Abstract
There are not too many events that have happened in my life that I can say were life-changing. One was when my father confessed to me that he had tried to commit suicide twice by drowning himself. The other was when I heard doctors pronounce me dead on a surgical table after minor surgery for sinus went awry and I almost drowned in my own blood.
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Notes
See Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (New York, Springer, 1980 ). For an accessible and in-depth examination of Levinas and the face
See Emmanuel Levinas, Basic Writings, ed. Adriaan Peperzack, Simon Critchley, Robert Bernasconi ( Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008 ).
See also Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Identity: Conversations with Philip Nemo (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1985 ). Translated by Richard Cohen.
Thomas Nagel has made an interesting argument in his essay “Sexual Perversion,” that the absence of reciprocal arousal is one criterion of sexual perversion. Sexual perversions are deviations from what he calls “interpersonal reciprocity.” Where there is no reciprocal arousal between oneself and another there is an arrestation of development of sex to higher levels—such is the case of sex with animals, children and inert objects. When one partner can never derive a sense of self-enhancement by sexual interaction with the other we witness the instantiation of a perversion. See Thomas Nagel, “Sexual Perversion,” in Philosophy and Sex ed. Robert B. baker and Kathleen Wininger (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009), 256–267. I draw the analogy only to show that in a society where reciprocal emotional and nonsexual arousal interest is denied one that it resembles a perverted social space because it sabotages the potential for civil, warm and ordinary human exchanges.
Jean-Paul Paul Sartre, “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: New American Library, 1975), 348. Grounding the constitutionality of humaneness in a paradigmatic ontology of indeterminacy and contingency, Sartre argues that the choices that we make have normative import to them. Lacking the imprimatur of metaphysical absolutism human reality is really social reality. Sartre does not deny a biological human nature but denies the idea of a metaphysical conception of human nature. Human nature is made by the choices and actions that we effect in the world. In the absence of a God to grant an a priori significance and determinate meaning to human nature, the individual makes her own nature by her freely chosen life plans, values and actions. Meanings and life purposes are heuristic and open-ended and compete with other meanings for salience in the social world. My meaning as conjured up by my commitments and actions jockey for resonance with the conscience and consciousness of others. Choices that we make, therefore, carry the weight of moral responsibility that ought to make us, according to Sartre, feel anguish. They will appeal to the sensibilities of others and make others susceptible to adopting our choices and commitments.
This is the position of Judith Butler who seems bent on elevating isolated incidents of mistreatment of Muslims to the level of an international catastrophe. She goes further, accusing the United States of amorphous racism that is rationalized by the claim of “self-defense.” Butler asserts that under the administration of George W. Bush every member of the US population was asked to become a “foot soldier” in Bush’s army. She claims that as a matter of policy that after the terrorist attacks by Islamic fundamentalists on September 11, 2001, that a population of Islamic peoples had become targeted by the government’s mandate to be on heightened alert. They were, in effect, rounded up, stared down, watched, hounded and monitored by a group of citizens who understood themselves as “foot soldiers” in the war against terrorism.; See Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 39, 77. Speaking as a social democrat, I suspect that Butler, like many who perceive themselves as possessing a great deal of social capital, is suffering from “white man’s burden,” and, like so many American intellectuals, harbors an intense dislike of the United States. I submit that no policy mandating each and every American to be a “foot soldier” in the war against terrorism exists or has ever existed. In point of fact, vigilantism was cautioned against, which is the chief reason we did not witness wholesale acts of vengeance against Muslims in the wake of the attacks—a state of affairs that would not have been reciprocated had a reversal of the scenario taken place in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Pakistan (to name but a few countries) by Christians against Muslims.
Mill writes: “Having said that individuality is the same thing as development, and that it is only the cultivation of individuality which produces, or can produce, well-developed human beings, I might here close the argument: for what more or better can be said of any condition of human affairs, that it brings human beings themselves nearer to the best they can be? Or what worse can be said of any obstruction to good, than that it prevents this? See John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Utilitarianism ( New York: Bantam Books, 1993 ), 73.
This is a position held by many Islamic feminists who argue that pious submission to God and modesty before men challenge the conventional wisdom of Western liberalism regarding female agency and well-being. See Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). Saba Mahmood, an anthropologist, offers an in-depth exploration and quite impressive study of the women’s mosque movement in Egypt who form part of the Islamic revival in Egypt. These groups of pious women reject emancipatory philosophies of the liberal West on the grounds that they presuppose an inner liberal subject external to the one who wears the veil and cultivates the virtues of piety and submission. They are not interested in subverting the prevailing norms or even dismantling the status quo. Self-realization and autonomy are not to be located in transgression but rather in obedience and submission to God. The veil, piety, modesty and submission are all inextricably linked. But the issue is larger than this. The focus of the book is about decentering male monopoly on the teaching of Islamic doctrine and pedagogy. The women in the mosque hold public meetings and share views on Islamic teachings. The book is a good case study in a solidaristic ethos among pious Egyptian Muslim women who are more known for the deployment of a strategy vis-à-vis the construction of their pious identities that avoids the vocabularies of resistance usually associated with emancipatory movements. These women are not interested in an a priori emancipatory agenda usually associated with feminism. In point of fact, a close reading of the text renders an interpretation that is at once not surprising and startling. They seem to be less concerned with a feminist reading of “the will of God” and submission and obedience to religious norms as inimical to their agency and more attuned to showing that piety, submission and obedience are expressions of freedom in the life of a person and not at all inimical to autonomy and agency. In one sense then, their manner of navigating themselves in their male-dominated patriarchal society is reactionary: reactionary against the idea of a liberal subject deconstructing and undermining the gendered social mores and norms that transmit a message of female decorum, piety and obedience to authority. Depending on one’s political commitments these women then are no different from female Orthodox Jews who assume their rightful place in the synagogues or Christian Evangelists who adhere to a script about woman’s rightful place in the world in relation to men. On one stark reading such individuals are uncritical participants in culture. On Mahmood’s reading, though, I think the message is that there are competing desires and aspirations and capabilities that properly qualify as candidates for female identity and agency other than those advocated by the liberal subject and the emancipatory resources associated with liberalism.
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© 2013 Jason D. Hill
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Hill, J.D. (2013). Hiding from Humanity: The Burka, the Face and the Annihilation of Human Identity. In: Civil Disobedience and the Politics of Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137350312_3
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