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Women Who Make a Fuss: The Unfaithful Daughters of Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf, to whom university admittance had been forbidden, watched the universities open their doors. Though she was happy that her sisters could study in university libraries, she cautioned women against joining the procession of educated men and being co-opted into protecting a “civilization” with values alien to women. Now, as Woolf’s disloyal (unfaithful) daughters, who have professional positions in Belgian universities, Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret, along with a collective of women scholars in Belgium and France, question their academic careers and reexamine the place of women and their role in thinking, both inside and outside the university. They urge women to heed Woolf’s cry—Think We Must—and to always make a fuss about injustice, cruelty, and arrogance.
166 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2014
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June 9, 2014http://www.full-stop.net/2014/04/17/r...
Women Who Make A Fuss – Isabelle Stengers & Vinciane Despret
by Helen Stuhr-Rommereim
[Univocal; 2014]
Tr. April Knutson
In the novel I Love Dick, Chris Kraus writes, “Who gets to speak and why . . . is the only question.” Over the years, this quote has become somewhat talismanic for women in certain literary spheres, serving, for example, as the subhead to Emily Gould’s blog Emily Magazine. The continuing resonance of Kraus’ assertion lies in the fact that it does not just ask us to crack open all of our discursive spaces to see how they might produce certain thoughts and modes of speech, but it also makes a stand for the importance of such a project. Then, in thinking about who is speaking and why, we start to consider how they speak.
What kinds of speech are privileged and how is this connected to the question of who gets to speak and why? A new little book called Women Who Make a Fuss (WWMAF), written by Belgian philosophers Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret and translated from the French by April Knutson, addresses this same question, but from a more explicitly academic perspective. They ask, “What are women doing to thought?” and connect this question to the position of women in the academy. They ask how the operation of academia in the context of economic forces might determine what kinds of ideas are produced, and how these determinations can be resisted.
They divide their inquiry into two discrete parts. Part one is composed of a series of co-written chapters clearly outlining Stengers’ and Despret’s starting point and overall argument. In part two a number of other female philosophers and scientists (the authorial “Collective”) respond to a letter sent out by Stengers and Despret. In this section, the women of the collective become both interlocutors and case studies — a multi-directional dynamic that fits the particular kind of situated thinking Stengers and Despret are interested in exploring. Like any good book on thought, the form serves in part to demonstrate the content. Their arguments are complex, but in the end their conclusion is simple: don’t be afraid to be fussy. “Women who make a fuss are not heroic figures,” write Stengers and Despret, “rather they are damned nuisances.” And that is not a bad thing.
WWMAF comes from a distinct philosophical perspective, and responds to a particular understanding of the consequences for academia — and human thought more generally — of our present socio-political condition. Stengers and Despret are both “philosophers of science,” which means that one of their primary interests is understanding and questioning the systems through which we establish knowledge. Stengers has written extensively on contemporary philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Gilbert Simondon, both notable for understanding objects, beings, and ideas as in a constant state of machinic flux, always “becoming” as a part of interconnected assemblages. Despret works in the fields of Ethnopsychology and Animal Studies — both of which she herself pioneered and helped to define — asking how the relationship between studier and studied informs conclusions drawn from scientific observation. Both are interested in thinking with the things they study.
Read the rest here: http://www.full-stop.net/2014/04/17/r...
Women Who Make A Fuss – Isabelle Stengers & Vinciane Despret
by Helen Stuhr-Rommereim
[Univocal; 2014]
Tr. April Knutson
In the novel I Love Dick, Chris Kraus writes, “Who gets to speak and why . . . is the only question.” Over the years, this quote has become somewhat talismanic for women in certain literary spheres, serving, for example, as the subhead to Emily Gould’s blog Emily Magazine. The continuing resonance of Kraus’ assertion lies in the fact that it does not just ask us to crack open all of our discursive spaces to see how they might produce certain thoughts and modes of speech, but it also makes a stand for the importance of such a project. Then, in thinking about who is speaking and why, we start to consider how they speak.
What kinds of speech are privileged and how is this connected to the question of who gets to speak and why? A new little book called Women Who Make a Fuss (WWMAF), written by Belgian philosophers Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret and translated from the French by April Knutson, addresses this same question, but from a more explicitly academic perspective. They ask, “What are women doing to thought?” and connect this question to the position of women in the academy. They ask how the operation of academia in the context of economic forces might determine what kinds of ideas are produced, and how these determinations can be resisted.
