Confusion

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  So to many, mixed-sex colleges seemed the next logical step. But that might take time. Women, for example, would require better bathroom facilities than the gruesome arrangements in the men’s colleges. But as a preliminary, students all over the university were demanding that the gate hours be abolished. We all had to be in college by midnight, and visitors were obliged to write their names in a book at the porter’s lodge and sign out before the gates were closed. Of course, people disregarded these gate hours. There were several places where it was very easy to climb over the college wall; everybody knew this and most turned a blind eye. If somebody were caught, he or she would suffer a mild reprimand and pay a small fine. But in these heady days of revolution, these rules seemed absurd to the more radical, and in my new official capacity, I had to attend heated meetings in which students and dons argued about them. As far as I was concerned, the question was wholly academic. There was no man clamoring to spend the night in my small college room, and the possibility of my climbing over the college wall after a love tryst was about as remote as my scaling the Great Wall of China. Moreover, until a few weeks before, I had been a very visible representative of an institution that condemned all sex outside marriage as gravely sinful. But those days were over. I still regarded myself as a Catholic, but I was aware that its traditional teachings on sexual matters had become extremely controversial within the church itself. Some of the nuns had been devastated the previous summer when Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae had outlawed the practice of artificial contraception. In one of our convents, I had heard, one of the more adventurous nuns had caused a minor sensation, on the morning after the papal ruling, by putting a pill (a mere aspirin, of course) on each of the sisters’ breakfast plates. Nuns naturally had no personal stake in the pope’s decision, but the encyclical had become symbolic of the authoritarian government of the church: by ignoring the advice of married couples, doctors, and psychologists in order to reassert the church’s traditional position, Paul VI seemed to be withdrawing from the new spirit of the Vatican Council, retreating yet again from the laity, and turning his back on the plight of those married couples who were loyal Catholics but who wanted to limit their families responsibly. The Catholic Church was undergoing its own sexual revolution, but most of those who campaigned against Humanae Vitae would not have condoned the use of the pill by unmarried people, and many of them would have expected me to take a strong line on the gate hours issue and speak up for good Catholic values. A few weeks before, I would probably have done this without hesitation.

• From Quiet (2012)

  An intriguing answer comes from a University of Michigan business school study, not of married couples with opposite personality styles, but of negotiators from different cultures—in this case, Asians and Israelis. Seventy-six MBA students from Hong Kong and Israel were asked to imagine they were getting married in a few months and had to finalize arrangements with a catering company for the wedding reception. This “meeting” took place by video. Some of the students were shown a video in which the business manager was friendly and smiley; the others saw a video featuring an irritable and antagonistic manager. But the caterer’s message was the same in both cases. Another couple was interested in the same wedding date. The price had gone up. Take it or leave it. The students from Hong Kong reacted very differently from the Israeli students. The Asians were far more likely to accept a proposal from the friendly business manager than from the hostile one; only 14 percent were willing to work with the difficult manager, while 71 percent accepted the deal from the smiling caterer. But the Israelis were just as likely to accept the deal from either manager. In other words, for the Asian negotiators, style counted as well as substance, while the Israelis were more focused on the information being conveyed. They were unmoved by a display of either sympathetic or hostile emotions. The explanation for this stark difference has to do with how the two cultures define respect. As we saw in chapter 8 , many Asian people show esteem by minimizing conflict. But Israelis, say the researchers, “are not likely to view [disagreement] as a sign of disrespect, but as a signal that the opposing party is concerned and is passionately engaged in the task.” We might say the same of Greg and Emily. When Emily lowers her voice and flattens her affect during fights with Greg, she thinks she’s being respectful by taking the trouble not to let her negative emotions show. But Greg thinks she’s checking out or, worse, that she doesn’t give a damn. Similarly, when Greg lets his anger fly, he assumes that Emily feels, as he does, that this is a healthy and honest expression of their deeply committed relationship. But to Emily, it’s as if Greg has suddenly turned on her. In her book Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion , Carol Tavris recounts a story about a Bengali cobra that liked to bite passing villagers. One day a swami—a man who has achieved self-mastery—convinces the snake that biting is wrong. The cobra vows to stop immediately, and does.

