LOVE AND VULNERABILITY

Love and Vulnerability: Thinking with Pamela Sue Anderson grew around a critical dialogue with feminist philosopher Pamela Sue Anderson’s extraordinary, unpublished last work on love and vulnerability – work interrupted by her early death from cancer in March 2017. The first part of the collection publishes this work, edited by close colleagues and friends, for the first time. The work consists of four interconnected pieces, entitled: “Towards a New Philosophical Imaginary”; “Reorienting Ourselves in (Bergsonian) Freedom, Friendship and Feminism”; “Silencing and Speaker Vulnerability: Undoing an Oppressive Form of (Wilful) Ignorance”; and “Creating a New Imaginary for Love in Religion.”

In a second part, a diverse, multidisciplinary, international range of contributors respond to Anderson’s last work, her oeuvre, and her life and death: philosophers working both in the Continental and Analytic traditions, theologians, literary and cultural critics, political theorists, and others. These include her sister, her former doctoral supervisor, former students, close friends, collaborators, colleagues, and those who knew her only through her written work.

Pamela Sue Anderson is perhaps best known for her path-breaking work in philosophy of religion, including: A Feminist Philosophy of Religion (1998) and Re-visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion: Reason, Love and Epistemic Locatedness (2012). She was Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy and Christian Ethics at Regent’s Park College, Oxford, from 2001, and in 2014 she was deservedly awarded the title of Professor of Modern European Philosophy of Religion by the University of Oxford. She was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Lund as a Pioneer in Feminist Philosophy of Religion. Anderson was also, in exemplary fashion, a friend – to her students, colleagues, and collaborators: a source of generous support, fun and joy, profoundly interested and forever discussing and championing someone else’s work, as many contributors to this volume attest. Michèle Le Doeuff, in her contribution, shares their “many studious holidays together”:

work until you drop! She was worse than me in that respect and sometimes I thought it necessary to try to moderate her, to no avail ever. At any rate, we both enjoyed ourselves a lot while at the same time believing in what we were doing; fits of laughter were frequent.

Her former student Emily Cousens recalls in her contribution “Pamela’s own performance of vulnerability-as-generosity […] In both life and writing, she demonstrated the transformational character of vulnerability: its implication in violence but also in generative relationalities such as love and friendship too.”

Anderson’s death was a blow to many; in my own experience, it was a personal loss of a friend, but also a severe collective loss to the Oxford women’s studies programme in and across the Humanities (including the interdisciplinary MSt in Women’s Studies, the Women’s Studies Steering Committee, and the TORCH Women in the Humanities programme). Many are contributing to this volume in order to continue their conversation with her. Friendship, conversation, dialogue, collective work, collaboration: these were constant themes and preoccupations in her work as well as a way of life for her; they are intricately connected to her understanding of love and vulnerability. She describes her conversion to a “relational ontology” in “Towards a New Philosophical Imaginary.” Her friendship was not indiscriminate and unconditional, but she was not factional or cliquey. She was drawn to open and dynamic groups and communities, as she theorizes them in “Reorienting Ourselves in (Bergsonian) Freedom, Friendship and Feminism.” Or, when these were lacking, she sought open and dynamic ways of relating to communities. She was an energetic but also very critical member of several communities – communities that might be deemed mutually exclusive. Was she working in the Continental tradition or the Analytic tradition, or seeking ways to bridge the two? What was the nature of her relationship to the Christian Church, the institution of philosophy, the Oxford Faculty of Philosophy, academic feminism, and so on? On these questions and others, there is no agreement among the contributors in this volume. But she was undoubtedly drawn to collaborations, and her late and last work, in particular, was connected to two collaborative research projects: The Enhancing Life project funded by the Templeton Foundation and the Love in Religion project at Regent’s Park College. (See <http://enhancinglife.uchicago.edu/> and <loveinreligion.org>.)

