On Violence and On Violence Against Women

by Jacqueline Rose

  Against this false and futile knowing, Arendt places, even more strikingly in this last meditation, a thinking ego which moves among ‘invisible’ essences, that is strictly speaking ‘nowhere’, ‘homeless in an emphatic sense’, which led, she suggests, to the early rise of ‘cosmpolitanism’ amongst philosophers.33 Way ahead of her time, Arendt calls up her answer to the violence of the times in the terms – homeless, nowhere, cosmopolitan – which will be so central to the literary and cultural theory that will follow, although rarely acknowledge, her. To which we can add today the indeterminate, flux-ridden, migratory nature of our world to which modern states react with such merciless violence. Arendt seizes her terms from the history of the refugee and the exile, the stateless, whose predicament had been her own and which she did so much to articulate and dignify.34 True thought, then, is a form of memory which exerts no dominion, ousts no one from their own space, because it remembers that it is or once was radically homeless. We could not be further from the despotic ruler of the Athenian household who dispenses violence to his women and slaves because it is in the remit of his own power, or rather because it is the only way he can struggle to exert control over the debasing, corporal necessities of life. Nor from the modern-day state that turns to violence in order to shore up a power that has lost all legitimacy. Arendt’s life of the mind does not, then, point to some realm of abstract contemplation – her plea for thought is the child of its time.

  Perhaps then we should not be surprised, although I admit that I was, to find Arendt slowly inching her way to the world of the dream – the ‘royal road to the unconscious’, as Freud called it (till the end of his life, he saw The Interpretation of Dreams as his most important work). Whatever the achievements of the thinking ego, it will, Arendt writes, never be able to ‘convince itself that anything actually exists and that life, human life, is more than a dream’.35 To illustrate this suspicion – among the most characteristic of Asian philosophy – she then selects the Taoist story of Chuang Tzu, who dreamt he was a butterfly only to wake not to the unerring sureness of who he really was, but to the realisation that perhaps he was a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Tzu (the same example is used by Jacques Lacan to evoke the vanishing of the human subject in relation to the unconscious).36 But Arendt being Arendt does not of course leave it there. The dream returns – in the conclusion to The Life of the Mind – as the great equaliser in the shape of the king who dreams he is an artisan (since his quotient of life in that moment is no different from the poor artisan who dreams he is king). Moreover, she writes, ‘since “one frequently dreams that he is dreaming,”’ (she is citing Pascal’s critique of Descartes), ‘nothing can guarantee that what we call our life is not wholly a dream from which we shall awaken in death.’37 The personal resonance of such moments in this, her last, uncompleted, book are surely striking. Arendt is exploring and relinquishing her own powers.

  Something is creeping back into Arendt’s writing. Remember the Greek citizen who mingled freely in the polis on condition of ruling with a rod of iron in his home. Remember too that, if women had to be subdued, it was because women were required to subdue in turn, and on his behalf, the messy, bodily frailties of life, the realm of birth and death that ‘harbors the things hidden from human eyes and impenetrable to human knowledge’. What seems, therefore, to be happening here is that this banished, hidden, despised domain of the Graeco-Roman dispensation is, in this final work, taking vengeance on the murderous technocratic know-how of the modern world, as slowly but surely it beats a path back into modernity as its only hope. I think we are talking about the return of the repressed. The options are stark. Violence or the dark, shadowy innermost recesses of the hearth and heart where all knowing comes to grief. Violence or the world of the dream.