• From Between Us

  Like partners in a dance, your emotions and those of others complement and steer each other to form the interaction. And shared cultural knowledge, in the form of language and practices, orchestrates the ways in which different individuals do emotions together. It is like dancing the tango at the rhythm of tango music, together with a partner who knows their dance steps, as you know yours. The dance emerges from everyone knowing their moves, and from the moves being in sync with the music. Doing your emotions in a way that fits with the relationships in your culture, and with your position in those relationships, is akin to having the right dance steps. So, what happens when people move to another culture? If doing emotions is like dancing the tango, is doing emotions in another culture like dancing the tango with a partner who has never learned the tango steps? The metaphor holds in that you think you are producing the right dance steps—you expect your steps will merge with the other person’s steps to form the dance—but they end up being out of sync, and possibly result in stepping on each other’s toes. And there is more to doing emotions than just you and a partner doing a private dance: doing emotions in another culture, at least initially, is dancing the tango when everybody else in the ballroom dances to the music of a waltz. Some individuals never get beyond the stage of noticing that other people perform a different dance than they were used to in their culture of origin. By her own admission, the anthropologist Jean Briggs had great difficulty understanding the emotions of Utku Inuit. At first, she did not understand when and why her hosts were angry, and she had difficulty identifying anger expressions when they occurred. Her ethnography shows an understanding of the emotion norms in the end, but she never internalized those norms. As linguist Aneta Pavlenko astutely conjectures, the very fact that Briggs considered her own way of doing emotions “natural” prevented her from ever completely fitting into her new emotional community. Briggs might have been unable, and perhaps unwilling, to do so, perhaps because she never saw herself as permanently living in the Utku community. At the other end of the spectrum are immigrants who end up clearly mastering the dance to the new music. In her autobiography Lost in Translation, Eva Hoffman describes how she gradually adopted new ways of doing emotions after moving at the age of thirteen from Poland to the United States: Eventually, the voices enter me; by assuming them, I gradually make them mine. I am being remade, fragment by fragment, like a patchwork quilt; there are more colors in the world than I ever knew.

• From Scandalous Liaisons (2007)

  The vision that was his wife stopped before him, and to his amazement, she dropped into a curtsy so low her forehead would have touched the dirt if not for the brim of her hat. Sebastian scowled. What in hell was she doing? “My lord,” she murmured in deference. The town immediately resumed its frenzied activity. Reaching down, he yanked Olivia to her feet. She shielded her eyes from him with her hat, a meek gesture that was not in keeping with her fiery nature. He wanted, with a soul-deep need, to see her lovely eyes and look upon her beautiful face. Annoyed with her behavior, Sebastian spoke harshly. “What is the matter with you?” It wasn’t possible, and yet her head dropped even lower, until all he could see was the top of her blasted hat. “I apologize if I have displeased you again, my lord. I meant no offense.” Again? What the devil was she talking about? Sebastian gripped her elbow and dragged her up the gangplank, not stopping until they reached her cabin, where he thrust her in first and slammed the door shut behind them. Frustrated by her hat, he removed the offending article and tossed it aside. Her lovely visage was revealed to him, as well as her tears. Immediately, he felt contrite. He was a cad. “What ails you?” he queried, drawing her into his embrace. Olivia stood stiffly for a heartbeat before melting into him. “You’re angry with me.” “No,” he denied, his hands stroking the curve of her spine. “I’m confused.” She buried her face in his chest and sobbed. “You think I’m a wanton.” His confusion remained, but his mouth curved against her hair. “Perhaps a little.” She sobbed louder. “But I like it,” he amended hastily. “You don’t!” she argued in a muffled voice. “You left me so I wouldn’t throw myself at you again. And I won’t. Never again, I vow.” Ah! Sebastian grinned like an idiot. He kept his voice low and soothing. “I’d have ravished you further, Olivia, if the ocean hadn’t been between us. You were distraught. Your ship was attacked, you were abused, and your husband was revealed to be a criminal. It would have been dishonorable of me to take your body under those conditions. Bad enough I took the liberties I did.” She struggled away from him, her eyes flashing dangerously. “You are not an honorable man! You said so yourself. You refused to marry a woman you compromised, and yet the woman to whom you are married is left a virgin.” She stomped a slippered foot. “I am not a fool! Admit the truth.”

• From Scandalous Liaisons (2007)

  The meal consisted of a variety of delectable dishes, including curried fowl and braised ham, and Charlotte was refreshing and engaging. She made him laugh with her dry wit and was attentive enough to keep his glass filled with wine. Hugh attempted to broach the subject of the duchess, but like a consummate politician, she directed the conversation to lighter topics, such as the spring dance in the village and Mr. Edgewood’s skinny, unappetizing pig. Lost in the pleasure of her company, Hugh was content to allow her evasiveness. For the moment. After dinner they retired to the upstairs library, and Hugh took the opportunity to study her in greater depth. It was easy to discern that she was not merely a paid companion. There was a practiced grace to her movements and a studious understanding of the customs enjoyed by men of privilege. She brought him a cigar, which she lit with expertise. Moving to the sideboard, Charlotte poured a large ration of brandy, which she warmed over a candle flame before bringing it to him. Her hips swayed softly as she approached, her shoulders held back to better display her lovely breasts. The invitation in her eyes was apparent. “You’re attempting to seduce me,” he murmured with a smile, extremely pleased. It was not unusual for women to pursue him, but he was especially enjoying it this evening. Setting his cigar aside, Hugh caught her wrist when she held out the glass and tugged her into his lap. “Would you like me to take you away from this place?” As soon as the words left his mouth, he acknowledged what an excellent idea it was. Charlotte was far too lovely to be hidden away, and he could easily see himself keeping her for a while. She didn’t reply. Instead, she turned her face and pressed those lush lips to his. Plump and flavored of wine, her kiss was intoxicating. He was held motionless, achingly touched and aroused by the simple gesture. He, a man consummate in the carnal arts, was arrested by a mere kiss. It was Charlotte who took control of the moment, Charlotte whose tongue licked along his lips and teased for entry. Hugh could only groan and pull her closer. “Montrose,” she whispered, her forehead pressed to his. “Hugh.” “Hugh . . .” She said his name on a sigh, a warm breath that mingled with his before he breathed in and made it his own. “I am a woman of the world. I don’t need to be rescued.” Holding her was both pleasure and torment. His cock was hard and swollen against her luscious derriere, aching to fill her. “What do you want, then, Charlotte?” he asked hoarsely. “I’ll give you anything you desire.” Her hand came up and entwined in his hair, kneading his scalp, until his eyes closed helplessly, awash in pleasure. The air around them heated, becoming heavy with a desire so intense, it almost frightened him.

