The hunger of Martha Nussbaum

Representations

Volumn 77, Issue , 2002, Pages 52-81

  Harpham, Geoffrey Galt ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 60950514077     PISSN: 07346018     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rep.2002.77.1.52     Document Type: Article

References (55)

1. http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/eyeghiay/Philosophy/Colloquia/nussbaum.html. Compiled by the estimable Eddie Yeghiayan.
2. Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge, 2000).
3. Martha Nussbaum, Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York, 1990), 390.
4. Mary Beard, "The Danger of Making Lists," Times Literary Supplement, 17 March 2000, 6.
5. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1978), 151, 152.
6. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak (Baltimore, 1976), 34.
7. See "Plato's Pharmacy," in Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago, 1981), 63-171.
8. Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge, 1986), 184-95.
9. Compared with the work of Donald Davidson, Charles Taylor, and Nelson Goodman, Nussbaum says, "the arguments of Derrida are relatively minor contributions." See Martha Nussbaum, "Human Functioning and Social Justice," Political Theory 20, no. 2 (May 1992): 202-46, 207. Hereafter HFSJ.
10. See also Martha Nussbaum "Skepticism About Practical Reason in Literature and the Law," Harvard Law Review 107 (1994): 714-44; here Derrida is associated with Robert Bork, both of whom are cast as proponents of a "new subjectivism" who prize above all "freedom from disturbance" (734 ff).
11. See Jacques Derrida, "Afterword: Toward an Ethic of Discussion," in Limited Inc, ed. Gerald Graff (Evanston, Ill., 1988), 111-60.
12. For a discussion of this text, see Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society (Durham, N.C., 1998), 38-49.
13. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (1940) (New York, 1976), vii.
14. See Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 104-65.
15. and Martha Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston, 1995;
16. See F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (New York, 1948), 227 ff.
17. See especially "'Finely Aware and Richly Responsible': Literature and the Moral Imagination," LK, 148-67;
18. For a detailed assessment of Nussbaum's attempt to reconcile ethics and aesthetics, see Rüdiger Bender, "The Aesthetics of Ethical Reflection and the Ethical Significance of Aesthetic Experience: A Critique of Alasdair MacIntyre and Martha Nussbaum" at: http://www.ph-erfurt.de/neumann/eese/ artic98/bender/_98.html.
19. Nussbaum stands at the opposite extreme from the utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer, who has argued that ethical principles dictate that people should give 10 percent of their income, or anything more than they need to sustain themselves, to charitable causes. If Singer argues we should "give till it hurts," Nussbaum, responding to a more traditional utilitarian emphasis, urges us to maximize our pleasures. For a recent statement, see Peter Singer, Writings on an Ethical Life (New York, 2000).
20. Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton, 1994), 312.
21. See Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, N.Y., 1993), 44.
22. Plato, Phaedrus and The Seventh and Eighth Letters, trans. Walter Hamilton (Harmondsworth, 1981), 64. It is important to Nussbaum that, in the "best" cases, the sex that occurred between teacher and pupil in Greece was "intercrural," between clenched thighs, rather than anal.
23. The word "misogynistic" is Nussbaum's, as quoted by Robert S. Boynton in "Who Needs Philosophy?" New York Times Magazine, 21 November 1999. See http:// www10.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/19991121mag- boynton.html. Since this essay is more accessible online than in hard copy, I will not refer to page numbers, which are unmarked in the electronic version.
24. Martha Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice (New York, 1999), 79.
25. See Martha Nussbaum, "Non-Relative Virtues: An Aristotelian Approach," in Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, eds., The Quality of Life (Oxford, 1993), 242-69.
26. See Nussbaum, "Non-Relative Virtues," 249.
27. Martha Nussbaum, "Platonic Love and Colorado Law: The Relevance of Ancient Greek Norms to Modern Controversies," in Virginia Law Review 80 (1994): 1515-651. Hereafter PL.
28. See Daniel Mendelsohn, "The Stand: Expert Witnesses and Ancient Mysteries in a Colorado Courtoom," Lingua Franca, September/October 1996, 34-46;