Anderson’s last work focused on reimagining love and vulnerability. Extending Michèle Le Doeuff’s critique of the “philosophical imaginary” – the repertoire of unexamined myths and narratives underlying philosophical thinking, and acting as an unthought element within thought – Anderson critiques and then attempts to rebuild the concepts of love and vulnerability. We tend to fear vulnerability as an exposure to violence and suffering. We often project a vulnerability we all share onto “the vulnerable.” We value our perceived invulnerability or strive for a goal of invulnerability. Such has been the nature of our philosophical imaginary but also our social imaginary, Anderson claims. She then proposes a bold reorientation. Let us think of vulnerability, also, as a capability we all share; an occasion, opportunity, or condition of possibility for a transformative and life-enhancing openness to others and mutual affection.

Granted, ontological vulnerability – whether personal or social, whether bodily or emotional – does not in itself necessarily lead to reciprocal affection. But we might envisage an “ethical” and, in some sense to be specified, rational vulnerability that aims to do so, under certain conditions of self-reflexive and reciprocal accountability. (On conditions and limits, see, for example, Paul Fiddes’ discussion of Anderson’s understanding of the limits of forgiveness and restorative justice in this volume.) “Ethical” vulnerability works closely with the project of identifying and eliminating social vulnerability and structural injustice. The task to reimagine love and vulnerability is enormous and all too clearly significant, especially in times of erecting borders between “us” and “them.” Anderson discusses the “war on terror” in “Towards a New Philosophical Imaginary.” She talks about attitudes to migrants and refugees in “Creating a New Imaginary for Love in Religion”:

a dark social imaginary continues to stigmatize those needing to be cared for as a drain on an economy, carefully separating “the cared for” from those who are thought to be “in control” of their lives and of the world. As the political myth suggests, “we” do not want too many of “them,” for example migrants and refugees.

But one might readily think of other examples. Anderson’s overall project is, I believe, in the interest of social justice; one of its aims is to end the wilful ignorance of social vulnerability and structural injustice, as she explains in “Silencing and Speaker Vulnerability: Undoing an Oppressive Form of (Wilful) Ignorance.” In this project, reason, critical self-reflexivity, emotion, intuition and imagination, concepts, arguments, myths, and narrative all have a role to play, according to Anderson, while also needing to be reimagined and rethought.

This volume and the conference that preceded it were conceived during the Thanksgiving and Memorial Service for Pamela Sue Anderson on 18 March 2017 at Mansfield College, Oxford – and quickly dubbed Pamela’s conference and Pamela’s edited collection. During the service, extracts from Anderson’s last work on love and vulnerability, overflowing with life, were used by one of the speakers, Kate Kirkpatrick, to console the mourners in their grief. A dossier of Anderson’s unpublished last work and selected, relevant published work was soon compiled by me – with generous help from Laurie Anderson Sathe, Nicholas Bunnin, Beverley Clack, Paul Fiddes, Kate Kirkpatrick, and A.W. Moore – and Anderson’s collaborators and colleagues, over the course of her career, were invited to respond to this newly created dossier. An international conference soon materialized: “Love and Vulnerability: In Memory of Pamela Sue Anderson,” at Mansfield College and Regent’s Park College, on 16–18 March 2018. The conference organizing committee – Roxana Baiasu, Nicholas Bunnin, Paul Fiddes, Sabina Lovibond, and myself as chair – was supported by Laurie Anderson Sathe, Kate Kirkpatrick, A.W. Moore, and Katherine Morris. The running of the conference itself was supported by three students: Emily Cousens, Vanilla Parthiban, and Yaron Wolf. On an unusually snowy Oxford spring day, the unusual diversity of Anderson’s different intellectual communities came together for the first time and in embodied form, triggering surprising interactions and conversations which this volume continues.

