Reviews and Comments

Sorry Lauren. I want to like you and your writing, but I couldn't. On one hand, I think I can grasp the book’s key message, and see that it is compelling. On the other hand, my understanding feels entirely superficial, like I’m too stupid to read the book. This isn’t a nice feeling, obviously.

Let me lay out what I took away from it. Relationships with other, whether they are personal, sexual, communal or political, generate friction and inconvenience. The very act of relating to other – even if it's a relation based on hate, repulsion or subjugation – constrains our selves: it encroaches on our personal space and autonomy, and by doing so it challenges our illusion of sovereignty, of being independent subjects. And yet, we cannot help desiring relations. Acknowledging this situation (or affect) is helpful because it allows us to reframe the outcomes of relations. For example, if after a sexual encounter (one we agreed to) we feel disappointed or violated or regretful, it does not mean that we made the wrong choice. Rather, those feelings are part and parcel of relating to strangers in this way, which is a thing that 'we' want (we, in this case, stands for sex-positive feminists, I suppose). If attachment is “what draws you out into the world,” Berlant argues, “inconvenience is the adjustment from taking things in.”

So far, so good. I could just about make out these ideas from reading the introduction, and this reassuring book review by Jo Linvingstone. But on another level the book is so impenetrable that I couldn't really read it. The conceptual sections are abstruse to the point that, taken individually, the sentences make little sense, especially if one is not familiar with the hundreds of oblique references that Berlant scatters through the text: works of art, literary criticism, philosophy books, brought up without explanation. The chapters seek to use artwork to illustrate the point, and probably they would a bit easier if I had watched the films, seen the paintings or read the poems. Alas, I haven't.

I get defensive when people say that Haraway should write as she speaks, because I totally see the point of her style. It took me some time and effort, but now I really do. So I'm weary to move the same criticism against Berlant, since maybe it's me that is lacking. I can tell that it's intentional, they write as much in the introduction, where they forewarn the reader that they may feel frustrated by the insistence on the both/and of attachment'' and their 'parenthetical voice' that resists organising thought hierarchically. But does it work? For whom? I found it impossible. Jo Livingston puts it more classily, as being akin to 'performing an autopsy on a bee'.

I should maybe add a few words about the notion of infrastructure, which is one of the reasons why I wanted to read the book. For Berlant an infrastructural perspective 'looks at the extension of life from within lifeworlds rather than at the dominant causal mechanism for reproducing the world's time, spaces, hierarchies, and relations' (p. 20). So, where structures are the causal mechanisms (e.g. capitalism), infrastructures are their instantiations, 'concrete social relations', that however do not need to be material (in the sense of something that can be photographed or measured or touched), but include feelings. The benefit of this perspective (or 'heuristic'), is that it allows to redefine structure as 'something other than a kind of smoothness on top of volatility' (p 23). I don't know if I'm moving to far from the text if I say that focusing on infrastructure helps to see reality in the making, or as they put it to 'loosen the object-world's self relation while holding on to living, and in this sense it offers the pleasures of an attachment to life from an otherwise arduous space'. For once a genuinely clarifying example (p. 23): think of the difference between talking of the institution of marriage, vs the infrastructure of marriage. Especially at times of crisis (times where there exists a collective sense that a glitch is interrupting the reproduction of like), infrastructuralism emerges as an epistemology that highlights how 'nothing from above or the outside is holding the world together solidly' (p. 24), that things are fluid and could be easily be otherwise. Indeed, they go as far as to say that making this possibility for transformations visible is the main task of critical social thinkers, more useful than proposing better forms and objects with which to replace the ones we have. How this exactly relates to the points above I'm not sure, but I suppose it's helpful.

I’ve read this book after finishing Berlant, and my first emotion towards it has been relief. Arendt write in such a clear and engaging way. The first chapters have an almost reportage-like style (the book did at first appear in The New Yorker), whilst later in the book she turns towards a persuasive / essay-ish tone. Throughout, she is concerned with keeping a constant pace, using precise and understandable words, and avoiding all rhetoric - clearly triggered by the style of both the accused and the prosecution in the Eichmann trial. Vite scadenti, mitologie eroiche (a sentence I saw attributed, in Italian, to Susan Sonntag).

In preparation to reading the book, I listened to a The Dig episode on the book 'The rights to have rights', which takes as a starting point Arendt's thinking on human rights to discuss migrant rights today. The authors (Astra Taylor and Stephanie de Gooyer) are taken in by Arendt observations about how human rights become extremely flimsy when people are deprived of citizenship, when they are just 'naked humans' with no state to protect them. Their critique of Arendt, as one would aspect from The Dig, is mainly about her insistence on the political as a separate sphere, which essentially elevates political rights over, say, economic rights.

One of the reasons I was drawn to the book in the first place is precisely that Arendt is so divisive. It is someone who many admire, and many (perhaps especially in Pro-Palestinian circles), love to hate. 'One of the most overrated ''philosopher'' in history' is a hot-take I have recently seen on Twitter, pardon, X. I know she opposed desegregation in the American South, but also that she changed her mind on things throughout her life. Changing your mind, publicly and without denying your earlier position is something I respect.

I found her critical outlook on the trial remarkable. She firmly critiques Ben Gurion's desire to use to reinforce the message that Israel is the only safe haven for Jews, and its courts the only institutions that could ever fairly judge the perpetrators of the Holocaust. She is also sharp in noticing the hypocrisy of Israel’s ‘shock’ about racial laws under the Naxi, noting the irony of an Israeli court discussing the German laws that prohibited mixed-marriages, when Israeli law also does not recognise marriages between Jews and non-Jews, and considers the children born of this kind of unions 'legal bastards'. I know part of the antipathy for Arendt stems from her involvement with the Zionist Agency, but this is quite a clear-sighted comment, in 1960, and one that today would certainly get one’s into trouble.

Her trust in (international) law is both idealistic and pragmatic: she believes it is paramount that the trial be fair, but also that it remains a trial about the guilt of one individual, not of a nation or a group of people - because, as she persuasively points out, if we allow Eichmann to stand in for the German or for the Nazi as a whole then (1) we relativise his guilt, implicitly recognising that he was unlucky and most people could have been on the stand in his place and (2) we then imply the ‘justice has been done’.

Yet, her reading of Eichmann rests on the assumption that indeed he was not particularly evil, or even ideologically antisemitic, and had simply internalised the prevalent morals, to the point that in his view acting well meant doing what Hitler wanted (Eichmann himself refers to this duty as a Kantian moral imperative, disturbingly). Arendt's interpretation also foregrounds how some of the most grotesque beliefs held by Nazi were widely shared, even within the opposition, and even within Jewish communities (eg. about the superiority of German civilisation, and/or the need for Jewish to live among themselves). She tries to really understand the acrobatics and contortions made by German minds and conscience to embrace, or at least comply with Nazi ideology. She also denounces the ways many Jews and non-Jews in positions of leadership crossed the line that divides ‘helping Jews to emigrate’ and ‘helping Nazi Germany carry out its deportation programmes’.

I have to say that the book slightly blew my mind on several fronts. First, although WWII and the Holocaust are theoretically one of the subjects most covered in school, the version I learnt was so simple and black and white to be basically useless when it comes to reflecting on questions of responsibilities, on what could have been different, and on how avoid similar horrors. Second, the clarity with which Arendt was able to critique Israel, not only for particular policies, but for its very setup as an exclusively Jewish state, comes across as shocking at this moment in time. Last but not least, also her take on the futility and emptiness of feelings of collective guilt (among Germans in particular) seems very foresighted.