Alex Tarnava on bell hooks, Žižek, Evola, and the nature of love.
Vadim Gershteyn, PhD, MPH served as my editor for StressHacked and contributed writing to my upcoming book The Stone Wall. He joins me for this discussion.
VG: In referring to men’s role as providers and protectors, you state “We must understand who we are protecting” in the introduction to Section 3 of The Stone Wall (see the reading here); you follow this up with, “We must understand women.” In trying to do just this (i.e., understand women), you, in that Section, wrestle with two thinkers of sexual difference: Otto Weininger and Luce Irigaray. Weininger, as you put it, is a misogynist whose misogyny is unparalleled of anyone before him or since, and Irigaray is, as I would put it, a kind of loopy feminist who nonetheless has breathtaking things to say about the experiences of women on occasion.
I want to bring in another voice or two (or three). To start, bell hooks (she prefers to lower-case her name as e.e. cummings also does). In The Stone Wall, I lamented that we did not have enough time/space to engage with her work, so I intend to do so here. In All About Love, hooks makes the case that a) love is a verb, not a noun; b) love is a choice, not something compelled; and c) love is incompatible with abuse. I disagree with b) only (I will return to this shortly), not a) and c), which I think are sound. In the midst of this, hooks had the following to say on sexual difference:
Almost all the recent popular self-help writing by men on love, from works like Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus to John Welwood’s Love and Awakening, make use of feminist perspectives on gender roles. Ultimately, though, the authors remain wedded to belief systems, which suggest that there are basic inherent differences between women and men. In actuality, all the concrete proof indicates that while the perspectives of men and women often differ, these differences are learned characteristics, not innate, or “natural,” traits. If the notion that men and women were absolute opposites inhabiting totally different emotional universes were true, men would never have become the supreme authorities on love. Given gender stereotypes that assign to women the role of feelings and being emotional and to men the role of reason and non-emotion, “real men” would shy away from any talk of love.
An excellent point she makes in favor of this is that the majority of self-help books are written by men, but purchased by women. If men and women’s desires are “strangers to each other,” as Irigaray argues, why would women read men’s words to understand love and desire? But do they (women) really understand love and desire? And do men really understand women? To this, hooks states,
It is particularly distressing that so many recent books on love continue to insist that definitions of love are unnecessary and meaningless. Or worse, the authors suggest love should mean something different to men than it does to women—that the sexes should respect and adapt to our inability to communicate since we do not share the same language. This type of literature is popular because it does not demand a change in fixed ways of thinking about gender roles, culture, or love.
I disagree with hooks, pretty strongly in fact. I believe “respecting and adapting to our inability to communicate since we do not share the same language” is a critical task, per Irigaray, and it can be done. It is indeed a demand for a change to state this. As an aside, as I promised I’d come back to this, she again affirms that “one [does not] simply ‘fall[]’ in love without exercising will or choice.” I am reminded of how Slavoj Žižek defines love in his Less Than Nothing:
And the same goes for love—that is to say, what is it to find oneself passionately in love? Is it not a kind of permanent state of exception? All the proper balances of our daily life are disturbed, everything we do is colored by the underlying thought of “that.” The situation is properly “beyond Good and Evil”: we feel a weird indifference towards our moral obligations with regard to our parents, children, friends—even if we continue to meet them, we do so in a mechanical way, in a mode of “as if”; everything pales into insignificance compared to our passionate attachment. In this sense, falling in love is like the blinding light that hit Saul/Paul on the road to Damascus: a kind of religious suspension of the Ethical, to use Kierkegaard’s terms. An Absolute intervenes and derails the normal run of our affairs: it is not so much that the standard hierarchy of values is inverted, but, more radically, that another dimension enters the scene, a different level of being.
To close this off, I want to bring in yet another voice—another “loathsome” voice, in fact: Julius Evola. I do this only because this may be the only time Evola will ever be addressed in anything adjacent to a self-help context (besides the platitude, contained in his later work, of “Riding the Tiger”). In Metaphysics of Sex, Evola writes (emphasis mine),
If, from a metaphysical point of view, the male corresponds to the active and the female to the passive principle, such relationships are universally inverted in so-called natural sexuality. The man very seldom goes to the woman as a bearer of the pure principle of “being” or as an emanation of the power of the One but, as a rule, seems to “undergo” the magic of the woman. … A woman who shows her desire is actively passive, whereas man is passively active. The “actively passive” quality is the substance of woman’s fascination and is activity in a higher sense. Common parlance alludes to this in attributing the power of “attraction” to a woman, this attraction being the power of the magnet. In such a regard, woman is active and man is passive. … It is remarkable that within the strongly patriarchal social system of the Far East, there was a tradition that knew the concept of “acting without acting” (wei-wu-wei) and understood that “in her apparent passivity and inferior status the female is superior to the male.” Paradoxical though it may seem, it is always man who is “seduced” in the strict, etymological meaning of the word; his active enterprise is reduced to that of approaching a magnetic field, the force of which he will undergo as soon as he has come within its orbit. Woman always and decisively has the upper hand over any man who desires, that is, over mere masculine sexual need.