29. and Boynton, "Who Needs Philosophy?" See note 23.
30. Robert George, "'Shameless Acts' Revisited: Some Questions for Martha Nussbaum," Academic Questions (Winter 1995-96): 24-42 (the journal of the National Association of Scholars). Hereafter SA. The article is online at http://www.webcom.com/zurcher/philosophy/nussbaum.html#22a. This text details a list of charges against Nussbaum, including the case of the missing ampersand. George's deposition at the trial contains comments that seem to reflect a conservative position on sexuality, to say the least.
31. First Things 67 (November 1996): 39-42. George is the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence in the Department of Politics at Princeton. In 1994 he was counsel of record to Mother Teresa of Calcutta in her amicus curiae brief to the Supreme Court to reconsider its ruling in Roe v. Wade.
32. Kenneth Dover, Greek Homosexuality, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).
33. This was not, however, the issue in Colorado, which concerned the rights of homosexuals to claim minority status or protected status, or to make a claim of discrimination. Nussbaum has written a number of pieces arguing for equal rights for gays. These include, most prominently, "A Defense of Lesbian and Gay Rights," in SSJ, 184-210;
34. and "The Study of Human Sexuality," in CH, 222-56.
35. The Kantian imperative to treat people as ends enables Nussbaum to introduce Enlightenment thinking in the course of a discussion of the way in which pornography "objectifies" women. See Martha Nussbaum, "Objectification," in SSJ, 213-39, 224.
36. Here, Nussbaum is concerned to disentangle those forms of objectification that degrade from those that merely excite, and thus form a valuable part of sex. For Nussbaum, the subject of sex brings out the Stoic best in Kant. See also Martha Nussbaum, "Kant and Stoic Cosmopolitanism," The Journal of Political Philosophy 5 (1997) 1: 1-25. Hereafter KSC.
37. and WHD; for Jürgen Habermas, see Martha Nussbaum, "Feminists and Philosophy," New York Review of Books, 20 October 1994, 59-63, 63.
38. Pure reason has come in for a number of critiques in recent years, having been accused of being implicitly oppressive, racist, and imperialist. See, respectively, Ashis Nandy The Intimate Enemy (Delhi, 1993), 99;
39. Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London, 1986), 110;
40. and Veena Das, "Subaltern as Perspective," in Ranajit Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies 6: Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi, 1989), 310-24, 312.
41. For a series of pointed vignettes on the function of race in the discourse of reason, see Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, ed., Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (Cambridge, Mass., 1997);
42. and for a brief account of sex and reason in a long tradition of philosophical discourse going back to the Greeks, see Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: "Male" and "Female" in Western Philosophy (Minneapolis, Minn., 1984).
43. For a discussion of contemporary accounts of rationality, see Geoffrey Gait Harpham, "Of Rats and Men; or, Reason in Our Time," Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society (Durham, N.C., 1999), 99-119.
44. Although conscripted by Nussbaum for liberal ends, compassion is one reflex of a conservative orientation that characteristically views suffering from the distance of privilege, as the onetime determination of George W. Bush to "build a vast army of compassion" suggests. Compassion, one might argue, is the form of social militancy favored by fortune's favorites. Treating it as "the basic social emotion," the affect that works toward justice, Nussbaum does not register the trickle-down aspect of compassion. See Martha Nussbaum, "Compassion: The Basic Social Emotion," Social Philosophy and Policy 13 (1996) 1: 27 ff. Nussbaum's account of "poetic justice" has been criticized on other grounds by Alan Jacobs, who quarrels with Nussbaum's Suggestion that Walt Whitman might be taken as a model judge. This, Jacobs argues, constitutes a grotesque misreading of Whitman, who would not have consented to have his faculties placed at the service of a legal bureaucracy. Whitman, Jacobs insists, wanted perfect freedom to "judge" according to his lights alone, and was indifferent to, if not scornful of, the civic-minded earnestness Nussbaum describes.
45. See Alan Jacobs, "Martha Nussbaum, Poet's Defender," at http://www.leaderu.com/ftissues/ft9610/articles/reviewessay.html.