The conference was memorable, by all accounts, in that it brought life and academic work powerfully together. We are grateful to the following for providing funding and support: the Oxford Faculty of Philosophy, the Oxford Faculty of Theology and Religion, the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), the Philosophical Fellowship Fund, Mansfield College, and Regent’s Park College. Most conference papers were subsequently reworked and peer-reviewed for inclusion in this collection, and some additional pieces peer-reviewed or specially commissioned. Many thanks to our peer-reviewers for their thoroughness: Alison Assiter, Roxana Baiasu, Andrea Bieler, Nicholas Bunnin, Beverley Clack, Kristine A. Culp, Susan Durber, Paul Fiddes, Alison Jasper, Morny Joy, Kate Kirkpatrick, Sabina Lovibond, Xin Mao, Mari Mikkola, A.W. Moore, Katherine Morris, Chon Tejedor, Günter Thomas, and Heather Walton. Grateful thanks, also, to Paula Boddington, Elizabeth Frazer and Kimberly Hutchings, Heike Springhart, and Heather Walton, who enriched the conference with their papers but were unable to rework them for publication. Gerard Greenway and James Hypher provided unstinting in-house editorial support throughout the publication process.

The Contents pages opening this volume will, I hope, have already suggested the breadth and diversity of contributors, some of whom are highly distinguished – “at the top” of their field and needing no introduction – while others are at the beginning of promising careers. I will not be introducing all twenty-seven pieces individually, but let me sketch out the volume, in broad outline. Some contributors trace the emergence of Anderson’s late thinking on love, vulnerability, and related concepts in her earlier work or offer synthetic accounts of her oeuvre around these concepts. Others rejoin and critically extend one or more of Anderson’s own conversations with a number of fields and thinkers: Baruch Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, Henri Bergson, Emmanuel Levinas, Simone de Beauvoir, Paul Ricoeur, Gilles Deleuze, bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, Judith Butler, and Anderson’s friends Paul Fiddes, Michèle Le Doeuff, and A.W. Moore. Some bring Anderson’s work in contact with other thinkers and debates – debates in theology; Continental and Analytic philosophy; feminist, queer, and transgender theory; postcolonial theory; African-American studies; and wider debates about the future of the university, the Me Too movement, sweatshops, climate change, and so on. Thinkers, writers, artists, and activists brought into conversation with Anderson by contributors include: Hannah Arendt, Sri Aurobindo, John Broome, Wendy Brown, Tarana Burke, Havi Carel, Stanley Cavell, Ananya Chatterjea, Judy Chicago, Stefan Collini, George Eliot, Martha Fineman, Miranda Fricker, Thomas Fuchs, Jesus, Søren Kierkegaard, Margaret Laurence, Jonathan Lear, Niklas Luhmann, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, John Stuart Mill, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Oakeshott, Plato, Michèle Roberts, Matthew Sanford, Amartya Sen, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Iris Marion Young.

To turn now to key concepts, themes, and topics, some contributors focus on vulnerability or aspects of it, including: emotional vulnerability; corporeal vulnerability, dying and death; illness and resilience; sexual violence; social vulnerability; the vulnerability of Jesus. Others discuss love and vulnerability, often as part of a larger constellation of concepts and themes, including: (symmetrical) accountability; affectivity; capability; empathy; epistemic justice; feminism; forgiveness; friendship; hope; the human; institutional critique; intuition; metaphysical and ethical unity; narrative; neoliberalism; philosophical nonsense; responsibility; restorative justice; risk; structural injustice; transformation; transformative justice; wilful ignorance; women in philosophy.