• From Bigorexia

  I'm sorry, am I gross and sweaty and disgusting... Listen, Matt Kroc. You're not a girl, okay, you're not a girl, y-- you know... [stutters] you're gender-fluid. There's no such thing as gender-fluid, you're either a guy or a girl. Or you have a fetish, you know what I mean, it-- you know, that I think that'd gone too far. I know h-- [chuckles] I know transgender is a whole identity thing. They're born a man and they're naturally stronger. -Yeah, I kind of agree with that. -So, -you know. -It's a-- it's bit unfair. At the end of the day, I mean, my wife is in a restroom and, you know, transgender, you know, man goes in the bathroom, you know, and, you know, i-- it's a problem, you know, it's a problem because who knows if he goes in there, you know, and starts flashing because he still likes women. You can't do that. Th-- You can be a transgendered woman, but you're not a woman, you know, I mean, you're not a genetic woman, you can't-- you-- you're either born male or born female. When people think about trans women, they think of someone like me, that is very masculine, has all this extra muscle mass. Well, that's not the majority of the cases. Another big problem in the trans community is that we're so invisible. And they do that because of discrimination, they do it because of violence. They just want to live their lives, and they want to be left alone. People just have this idea that it's simply a man putting on a dress and growing their hair out, putting on makeup. And so, when people think of trans people, the only people they think of, the only ones they see, are the people who don't blend in. Then there's just so much misinformation and disinformation. You hear all these stories about trans women smashing world records and all this and it's baloney, it hasn't happened. Trans women have been able to compete in the Olympics since 2004, in Athens. In that time, there has been no Olympic records, no Olympic golds, no Olympic medals of any kind. So, if this was a huge advantage that people think it is and it was so easy, why aren't all these trans women coming in and taking over the sports. It just hasn't happened. The reality of the situation is trans women are not dominating sports and they haven't taken over. [tense music] [gentle dramatic music] As I started getting bigger and putting on more size, all of a sudden I was the cool boy. I don't know if this makes me feel good like it used to. Like, now I feel like it's not what I want. So, and I have an appearance coming up in a another month or so that I'm slimming down specifically for that. I've dropped, like, 22 pounds so far and I plan to drop about another 20.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  Our questi on then returns about articul ations in descriptive pros e of our sense of qual itative 98 · IDENT ITY AND TH E GOOD distinctions. These are the ones which mo dern moral philosoph y tends to suppress. Should we try to recover them for moral tho ught, or are they best left in implicit limbo ? 4.2 One might think straight off that we have an obvious reason to articulate them in the very modem predicament of perplexity and conflict between rival notions of the good. If one wants to reason about them, doesn't one have to spell them out? Or put negatively, isn't inarticula cy a crippling handicap to seeing clearly in this domain ? I think it is, and I am very sympa thetic to this argument. But a proponent of silence might be unconvinced. If anicu lation can only banalize at best, and at wor st feeds our love of self-display and self-delusion, then it cannot improve our epistemic plight. And isn't there a danger of ironing out too quick ly what is paradoxical in our deepest moral sense, of reconciling too quickly the conflicts, making a synthesi s of what cannot easily be com bined, in short of making our moral predicament look clearer, more unified, more harm onious, than it really is ? I am very aware of these dangers; at least I aspire to be. In another situation, they might provide good reasons for silence. But I think the silence of modem philosophy is unhealt hy. It is powere d, I argued above, partly by metaphysical and epistemological reasons which I believe invalid and largely by mo ral or spiritual reasons: the affirmation of ordinary life, and the modem conception of freedom, which indeed I want to endorse under som e versio n, but cannot under this one. The reason is that this version is deeply confuse d. It reads the affirmation of life and freedom as involving a repudia tion of qualitative distinctions, a rejection of constitutive goods as such, while these are themselves reflections of qualitativ e distinctions and presuppose some conception of qualitative goods.