46. Martha Nussbaum, For the Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, ed. Joshua Cohen (Boston, 1996).
47. Hereafter FLC. Nussbaum's essay is "Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism," 2-20.
48. See Stanley Fish, "Boutique Multiculturalism, or Why Liberals are Incapable of Thinking About Hate Speech," Critical Inquiry 23 (Winter 1997) 2: 378-95.
49. Reprinted in Stanley Fish, The Trouble with Principle (Cambridge, Mass., 1999).
50. Martha Nussbaum, "The Professor of Parody," New Republic, 22 February 1999; online at http://www.thenewrepublic.com/archive/0299/022299/ nussbaum022299.html. Because the article is more readily available online than in hard copy, I will not refer to page numbers, which are not given in the electronic form.
51. A number of eminent feminist scholars rushed to defend Butler, but the spectacle of the empire writing back only strengthened Nussbaum's position. The clobbering counter-claims made by her attackers delineate the orthodoxy of contemporary academic feminism. Nussbaum is viciously confused, they argue, on many - indeed, on all - points. Specifically, they write, Butler is political, she is effective, she is subversive, she is antiauthoritarian - and anyway, she is a theorist, a thinker, and so doesn't have to be any of these things. In fact, her refusal to be directly political is a mark of her integrity and sophistication; her "provocative, open theories" compare favorably with Nussbaum's "closed moralizing." Indeed, Joan Scott warns, serious consequences would follow if Nussbaum were to be preferred to Butler: "when the gap between theory and politics is closed in the name of virtue, when Robespierre or the Ayatollahs or Ken Starr seek to impose their vision of the 'good' on the rest of society, reigns of terror follow." Perhaps the most darkly illuminating response comes from Gayatri Spivak, who describes Nussbaum's critique of Butler as a symptom of an appetite for cultural imperialism. "How does she know," Spivak asks, that Indian women would prefer to be fed, literate, enfranchised, and protected to being hungry, uneducated, exploited, beaten, and raped? Has she taken the rich tapestry of Indian life fully into account? "This may be her idea of what they should want," Spivak says, but her own research and experience have revealed that the "gender practice of the rural poor is quite often in the performative mode, carving out power within a more general scene of pleasure in subjection." Chastising Nussbaum for her inelegant moral confidence, her respondents do succeed in "putting into question," as theorists like to say, the difference between good and evil. Nussbaum's response was coldly nonciliatory. See New Republic, 19 April 1999, online at http://www.tnr.com/ archive/0499/041999/nussbaum041999.html.
52. As early as 1994, Nussbaum was announcing an intention to re-orient feminism, claiming that "the old norm of objectivity was in a sense more attractive for feminists than the [gender-specific] norms that feminists now defend." See Nussbaum, "Feminists and Philosophy," note 38, 63.
53. In an essay that makes many of these points, Butler actually bases her discussion on Nussbaum's hero Aristotle and refers to other thinkers Nussbaum cites as well. See Judith Butler, "Desire," in Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, eds., Critical Terms for Literary Study, 2d ed. (Chicago, 1995), 369-86. In a recent review of a book by Edward Said, Nussbaum adopts another, friendlier form of appropriation, praising Said, in effect, for his insightful promotion of her ideas.
54. See Martha Nussbaum, "The End of Orthodoxy," New York Times Book Review, 18 February 2001, 28.
55. In Getting It Right: Language, Literature, and Ethics (Chicago, 1992), I described the relation between ethics and morality in terms of openness - theoretical openness, the interval of reflection and uncommitted assessment in which all options remain possible - and closure, the moment of decision in which a specific course of action is chosen in accordance with a " transcendental" warrant (52-58). Critics of deconstruction have charged that it sought to prolong the gap of ethical openness infinitely, and thus refused, in a spirit of cognitive antisepsis, the responsibilities and risks that attend definite worldly action. It was, in fact, the vulnerability of deconstruction to this accusation that led to its almost immediate collapse, in terms of academic fashion, in the wake of the discovery of Paul de Man's "wartime journalism."