The unusually wide range of Anderson’s interests and commitments was due partly to her determination to accept no intellectual master and to think for herself, in friendship and feminism. Anchoring all her interests and commitments was her feminism, particularly the issues of finding a place for feminist philosophy and a place for women in philosophy. This is why she personally made provisions for the Pamela Sue Anderson Studentship for the Encouragement of the Place of Women in Philosophy. In my view, these are strategic and pragmatic goals having to do with her particular time, place, and location. But what kind of feminist is Anderson? In addition to the aforementioned Beauvoir, Butler, Collins, Le Doeuff, and hooks, other important interlocutors were Sandra Harding, Julia Kristeva, and quite a few of the contributors to this volume. She was certainly not the kind of feminist who believed in the primacy of gender over race, sexual orientation, class, and other vectors. Nor was she only or primarily fighting discrimination against (white, cis, straight) women. As “Silencing and Speaker Vulnerability: Undoing an Oppressive Form of (Wilful) Ignorance” makes clear, she was committed to ending all forms of discrimination. I remember her closing her October 2017 Feminist Theory lecture on Simone de Beauvoir – in Room 11 of Examination Schools, a room adorned with portraits exclusively of “serious” and “respectable” men at the time – with enthusiastic discussion of Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl. This was the last Feminist Theory lecture she ever delivered, and transfeminist issues were clearly high on her agenda. Her readings in feminists of colour (including queer theorists and transgender theorists) were perhaps somewhat limited in range, but the programmatic commitment was there. In another time and place, her intersectional and interdisciplinary inclinations might have had more scope to grow.

Anderson’s last work is exceptionally good to think with, I believe. It casts a wide net, reaching out for help wherever she can find it. These last essays are fearlessly synthetic. They have a constructivist spirit, moving at speed, fleet of foot, from one ally to the next to build themselves. They are acts of the imagination at least as much as they rely on tight argumentation. As Anderson’s former doctoral supervisor, Alan Montefiore, puts it in this volume: “This is a philosophy of ‘Look at it in this way rather than in that.’” The pace and sketchiness of execution inevitably leave unanswered questions but effectively require the reader’s collaboration. In their airiness and spaciousness, these last essays are good to think with. In painterly terms, they are a combination of impressionistic sketch, rooted in the moment, and high abstraction. Though Anderson’s interest in vulnerability was life-long and preceded her cancer diagnosis and her experience of living with terminal cancer, her work must have found a testing ground in that experience. And yet there is nothing preachy about her voice, but much aliveness. It is a living voice vividly addressing its audience in an invitation to think together. It is a young voice, like the voice of the young girl, Dawn, that she reprises, following Le Doeuff, in “Towards a New Philosophical Imaginary.”

In collectively thinking about how to edit Anderson’s last writings, we (Anderson Sathe, Bunnin, Fiddes, Lovibond, Moore, and myself) decided to aim for the light touch. There was a quirkiness to the documents – for example, in Anderson’s use of red, bold, and underline – that we decided to retain as much as possible. There is also an element of repetition in the four pieces. Most notably, a section of “Silencing and Speaker Vulnerability: Undoing an Oppressive Form of (Wilful) Ignorance” reappears in the middle section of “Creating a New Imaginary for Love in Religion,” where it serves as an example.

Some of the contributors themselves were keen to emulate the unstuffy, unfinished, conversational quality of Anderson’s last work. Some contributions are quite deliberately brief, bare, and intent on doing without the usual markers of “serious” academic scholarship, such as full, exhaustive referencing. Others have joined the conversation in lively critique of Anderson’s work, determined to avoid numbing eulogy and deadening hagiography to keep her work alive. Yet others have honoured her commitment to fighting social vulnerability and structural injustice, including epistemic injustice, by reconnecting her work to ongoing institutional critique of philosophy, the university, the Church – and political activism. Some contributions were very much in the spirit of doing things with Pamela or going on a trip with Pamela. Nicholas Bunnin captures the hopes of many for this volume in his piece:

When I outlined my plans for this essay to Adrian Moore, I confessed worries that I might be imposing my own preoccupations on Pamela’s thinking. He reassured me that my worries were most likely fully justified, but at least the essay would show how talking with Pamela could stimulate fresh thinking in others.

Oxford, UKBeach house near ancient Abdera, Greece