• From Sin: The Early History of an Idea (2012)

  God works redemption through the Son, his Logos, the mediator between himself and creation, between himself and history. The Word’s entry into human time with the incarnation effected a discrete moment, a turning point in the story of universal salvation. The incidents in Jesus’ life on earth conformed to the ancient prophecies, thus revealing to the nations the divine authority of the Jewish scriptures. In consequence, these scriptures “have prevailed over the elect taken from among the nations. . . . For before the advent of Christ, it was not at all possible to bring forward clear proofs of the divine inspiration of the old scriptures. But the advent of Jesus led . . . to the clear conviction that they were composed with the aid of heavenly grace” (IV. i, 6). Christ through his incarnation revealed scripture itself as a medium of divine redemption, the charter of the church. But if the Bible, with Jesus’ advent, has been so clearly revealed to be God’s word, why then do so many fail to interpret it correctly? Why is the (true) church not universally acknowledged? The Jews reject Christian claims because the prophecies of the messianic age went unfulfilled. (In Jesus’ lifetime, Origen readily concedes, no leopards lay down next to lambs, no lions ate straw like oxen; IV. ii, 1.) The biblical text is full of references to God as labile or angry or jealous: he changes his mind about Saul (1 Sam 15.11), he “makes peace and creates evil” (Isa 45.7), he sends evils upon Jerusalem (Mic 1.12), and there are “ten thousand other passages like these.” As a result, some readers think that the text refers only to the god of the Jews, the Creator, and “since the Creator [in their reading] is imperfect and not good, they think that the Savior came here to proclaim a more perfect god who they say is not the Creator, and about whom they entertain diverse opinions” (IV. ii, 1; Origen has Valentinians and Marcionites in mind). Finally, the “simple” believers within Origen’s own church, while rightly thinking “that there is none greater than the Creator . . . believe such things of him as would not be believed of the most savage and unjust of men” (IV. ii, 1).

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  This difficulty takes on a specific dimension when approached from a psychoanalytic perspective. In my efforts to understand the opacity of the “I” in language, I have turned increasingly to psychoanalysis since the publication of Gender Trouble. The usual effort to polarize the theory of the psyche from the theory of power seems to me to be counterproductive, for part of what is so oppressive about social forms of gender is the psychic difficulties they produce. I sought to consider the ways in which Foucault and psychoanalysis might be thought together in The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford, 1997). I have also made use of psychoanalysis to curb the occasional voluntarism of my view of performativity without thereby undermining a more general theory of agency. Gender Trouble sometimes reads as if gender is simply a self-invention or that the psychic meaning of a gendered presentation might be read directly off its surface. Both of those postulates have had to be refined over time. Moreover, my theory sometimes waffles between understanding performativity as linguistic and casting it as theatrical. I have come to think that the two are invariably related, chiasmically so, and that a reconsideration of the speech act as an instance of power invariably draws attention to both its theatrical and linguistic dimensions. In Excitable Speech, I sought to show that the speech act is at once performed (and thus theatrical, presented to an audience, subject to interpretation), and linguistic, inducing a set of effects through its implied relation to linguistic conventions. If one wonders how a linguistic theory of the speech act relates to bodily gestures, one need only consider that speech itself is a bodily act with specific linguistic consequences. Thus speech belongs exclusively neither to corporeal presentation nor to language, and its status as word and deed is necessarily ambiguous. This ambiguity has consequences for the practice of coming out, for the insurrectionary power of the speech act, for language as a condition of both bodily seduction and the threat of injury.

• From Between Us

  When I learned English, I never suspected that anger was different from the Dutch boos. I just used them interchangeably; I attached my old experiences to the new word. I now know (from research) that these words are different, if only somewhat. Anger words in English (e.g., “angry”) are more closely associated with aggression (e.g., “yell,” “argue,” “hit”) than anger words in Dutch (e.g., boos, kwaad). In turn, Dutch anger words have a stronger association with distancing yourself from the situation (e.g., “leave,” “ignore,” “forget”) than English anger words. This may be so because the angry and boos episodes in the respective cultures are different. It is not until you experience a lot of those episodes that you come to learn the “emotion” in the new culture. By merely including emotion concepts that were similar on the dimensions of valence and goals, and by exclusively focusing on these dimensions, our research with emotion profiles steered clear from the way immigrant individuals learn new emotion concepts. However, in some cases, linguistic equivalents in Turkish and (Belgian) Dutch were different, even with respect to the two basic dimensions of meaning we considered. The Turkish words for “resigned” and “embarrassed” were positive, but the Belgian Dutch words were negative; the Turkish word for “jealousy” was relationship-protecting, but its Belgian Dutch equivalent was protective of personal goals. For a Turkish immigrant, there may be a point where they do not only learn Dutch words, but also learn the associated meanings. “Resigned” will become an emotion that marks the lack of personal control, rather than accepting one’s place in the world. “Embarrassment” will become an emotion that underlines the dependence on others’ judgment, rather than the awareness of one’s modest social position. And “jealousy” will become selfish, rather than a justified response to threats to the relationship. These concepts take on new meaning, because the social realities they reflect are different. Ironically, it may be the difficulty of recognizing that linguistic equivalents do not refer to the same “emotions” that clouds our understanding of the emotions of a person from another culture. Having translations available, even imperfect ones, may seduce us to think that deep inside people from other cultures have the “same emotions.” It is this same difficulty that may account for the reluctance of many scientists to recognize cultural differences in emotions. The Tango and the Waltz