In my rejoinders in Section 3 of The Stone Wall, I quoted the Christian advice that “woman has the power behind the throne” in her relationship with a man, so I like where hooks is coming from—trying to heal the divide between men and women—but I (sadly) agree more with Evola that the divide is there for a reason. There is empirical evidence for this, contained in Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man, which shows that female members of any species are those who largely choose mates, certainly among mammals comparable to humans (and choosing who you want to be with gives you power). Evola has choice words for the kind of materialist viewpoint coming from Darwin, attesting, “Many organisms in both the vegetable and the animal realms reproduce asexually; the sexual fact occurs in the reproduction not of the organisms in general but of the higher organisms. Therefore ‘the meaning of sexual differentiation (and of sexual love) is to be sought not at all in the idea of the survival of the species and its multiplication, but only in the idea of the higher organism.’” According to him, there is a higher purpose to sex and desire besides the continuation of the species. Do you agree?
What is love or sexual desire, then, to you—Alex? Is it, as you intuited to me before, a chemical reaction? If so, how does this chemical reaction fit into your greater ontology of the alchemy of sexual difference: how will understanding desire help us understand women?
AT: Regarding bell hooks, I definitely agree with “a”, definitely disagree with “b,” and I argue that “c” is too subjective to definitively state anything; the definitions of “love” and “abuse” are both subjective, and exist on a “scale,” and under many definitions the two can be compatible. In fact, I would contend that love cannot exist without a low level of “abuse,” as defined by those asserting that any friction, negativity, criticism, or moments of annoyance are “abuse.” If someone is devoid of all of those “micro abuses” in their behavior to another, the perception would be that the one acting “absent of any abuse” must be mentally ill in some regard. In order to love, one must care, and if one cares, their emotions will be tested from time to time. For me, abuse could better be defined as something more relentless. The actions defined as abuse do not need to be intentional, but to be “abusive” they must outweigh the positive actions driven from the same care, and/or the “abuser” must be resistant to, or avoiding/refusing to attempt to alter their behavior.
Through these considerations we can perhaps argue that one can act abusively, while still being loving and love the target of their momentary abuse, and likewise someone can experience moments of abuse and still love the individual abusing them. Yet, if abuse is sustained, without remorse, redemption, or a net positive in caring actions to lift the other, it is hard to argue for love—sustained relationships in this capacity closer resemble a trauma-driven co-dependency. It’s important we delineate the two, as many individuals today fail to consider the nuance between moments of micro abuse in a genuine loving relationship, and an abusive relationship.
I find your next point, regarding male authors of female appreciated books on the differences between men and women interesting for two reasons; I recently met John Gray (author of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus), we discussed the biological sexes and roles, and he has an advanced copy of The Stone Wall. I am excited to hear his feedback. Second, it was Weininger that suggested that men, namely “intermediary” men, could help women understand themselves. He also argued that intermediary women could perhaps help women understand women better, but that intermediary women couldn’t understand men. More on that in The Stone Wall. Anyways, I, like you, disagree with hooks to the extreme. Men and women are biologically different, very different in fact, but individuals exist on a spectrum. This perpetual need to argue black and whites is truly exhausting, and the fact the supposed intellectuals descend into this madness is even more infuriating.
It can simultaneously be true that most men are a certain way, differing from most women, but some women exist closer to men, and some men closer to women—and for those outliers, historically culture forced them to conform. Today, culture is forcing the majority to conform to the belief “gender” is a construct, which is the inversion of the same crime, but to a far greater scale. It can simultaneously be true that individuals are forced by societal constructs to behave a certain way, but that the macro trends of the group, on average, need no such constructs as they will naturally behave in this manner, anyways. The two concepts are not mutually exclusive.
For the rest, I must remain purposefully coy; much of what you are asking, I spend a great deal of time discussing in the Stone Wall, as you know. The book will be out in the coming weeks, free as usual, and if the readers are curious any response I give here will not do justice to the detailed explanations I provide there.
VG: I don’t disagree with what you say about abuse. I don’t disagree despite also agreeing with hooks that abuse-qua-abuse doesn’t belong in a relationship. Your view is more minute and I see truth in it.
Among the most profound symbols for illustrating this is the Taiichi symbol, or the yin-and-yang. Despite being composed of black and white (complete opposites), both black and white sections contain ‘drops’ of the opposite color. What this means is that everything contains traces of its opposite as a constituting part of its identity. As such, hate (or abuse, if you will) is a sublimated form of love, while the (true) opposite of love is indifference.
I agree the reader can inform themselves about your view of sexual difference in reading The Stone Wall, but what about love? You stated that we as men have to understand what we’re protecting: women. We not only love women—we have to love what we’re protecting, or we tend to—but women also love a lot. They are known for ‘love’ and loving. Is it the case that “men and women’s desires are strangers to each other,” as Irigaray states, or is it that all human beings love (or are capable of love) in the same way and perhaps intensity, as hooks infers? Is love, as you have implied to me before, a chemical reaction, or is it the aim of transcending to a higher organism, as Evola puts it? (To ask this another way, hooks wrote All About Love and put forward the triadic thesis I outlined. If you were to write a book, All About Love, what would be your thesis?)
AT: I think we invent stories to tell ourselves, trying desperately to find greater meaning in the biological. This is, at times, beneficial, but also at times harmful. I view this almost identically to how I described my views on something “greater,” or “mystical,” in interlude 4 in The Stone Wall.
So again, I need to be a bit coy, as my answers to all of this can be pieced together by reading the grander work, and responding in brevity here would be a disservice to a complex subject.
