence: Two Forms of Violence against Women,” Journal of Marriage and Family 57.2 (1995): 283–94; Evan Stark, Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007).

43 Anderson took this term from the work of Nancy Tuana. See “The Speculum of Ignorance: The Women’s Health Movement and Epistemology of Ignorance” in Feminist Epistemologies of Ignorance, Spec. issue of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 21.3 (2007): 1–19.

44 See Kristie Dotson, “Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 26.2 (2011): 236–57.

45 Anderson, “Silencing and Speaker Vulnerability” 38–39.

46 Anderson, “Silencing and Speaker Vulnerability.”

47 Lara Coleman, “Speaker Vulnerability and the Patriarchal University: A Response and Tribute to Pamela Sue Anderson,” available <https://thedisorderofthings.com/2017/11/02/speaker-vulnerability-and-the-patriarchal-university-a-response-and-tribute-to-pamela-sue-anderson/> (accessed 23 Nov. 2019).

48 Pamela Sue Anderson, “Enhancing Life: Vulnerability and a Liveable Life,” Regent’s Now (Alumni Magazine) (2016): 36–37.

49 Anderson, “Silencing and Speaker Vulnerability” 39.

50 Anderson, “Silencing and Speaker Vulnerability.”

51 Coleman, “Speaker Vulnerability and the Patriarchal University.”

52 Anderson, “Silencing and Speaker Vulnerability” 42–43.

53 Ibid. 42.

54 Le Doeuff, The Philosophical Imaginary 128.

55 Pamela Sue Anderson, “Silencing and Speaker Vulnerability” 37.

56 Le Doeuff, The Philosophical Imaginary 127.

57 Ibid. 128.

58 Coleman, “Speaker Vulnerability and the Patriarchal University.”

59 Anderson, “Silencing and Speaker Vulnerability” 39.

60 Judith Butler, “Violence, Mourning, Politics” in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, by Judith Butler (London and New York: Verso, 2004) 19–49.

61 Ibid. 31.

62 Ibid. 21.

63 Anderson, “Silencing and Speaker Vulnerability” 43.

64 Ibid.

65 Butler, “Violence, Mourning, Politics” 29.

66 Ibid.

67 Ibid. 19.

68 Anderson, “Silencing and Speaker Vulnerability” Abstract (online only).

69 Butler, “Violence, Mourning, Politics” 21; emphasis in original.

70 Ibid. 23.

71 Ibid. 20; emphasis in original.

72 Anderson, “‘A Thoughtful Love of Life’” 123.

73 Pamela Sue Anderson, “Ricoeur in Dialogue with Feminist Philosophy of Religion,” Svensk Teologisk Kvartalskrift 91.1–2 (2015): 199–220.

74 Ibid. 200.

75 Ibid.

76 Ibid.

77 John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667), line 26.

78 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992) 24.

79 Anderson, “Myth, Mimesis and Multiple Identities” 116.

80 See note 32.

81 Pamela Sue Anderson, “Forever Natal: In Death as in Life,” Literature and Theology 21.2 (2007): 227–31.

82 Hanneke Canters and Grace M. Jantzen, Forever Fluid: A Reading of Luce Irigaray’s Elemental Passions (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2005).

83 Anderson, “‘A Thoughtful Love of Life’” 120–22.

84 Anderson, “Forever Natal” 228.

85 Pamela Sue Anderson, “Shadows of the Past,” Literature and Theology 28.4 (2014): 371–88.

86 Ibid. 385.

87 Ibid. 371.

88 Ibid. 381.

89 Ibid. 385.

90 See Anderson, “‘A Thoughtful Love of Life’” 123.

91 Ibid.

92 Anderson, “Forever Natal” 230.