• From What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (2013)

  Chivers was haunted in a similar way. She saw the culture’s relentless sculpting of women’s sexuality, but her mission was always to look past that, to seek and examine what lay beyond society’s reach, and this put her into a wrenching confrontation with rape. She knew about emerging results from a close colleague’s experiment: genital blood flow spiked when women listened to rape scenes in a lab. (An experiment of her own demonstrated, as well, that situations of fear or euphoric excitement triggered no vaginal pulsing if sex wasn’t involved. In one comparison, she played videos of a woman being chased up a flight of stairs by a rapist or by a rabid dog. Only the sexual scene flooded the genitals.) She dwelled on studies of victims that documented not only lubrication but sometimes orgasm during sexual assault. And she remembered—from her postdoctoral program in Toronto, when she had done work as a therapist—rape survivors who’d confided their own arousal, their own climaxes, to her. How to understand this? How to comprehend this harrowing evidence? Was something deeply scripted, something intrinsic, at work? Chivers felt that it was. And she helped to develop a reassuring theory: that prehistoric women had been constantly subject to sexual attack, and that the ability to lubricate automatically in reaction to all sorts of sexual cues evolved genetically as a protection against vaginal tearing, against infection, against the infertility or death that might follow. Genital arousal might not represent desire, she argued, but might, rather, be part of a purely reflexive, erotically neutral system, a system that was somehow intertwined with but separate from the wiring of women’s libidos. And the instances of orgasm might reflect nothing more than friction. Yet the theory of separate systems was elaborate, precarious. It defied more straightforward thinking: that being wet meant being turned on, that there wasn’t much that was neutral about it, just as was true for men and being hard. Gradually Chivers settled on what had perhaps, she told me, been obvious all along, that it was possible to be stirred by all sorts of things one didn’t, in fact, want. By sex featuring bonobos, by sex featuring assault. “I walk a fine line, politically and personally, talking frankly” about rape, she said. “I would never, never want to deliver the message to anyone that they have the right to take away a woman’s autonomy over her own body. Arousal is not consent.”

• From Sex Matters: How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love, and Common Sense (2018)

  Others—and they are the majority—have responded with a sleight of hand. Perhaps that’s too gentle. More accurately, they remain in denial of reality. They now grant that “male and female,” “men and women,” “masculinity and femininity” are true things, but their way of wiggling out of the clear lessons of brain science and other disciplines has been to invent a novel concept: gender identity. At one time, gender was a grammatical term with no biological definition and little relevance for English speakers. Its introduction into the study of human sexuality has generated confusion—which, I suspect, was not accidental. If one’s gender identity is distinct from one’s sex, which in turn is separate from one’s sexual orientation, then the concept of “normal” becomes lost in a fog of infinite permutations. Not only that, but because “gender identity” is totally subjective (based upon how one feels, not on one’s clear biology), it becomes possible to smuggle back into our understanding of sexuality the discredited idea that “male” and “female” are entirely socially constructed. Please note that this entails a complete contradiction of earlier orthodoxies. The idea that a not insignificant number of human beings have the bodies of one sex but the minds of the other sex requires admitting that the brains of males and females are indeed different. It also leads gender theorists into territory they previously disdained. Only yesterday, they denied that the sexes behaved in identifiable ways due to their biology. Now they grab stereotypes with both fists. Caitlyn Jenner proves his “femininity” by posing in a bathing suit for the cover of a magazine, as if flaunting one’s body is what it means to be female. Parents of little boys who like to play with dolls or of girls who like to climb trees rush to doctors to determine whether their children might be transgender. The American Psychological Association outlines the new thinking: “Sex is assigned at birth, refers to one’s biological status as either male or female, and is associated primarily with physical attributes such as chromosomes, hormone prevalence, and external and internal anatomy. Gender refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviors, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for boys and men or girls and women. These influence the ways that people act, interact, and feel about themselves. While aspects of biological sex are similar across different cultures, aspects of gender may differ.”59 The APA, sensitive to social fashion, is reflecting the gender theory popularized by feminists such as Ann Oakley, Suzanne Kessler, and Wendy McKenna. The latter two collaborated on Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach (1978), which argues that “gender is a social construction, that a world of two ‘sexes’ is a result of the socially-shared, taken-for-granted methods that members use to construct reality.”60 Gayle Rubin says she looks forward to an androgynous society in which “obligatory sexualities and sex roles” are swept away and “one’s sexual anatomy is irrelevant to who one is, what one does, and with whom one makes love.”61