They divide their inquiry into two discrete parts. Part one is composed of a series of co-written chapters clearly outlining Stengers’ and Despret’s starting point and overall argument. In part two a number of other female philosophers and scientists (the authorial “Collective”) respond to a letter sent out by Stengers and Despret. In this section, the women of the collective become both interlocutors and case studies — a multi-directional dynamic that fits the particular kind of situated thinking Stengers and Despret are interested in exploring. Like any good book on thought, the form serves in part to demonstrate the content. Their arguments are complex, but in the end their conclusion is simple: don’t be afraid to be fussy. “Women who make a fuss are not heroic figures,” write Stengers and Despret, “rather they are damned nuisances.” And that is not a bad thing.
WWMAF comes from a distinct philosophical perspective, and responds to a particular understanding of the consequences for academia — and human thought more generally — of our present socio-political condition. Stengers and Despret are both “philosophers of science,” which means that one of their primary interests is understanding and questioning the systems through which we establish knowledge. Stengers has written extensively on contemporary philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Gilbert Simondon, both notable for understanding objects, beings, and ideas as in a constant state of machinic flux, always “becoming” as a part of interconnected assemblages. Despret works in the fields of Ethnopsychology and Animal Studies — both of which she herself pioneered and helped to define — asking how the relationship between studier and studied informs conclusions drawn from scientific observation. Both are interested in thinking with the things they study.
Read the rest here: http://www.full-stop.net/2014/04/17/r...
October 18, 2023
I think that the premise is good, and I have deeply loved the explanation on Woolf's famous declaration. I have, really. But at some point, things go kind of boring. Maybe it's just bad timing for me. To me, this is a potent statement for all academics, the need to make a fuss, to think and rethink, the alternatives to a university that has been surrendered to the capital. In that sense, as I'm not part of the academia, maybe I haven't felt that called to the issue. Anyway, there are some quotes I'd like to add:
The very strength of women who make a fuss is to not represent the True, rather to be witnesses for the possibility of other ways of doing what would perhaps be “better.” The fuss is not the heroic statement of a grand cause, in the name of which sacrifice would be de rigueur, it instead affirms the need to resist the stifling impotence created by the “no possibility to do otherwise, whether we want it or not,” which now reigns everywhere.The question of women making a fuss is addressed to all women and all men, in the same manner as the question of a habitable world: a world just a little better, not the world where Good, however it is defined, would have triumphed over evil.
The very strength of women who make a fuss is to not represent the True, rather to be witnesses for the possibility of other ways of doing what would perhaps be “better.” The fuss is not the heroic statement of a grand cause, in the name of which sacrifice would be de rigueur, it instead affirms the need to resist the stifling impotence created by the “no possibility to do otherwise, whether we want it or not,” which now reigns everywhere.The question of women making a fuss is addressed to all women and all men, in the same manner as the question of a habitable world: a world just a little better, not the world where Good, however it is defined, would have triumphed over evil.
April 29, 2022
Two prominent voices in contemporary philosophy put a letter, and an idea, to a collection of academics about how being a woman has affected their being in university. Inspired by Virginia Woolf's refusal to sign a statement supporting the Allied response in World War II, this contemporary letter is not a call to (or against) action, but more a searching for diversity of thought.
It is successful too. The second half of the book documents the responses, so varied and considered that they make fascinating reading. This is where the book really enthralls. The authors allow the responses their own space, and many of the academics eloquently pick apart the flaws in a male-dominated space, while some refuse to and choose critique and analysis that positions them within this system. As a fan of both Despret's and Stengers' other work, it was nice to see how both voices came through here (although Stengers' felt the stronger of the two). The epilogue clearly says that no definitive conclusion is reached, and that is true, but in this case the journey seems to be the important point, and in that journey are many varied perspectives well presented.
It is successful too. The second half of the book documents the responses, so varied and considered that they make fascinating reading. This is where the book really enthralls. The authors allow the responses their own space, and many of the academics eloquently pick apart the flaws in a male-dominated space, while some refuse to and choose critique and analysis that positions them within this system. As a fan of both Despret's and Stengers' other work, it was nice to see how both voices came through here (although Stengers' felt the stronger of the two). The epilogue clearly says that no definitive conclusion is reached, and that is true, but in this case the journey seems to be the important point, and in that journey are many varied perspectives well presented.
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