  Cue Melanie Klein. But before leaving Arendt for Klein, there is a crucial link to be made to Rosa Luxemburg, for whom Arendt’s enthusiasm knew no limits. There is the deepest and fully acknowledged debt. In all the works by Arendt discussed so far, spontaneity – Luxemburg’s central concept and another humble reminder of the unpredictable reality of the world – is a refrain.38 But there is one moment when Arendt calls on Luxemburg which is of particular value for what I am trying to evoke here. She is talking about love. In its highest manifestation, Arendt writes, when the willing ego pronounces ‘Amo: Volo ut sis’, what it means is ‘I love you; I want you to be.’ Not, she goes on, ‘I want to have you’, or ‘I want to rule you.’39 Love without tyranny. Compare this free-wheeling, uncontrolling version of love with Rosa Luxemburg. ‘Blessed are those without passion,’ she wrote to her last lover, Hans Diefenbach – a relationship conducted by correspondence from prison – ‘if that means they would never claw like a panther at the happiness and freedom of others.’ Then she qualifies: ‘That has nothing to do with passion […] I possess enough of it to set a prairie on fire, and still hold sacred the freedom and the simple wishes of other people.’40 True passion stakes no claim. Like democracy, it does not own, control or master the other. It lets the other be. The line from the personal to the political – famous feminist mantra – could not be more clear, provided we recognise that it can be crossed in both directions. With Luxemburg, you barely have to scratch the surface. We are talking about sexual politics.

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  Whenever I address the topic of violence against women, I am always asked about boys. If so many of them, as men, turn out to be so ghastly, where does it all begin? Psychoanalysis, notably in the writings of pioneering psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, might, I suggest, cast some light on this question. In the middle of the Second World War, Klein finds herself with an unexpected opportunity: to analyse a ten-year-old boy known as Richard over what they both know in advance will be the restricted time-frame of four months. She takes notes after every session – several verbatim – and then collects them into one of the first full-length accounts of what her editor Elliott Jaques describes in his foreword to the published volume as a ‘total analysis’.41 The fact that this is only made possible by the conditions of the war – evacuation from London – a war which will colour the analysis at every turn, is seen not as obstacle, but as the core of the process. Richard’s distress is multi-layered and over-determined. This in itself demonstrates the futility of trying to locate childhood anxiety either inside the mind or outside in the world (as if one precluded the other). He is an avid follower of the war – reads three newspapers a day, listens to all the news on the wireless, and threatens suicide at the fall of Crete if Britain should be defeated. But his fear of Hitler is overlaid – driven, perhaps, we do not have to decide which comes first – certainly matched, by his fear of his father. The two are inseparable. And what he fears most from his father is what he is doing, or capable of doing, to his mother.

  ‘Just now he had spoken of the terrible things the Austrian Hitler did to the Austrians. By this he meant that Hitler was in a way ill-treating his own people, including Mrs K., just as the bad Daddy would ill-treat Mummy.’ Or again: ‘Mrs K. interpreted R’s desire for peace and order in the family, his giving way to Daddy’s and [his brother] Paul’s authority, as a means of restraining his jealousy and hatred. This meant there would be no Hitler-Daddy, and Mummy would not be turned into the “pig-sty” Mummy, for she would not be injured and bombed by the bad father.’ Hitler-Daddy. Klein’s interpretations are famously blunt, some would say coercive. But this very bluntness, I suggest, has served to obscure something that is also staring us in the face. ‘Ill-treat’, ‘injure’, ‘bomb’; Mummy as a ‘pig-sty’ for the garbage of the world and of the heart. Like Arendt, Klein is not best renowned as a feminist thinker. Nonetheless, when she looks into Richard’s fantasy world, what she sees there – what she urges him to see – is a scene of domestic violence. At one point Richard asks obsessively and solicitously about the number of Klein’s other, especially child, patients. Interpreting this as the rivalry and fear of displacement it clearly is, she then also suggests that perhaps he wishes her to
have child patients in the same way as he wanted Mummy to have babies, because ‘they were less dangerous than men.’42

  It is central to one radical feminist argument that the worlds of war and peace are no different. For MacKinnon, the 1990s assault on Bosnian women and their resistance to it challenges ‘the lines between genocide and war and, ultimately, between war and peace’.43 The significance of 9/11, which she describes as an ‘exemplary day of male violence’, is that the number of people killed in the twin towers and Pentagon on that day was almost identical to the number of women murdered by men, mostly their male partners, in the US over the average year. MacKinnon is rightly challenging the indifference of national and international law towards violence against women compared with the military response to the attacks of 9/11. Although when she asks, ‘Do these women not count as casualties in some war? Will the Marines not land for them?’44 I take my leave. To my mind the last thing feminists should be calling for is the US forces landing or striking anywhere in the world any more than they do, mostly disastrously, already.