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  Other concerns have emerged over this text in the last decade, and I have sought to answer them through various publications. On the status of the materiality of the body, I have offered a reconsideration and revision of my views in Bodies that Matter. On the question of the necessity of the category of “women” for feminist analysis, I have revised and expanded my views in “Contingent Foundations” to be found in the volume I coedited with Joan W. Scott, Feminists Theorize the Political (Routledge, 1993) and in the collectively authored Feminist Contentions (Routledge, 1995). I do not believe that poststructuralism entails the death of autobiographical writing, but it does draw attention to the difficulty of the “I” to express itself through the language that is available to it. For this “I” that you read is in part a consequence of the grammar that governs the availability of persons in language. I am not outside the language that structures me, but neither am I determined by the language that makes this “I” possible. This is the bind of self-expression, as I understand it. What it means is that you never receive me apart from the grammar that establishes my availability to you. If I treat that grammar as pellucid, then I fail to call attention precisely to that sphere of language that establishes and disestablishes intelligibility, and that would be precisely to thwart my own project as I have described it to you here. I am not trying to be difficult, but only to draw attention to a difficulty without which no “I” can appear.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  primarily to the gentile or diaspora mission. Luke, in the Acts, does not tell us what rights or duties or privileges were enjoyed by ‘the twelve’ or by ‘the apostles’. Indeed, when he gets to Paul’s work he forgets all about them, and thenceforth refers to him as ‘the apostle’. Only with Peter can we trace any activity; with John it is barely possible, though we can assume it since he was martyred. And it is quite impossible with the rest. James, Jesus’s brother, is an identifiable personality, indeed an important one. But he is not an ‘apostle’, nor one of ‘the twelve’. It is thus misleading to speak of an ‘apostolic age’, and equally misleading to speak of a primitive pentecostal Church and faith. The last point is important, because it implies Jesus left a norm, in terms of doctrine, message, and organization, from which the Church subsequently departed. There was never a norm. Jesus held his following together because he was, in effect, its only spokesman. After Pentecost, there were many; a Babel of voices. If the famous Petrine text in Matthew is genuine and means what it is alleged to mean, Peter was a very unsteady rock on which to found a Church. He did not exercise powers of leadership and seems to have allowed himself to be dispossessed by James and other members of Jesus’s family, who had played no part in the original mission. Finally, Peter went on foreign mission and left the Jerusalem circle altogether. The impression we get is that the Jerusalem Church was unstable, and had a tendency to drift back into Judaism completely. Indeed, it was not really a separate Church at all, but part of the Jewish cult. It had no sacrifices of its own, no holy places and times, no priests. It met for meals, like the Essene groups, and had readings, preaching, prayers and hymns; its ecclesiastical personality was expressed solely in verbal terms. Thus, we are told, it attracted a good many people. Many of them must have regarded it as little more than a pious and humble Jewish sect, keen on charity, sharing goods, revering an unjustly treated leader, and with an apocalyptic message. This view was also shared by some in authority. A number of priests became members. So did some of the Pharisees. How did this participation square with the execution of Jesus? That, it was now admitted in some quarters, had been a mistake; just as, later, the execution of James in 62 would be denounced subsequently as a blunder by one man acting ultra vires. Of course, there were Jewish establishment elements who were opposed to the Jesus movement all along, and attacked it whenever opportunity offered, as they attacked other religious ‘troublemakers’. But with the penetration of the Jerusalem circle by priests and scribes, there were always

• From What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (2013)

  Many of Fedoroff’s patients were convicted criminals, but he told me about a case that wasn’t criminal at all. A heterosexual couple had sought him out; the woman could no longer climax, not with her partner. She’d taken to having sex with a series of men in the same night, to watching videos of women having sex with animals, to making videos of herself masturbating—these sent her toward orgasm. Climactic sex with her partner seemed a hopeless cause “until,” Fedoroff wrote in a journal article, “it was discovered that she consumed large amounts of L-tryptophan, available in health food stores, to help her sleep. This substance is metabolized into serotonin, which is known to cause difficulty reaching orgasm. She was advised to discontinue taking L-tryptophan. Soon afterward, her ability to reach orgasm through intercourse with her partner returned, and with it, her paraphilic interest in group sex, exhibitionism, and zoophilia disappeared.” According to Fedoroff’s theory, fantasies of sexual assault might well serve, for some non-paraphilic women, as a way to unstick the switch; they might supply an emotional emergency and enable orgasm. But for Meana, rape fantasies were rooted in the narcissism that was imbedded in the female sex drive. As we talked, she narrowed her ideas into an emblematic scene: a woman pinned and ravished against an alley wall. Here, in her vision, was an ultimate symbol of female lust. The ravager, overcome by craving for this particular woman, cannot restrain himself; he tears through all codes, through all laws and conventions, to seize her, and she—feeling herself to be the unique object of his unendurable need—is overcome herself. Right away, she regretted what she’d described, the alley image she’d called symbolic. She hadn’t used the word “rape,” but the scene evoked it. “I hate the term ‘rape fantasies,’ ” she said quickly. The phrase was paradoxical, she stressed; it had no meaning. “In fantasy we control the stimuli. In rape we have no control.” The two ideas couldn’t coexist. “They’re really fantasies of submission,” she continued. She elaborated on the pleasure of being wanted so much that the aggressor is willing to overpower, to take. “But ‘aggression,’ ‘dominance,’ ” she sifted through the terms that came to her as she tried to express the wish. “I have to find better words. ‘Submission’ isn’t even a good word.” It didn’t reflect what women were imagining as Meana’s scene culminated: their willing acquiescence.

• From Educated (2018)

  There was no waiting, it insists. The chopper was called right away. I’d be lying if I said these details are unimportant, that the “big picture” is the same no matter which version you believe. These details matter. Either my father sent Luke down the mountain alone, or he did not; either he left Shawn in the sun with a serious head injury, or he did not. A different father, a different man, is born from those details. I don’t know which account of Shawn’s fall to believe. More remarkably, I don’t know which account of Luke’s burn to believe, and I was there. I can return to that moment. Luke is on the grass. I look around me. There is no one else, no shadow of my father, not even the idea of him pushing in on the periphery of my memory. He is not there. But in Luke’s memory he is there, laying him gently in the bathtub, administering a homeopathic for shock. What I take from this is a correction, not to my memory but to my understanding. We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell. This is especially true in families. When one of my brothers first read my account of Shawn’s fall, he wrote to me: “I can’t imagine Dad calling 911. Shawn would have died first.” But maybe not. Maybe, after hearing his son’s skull crack, our father was not the man we thought he would be, and assumed he had been for years after. I have always known that my father loves his children and powerfully; I have always believed that his hatred of doctors was more powerful. But maybe not. Maybe, in that moment, a moment of real crisis, his love subdued his fear and hatred both. Maybe the real tragedy is that he could live in our minds this way, in my brother’s and mine, because his response in other moments—thousands of smaller dramas and lesser crises—had led us to see him in that role. To believe that should we fall, he would not intervene. We would die first. We are all more complicated than the roles we are assigned in stories. Nothing has revealed that truth to me more than writing this memoir—trying to pin down the people I love on paper, to capture the whole meaning of them in a few words, which is of course impossible. This is the best I can do: to tell that other story next to the one I remember. Of a summer day, a fire, the scent of charred flesh, and a father helping his son down the mountain. Further ReadingSome readers of this book may also find themselves struggling to think through difficult family or personal situations. If that is you, below is a list of books, poems, and lectures that helped me.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 4 (300 – 1300, Rome) (2009)