  But what is never discussed in this argument, which assumes a perfect fit or continuity between manhood and a violence of which it becomes the supreme and deadly fulfilment, is the terrain in which men, and before them boys, do psychic battle. Crucially, in Klein’s account, that terrain is not free of violence. It is drenched in it. She is the arch-theorist of psychic violence, more specifically of matricide, as Julia Kristeva points out in her study of Klein.45 In the case of Richard, the line between war and peace is indeed thin to the point of breaking. To differentiate them is his most urgent task. It is the work to be done. Richard’s challenge, as for many boys, is to resist the pull of the most deadly masculine identifications the world has on offer. Were that not an available option for him, indeed for men more generally, then feminism would surely be on a hiding to nothing; it would be on a losing battle – for ever. If the child is father to the man, then, Melanie Klein’s life’s work suggests, what that means is always, urgently and painfully, up for grabs. There is always still everything to play for.

  If there is a profound link here for me to the ideas of Hannah Arendt, it comes through the category of thought. Richard is a boy who ‘knows his blows’, a slip of the tongue for ‘blows his nose’ which he made early in the analysis and which is as fateful as it is wondrous (it points the way to the reckoning with violence which will be at its core). Goebbels and Ribbentrop become especially intense objects of hatred when they dare to say that Britain was the aggressor in the war. In this flagrant act of projection, they are way behind Richard himself since the whole of his analysis is an inner negotiation with the violence which he feels himself capable of. He knows his blows. Remember that lying was the target of some of Arendt’s fiercest political critique (‘Lying in Politics’, which gave rise to her idea of impotent bigness, was the title of her 1972 indictment of the Vietnam war). Lying is, as we know, the collateral damage of warfare, whose first casualty is truth. Klein is providing the psychic backdrop to Arendt’s protest against the corruption and deceptions of political life, which, certainly in the US and UK, are if anything more flagrant today. In Richard’s narrative, lying is a form of self-harm, an act of blinding which then becomes the trigger for increasing violence against the other. When Klein suggests that Richard’s moral outrage at Ribbentrop’s lies might be due to the fact that he too is capable of aggression, I read her as saying that the one who deceives himself on such matters becomes his own – although by no means only his own – worst enemy. Lying drives aggression in deeper, leaving it no outlet finally other than the destruction of everything that litters its path (Hitler-Daddy assaulting pig-sty Mummy). When Klein offers this interpretation, Richard remains silent, ‘obviously thinking over the interpretation and then smiled.’ When she asks him why he smiled, ‘he answered that it was because he liked thinking.’ This does not mean that he mentally submits to her or lacks his own psychic freedom: ‘How’, he insists at one moment, ‘can you really know what I think?’46

  For psychoanalysis, thinking is not of course exactly thinking as it is most commonly understood. Returning to Arendt’s insistence on the Kantian difference between the ‘urge to know’ and the ‘need to think’, we could say that psychoanalysis pitches its tent firmly on the side of the latter. Unconscious thinking does not know its own ends. Epistemophilia, as the strongest impulse of the infant, was a term introduced by Klein into the psychoanalytic lexicon. We yearn to know (Sehnsucht or yearning was Rosa Luxemburg’s favourite word). Driven by sexual curiosity, the infant is pitched into a dark, shadowy world where she or he will struggle to find a place and which she or he cannot fully control, an ‘ocean of uncertainty’, as Arendt might say. Such control would be as murderous as it is phoney. It is the violent solution of the bad father who lashes out at the mother as a way of getting rid of what he cannot bear to countenance in himself.