  it is notable for its absence from his spiritual writings, but they develop an Evagrian theme of ‘purity of heart’ as the goal of monastic endeavour. Unlike another favourite term of Evagrius, ‘passionlessness’ or ‘serenity’, apatheia, which quickly aroused hostile criticism from Jerome among others, this was a safely biblical phrase, but it is clear from Cassian’s writings that the aim of purifying the heart, like the aim of stripping out the passions from human consciousness, was to lead on to a union with the glorified, resurrected Christ. The vehicle for this was a life of unceasing prayer and contemplation.68 Since Cassian’s teaching and example inspired enthusiasm among the growing monastic communities of Gaul, the inheritance from Origen (not for the last time) provoked a confrontation with the theology of that great Westerner whose call to serve his Church had led him to turn away from monastic life: Augustine. The issue was the extreme version of predestination which had appeared in Augustine’s writings in the later phases of his conflict with Pelagius. It is doubtful whether Cassian and Augustine would have differed much in their everyday practice of an austere Christian life, but Augustine’s view of grace offended Cassian’s theology of salvation, grounded as it was in the rival tradition of Origen and Evagrius. Cassian, like Pelagius, wanted to give human beings a sense of responsibility for their progress towards God, and Augustine’s picture of humans stranded helplessly in their ‘lump of lostness’ threatened this possibility.69 He penned some fairly open and pointed criticisms of Augustine’s assertions; he found a sympathetic audience among the monks of communities newly founded in south-eastern Gaul, for whom Cassian was a major inspiration and in many respects a founding father, and who have often been given a label intended to discredit their theology, ‘Semi-Pelagians’. Augustine did have his admirers in Gaul: one monk, Prosper of Aquitaine, alerted the Bishop of Hippo to the controversy, and Augustine replied to his critics with two of his most savage treatises spelling out the logic of predestination. For many among the Gaulish monks, such statements transcended the bounds of acceptability.70 In particular, Vincent, a monk on the island of Lérins (Ile-Saint Honorat), admired much of Augustine’s writings where he dealt with the Trinity and Christ’s incarnation, but he also felt that on the subject of grace both Augustine and Prosper had gone beyond the bounds of doctrine as understood in the universal Church. He gave a definition of how doctrine should be judged properly Catholic or universal. It was what had been believed everywhere in the Church, always and by everyone (‘quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est’).71 The formula has become a favourite of Catholic Christians, although the story of Christianity so far should give us a fair indication that, if applied with historical knowledge, it would leave a rather skeleton faith.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Every time he returns to A., from which place business often calls him, he seems to himself as if entering a strange city. He views the monuments, houses, and streets with the same surprise as if he saw them for tile first time. Gradually, however, his memory returns, and he finds himself at home again. When asked to describe the principal public place of the town, he answered, "I know that it is there, but it is impossible to imagine it, and I can tell you nothing about it." He has often drawn the port of A. To-day he vainly tries to trace its principal outlines. Asked to draw a minaret, lie reflects, says it is a square tower, and draws, rudely, four lines, one for ground, one for top, and two for sides. Asked to draw an arcade, he says, " I remember that it contains semi-circular arches, and that two of them meeting at an angle make a vault, but how it looks I am absolutely unable to imagine." The profile of a man which he drew by request was as if drawn by a little child; and yet he confessed that he had been helped to draw it by looking at the bystanders. Similarly lie drew a shapeless scribble for a tree. He can no more remember his wife's and children's faces than he can remember the port of A. Even after being with them some time they seem unusual to him. He forgets his own face, and once spoke to his image in a mirror, taking it for a stranger. He complains of his loss of feeling for colors. "My wife has black hair, this I know; but I can no more recall its color than I can her person and features." This visual amnesia extends to dating objects from his childhood's years—paternal mansion, etc., forgotten.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  So much for the transitive states. But there are other unnamed states or qualities of states that are just as important and just as cognitive as they, and just as much unrecognized by the traditional sensationalist and intellectualist philosophies of mind. The first fails to find them at all, the second finds their cognitive function , but denies that anything in the way of feeling has a share in bringing it about. Examples will make clear what these inarticulate psychoses, due to waxing and waning excitements of the brain, are like.[230] Suppose three successive persons say to us: 'Wait!' 'Hark!' 'Look!' Our consciousness is thrown into three quite different attitudes of expectancy, although no definite object is before it in any one of the three cases. Leaving out different actual bodily attitudes, and leaving out the reverberating images of the three words, which are of course diverse, probably no one will deny the existence of a residual conscious affection, a sense of the direction from which an impression is about to come, although no positive impression is yet there. Meanwhile we have no names for the psychoses in question but the names hark, look, and wait. Suppose we try to recall a forgotten name. The state of our consciousness is peculiar. There is a gap therein; but no mere gap. It is a gap that is intensely active. A sort of wraith of the name is in it, beckoning us in a given direction, making us at moments tingle with the sense of our closeness, and then letting us sink back without the longed-for term. If wrong names are proposed to us, this singularly definite gap acts immediately so as to negate them. They do not fit into its mould. And the gap of one word does not feel like the gap of another, all empty of content as both might seem necessarily to be when described as gaps. When I vainly try to recall the name of Spalding, my consciousness is far removed from what it is when I vainly try to recall the name of Bowles. Here some ingenious persons will say: "How can the two consciousnesses be different when the terms which might make them different are not there? All that is there, so long as the effort to recall is vain, is the bare effort itself. How should that differ in the two cases? You are making it seem to differ by prematurely filling it out with the different names, although these, by the hypothesis, have not yet come. Stick to the two efforts as they are, without naming them after facts not yet existent, and you'll be quite unable to designate any point in which they differ," Designate, truly enough. We can only designate the difference by borrowing the names of objects not yet in the mind.

• From On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy (1961)

  C: Uh, I caught myself thinking that during these sessions, uh, I’ve been sort of singing a song. Now that sounds vague and uh—not actually singing—sort of a song without any music. Probably a kind of poem coming out. And I like the idea, I mean it’s just sort of come to me without anything built out of, of anything. And in—following that, it came, it came this other kind of feeling. Well, I found myself sort of asking myself, is that the shape that cases take? Is it possible that I am just verbalizing and, at times kind of become intoxicated with my own verbalizations? And then uh, following this, came, well, am I just taking up your time? And then a doubt, a doubt. Then something else occurred to me. Uh, from whence it came, I don’t know, no actual logical kind of sequence to the thinking. The thought struck me: We’re doing bits, uh, we’re not overwhelmed or doubtful, or show concern or, or any great interest when, when blind people learn to read with their fingers, Braille. I don’t know—it may be just sort of, it’s all mixed up. It may be that’s something that I’m experiencing now. T: Let’s see if I can get some of that, that sequence of feelings. First, sort of as though you’re, and I gather that first one is a fairly positive feeling, as though maybe you’re kind of creating a poem here—a song without music somehow but something that might be quite creative, and then the, the feeling of a lot of skepticism about that. “Maybe I’m just saying words, just being carried off by words that I, that I speak, and maybe it’s all a lot of baloney, really.” And then a feeling that perhaps you’re almost learning a new type of experiencing which would be just as radically new as for a blind person to try to make sense out of what he feels with his fingertips. C: M-hm. M-hm. (Pause) . . . And I sometimes think to myself, well, maybe we could go into this particular incident or that particular incident. And then somehow when I come here, there is, that doesn’t hold true, it’s, it seems false. And then there just seems to be this flow of words which somehow aren’t forced and then occasionally this doubt creeps in. Well, it sort of takes form of a, maybe you’re just making music. . . .