  In this sense, Melanie Klein can be seen as the silent psychoanalytic partner of Hannah Arendt, and both of them together as partners in the investigation of crime. Klein is exploring the underbelly, giving flesh and blood to the ‘passions of the hearth’ outlawed from the polis by the Greek city-state. And for Klein, as for Arendt, what is at issue is once again what we might call impotent bigness. ‘Richard’s love was genuine,’ she comments, ‘when his predominant attitude was to protect me against the bad father, or when he himself felt persecuted by the internal father and expected protection from me’ – that is, when Richard refuses the invitation to identify with the violent father in his head. ‘He became artificial and insincere,’ she continues, ‘when he felt he possessed the powerful penis with which he could ally himself in a hostile and dangerous way against me.’47 Only a boy who relinquishes the fantasy of the powerful penis will stop himself from attacking the mother. Ceding his omnipotence at the very moment he is most compelled by it is the only path to a viable masculinity – calling the bluff on impotent bigness, as we might say. Certainly it is the only way that this young boy, on the verge of puberty, can behave towards his woman analyst like a gentleman. Violence against women is the boy’s deepest wish and worst fantasy. But if he knows this, can give it thought, then it becomes a fantasy he is less likely to act upon.

  If Klein is key to my understanding of violence, it is because she is sentient of just how high the stakes are, how treacherous the ground on which she moves. She is dealing with psychotic anxiety, which is far more disturbing than neurosis, and in which she believes all human subjects have their share. The greatest anxiety that afflicts the infant, boy or girl, is that he or she has destroyed the object; a fear which she distinguishes crucially from the anxiety that she or he might do so (which at least leaves open the possibility that you and the world might survive). On such finely graded psychic distinctions the health of her patients relies. Hitler-Daddy goes on killing because he has nothing left to lose. For Klein, to sidestep or skirt this perilous domain in the analytic encounter would, therefore, be a sop to, or complicit with, a world in denial (the lies of Ribbentrop). The implications for her practice – what made her and still I think makes her so controversial and vital – resides in this. It was also at the heart of her famous dispute with Anna Freud, who wanted to pitch the analyst on the side of her patients’ ego, of their most fervent wish to believe in their best self.48 In an extended footnote to the twenty-first session with Richard, she explains why she goes so far and why she believes it makes her patients better:

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  It is in fact striking that very painful interpretations – and I am particularly thinking of the interpretations referring to death and to dead internalised objects, which is a psychotic anxiety – could have the effect of reviving hope and making the patient feel more alive. My explanation for this would be that bringing a very deep anxiety nearer to consciousness, in itself produces relief. But I also believe that the very fact that the analysis gets into contact with deep-lying unconscious anxieties gives the patien
t a feeling of being understood and therefore revives hope. I have often met in adult patients the strong desire to have been analysed as a child. This was not only because of the obvious advantages of child analysis, but in retrospect the deep longing for having one’s unconscious understood had come to the fore. Very understanding and sympathetic parents – and that can also apply to other people – are in contact with the child’s unconscious, but there is still a difference between this and the understanding of the unconscious implied in psycho-analysis.49

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  In such moments, Klein is making a plea – one I would wish to endorse – for a more psychoanalytically attuned world.

  So, in what, then, might the renewal of hope consist (which must be the only question)? At the end of a treatment whose long-term effects Klein is not in a position to predict, Richard begins to feel compassion for his enemies. We are on the last page: ‘He no longer felt impelled to turn away from destroyed objects but could experience compassion for them […] Richard, who so strongly hated the enemies threatening Britain’s existence at that time, became capable of feeling compassion for the destroyed enemy.’50 This too is a political as much as a psychic point. Before we dismiss it as unrealistic or sentimental (or both), we might remember that had the Allies felt sympathy for, and been less punitive towards, a defeated Germany after the First World War, we might not have witnessed the Second.

  In an important essay on brotherhood and the law of war, Juliet Mitchell suggests there is an irreconcilable contradiction in how women are viewed in war.51 They are both the defeated and protected – in double jeopardy. Rape as a war crime would then belong at the opposite psychic pole to what Richard arrives at here. No compassion. Probably no recognition of what you have done. Certainly no place for your own dead objects inside your head. Instead the enemy you have defeated has to be destroyed and degraded over and over again. On this, for me, Klein’s bombed, damaged, pig-sty Mummy and Arendt’s thoughtlessness belong together. Klein was no social commentator, but she has described a world which repeatedly condemns itself to violence, and where women pay the price for the drive, shared by so many men of our time, towards a self-blinding repudiation of the life of the mind.