Statement of Record

The Feeling of Thinking

by Veronika Reichl

T

The Feeling of Thinking

by Veronika Reichl

T

A Compass Whose Needle Points in Two Directions

Carla reads Judith Butler

1990. Carla is twenty. She has moved to a major city, found an apartment with roommates, and has just started studying philosophy. She somehow hadn’t believed that all of this would actually happen. But now she goes to class or to the library every day. She reads one book after the other. She gets involved in discussions and writes papers. Studying philosophy answers a deep longing in her and it baffles her that she is allowed to pursue this longing. It is so luxurious to invest most of her time in reading philosophy that Carla can hardly stand it. The prospect of having the permission to do this for years seems too good to be true. Carla grew up with a class conflict in her family. Her absent father is rich, her single mother is poor. As a child and teenager, Carla saw how difficult her mother’s life was and how neither she nor everything she did were seen or acknowledged. She watched patriarchy and capitalism making life hard for her mother and many other people. Every morning on the subway, Carla thinks about how the world has to change and wonders whether she shouldn’t be studying social work or political science. But then she still ends up at the philosophy department every time.

            Tuesday afternoon Carla is sitting on a park bench with Gender Trouble by Judith Butler. The air is balmy and the lilac is fragrant. Carla bought the book at a feminist event in the new theory bookstore. Someday Carla wants to be one of the people who put on events like that, who are visibly politicized and know lots of other politicized people, who laugh with deep voices and look incredibly self-assured when standing around smoking.

            Carla starts with the last chapter. She is reading Butler in English because it hasn’t been translated into German yet. She manages it, even if she has to look up a lot of words, and this makes her a little proud. Butler writes long, complicated sentences with feverish earnestness. Some of these sentences Carla has to read ten times. Butler’s text keeps getting her incredibly worked up without her being able to say exactly why. Maybe because Butler seems to be constantly contradicting herself. But that can’t be. Carla reads:

The feminist “we” is always and only a phantasmatic construction, one that has its purpose, but which denies the internal complexity and indeterminacy of the term and constitutes itself only through the exclusion of some part of the constituency that it simultaneously seeks to represent. The tenuous or phantasmatic status of the “we,” however, is not cause for despair or, at least, it is not only cause for despair. The radical instability of the category sets into question the foundational restrictions on feminist political theorizing and opens up other configurations, not only of genders and bodies, but of politics itself.[1]

           This paragraph too points Carla to a contradiction: between the obvious existence of a we of feminism (this existence is certain for Carla, because it seems necessary for the existence of feminism, at least as a construct) and the total instability of the meaning of this we. In Butler this evidently goes together somehow. But when Carla tries to pull it together, her head gets hot. And yet she trusts Butler’s feverish earnestness. She struggles through the next five pages, then sticks the book in her bag and goes home. It’s pretty cool to be a young woman cycling through the city at dusk with Judith Butler in the original in her backpack.

~

Her sleep is restless that night, with Butler’s text flying around her head. At 4 a.m., Carla is suddenly wide awake: Butler’s complicated sentences concern a key aspect of her own life! Carla can’t yet put into words how, exactly, but that it is so is suddenly crystal clear. This puts her in a reverent mood. She gets up and pours herself a glass of Pinot, curls up in her armchair, and looks out into the dark chestnut trees in the courtyard. She sips the wine and tries to formulate sentences in her head that would clarify what she means. She pictures her friend Tami, because if someone understands Carla, it’s Tami. Carla formulates the following: Butler describes a key problem I have that I have not been able to put into words. Butler is writing specifically about being a woman, but it can easily be applied much more broadly. The problem works more or less like this: I have been shaped by my parents and society in a limiting way. This influence is not identical with me but nor is it simply external to me. I feel in it and think in it and my body moves in it. At the same time, there are parts of me that don’t agree with this influence and—very rightly so—defend themselves against it. Unfortunately, my gut feelings, this inner compass that is the most important of all my tools, represent both the influence and the defense against it. So I can never say whether it is right or wrong to decide for or against my gut feeling. For one, my gut feeling sometimes does represent my good, my truest self. For another, fighting my gut feeling, even if it represents a constricting influence, is always also a form of violence against myself. And yet it’s also wrong to simply follow my gut feeling, because this—due to the limiting influence—often leads to wrong, fear-driven decisions. This means that every day I am faced with undecidable questions: is my fear of making a fool of myself in front of a group of particularly cool fellow students an insecurity inculcated in me or a useful warning that some of these people are actually not very nice? Is my aversion to my professors’ jargon with all its foreign words a reaction of childish defiance or politically expedient resistance to exclusionary elitist arrogance? Either is always possible. With Butler both can maybe even be true at the same time. That’s the new idea that came to me in my half-sleep just now: maybe Butler’s super-complicated sentences are describing those kinds of doublings. So maybe in my case as well two contradictory things are always true at the same time? I’m not sure yet what that would mean, but it’s important!

           Ever since I was thirteen I’ve been doubting my decisions, because it became clear to me then that I had acquired a bunch of stupid fears from my parents and from school that did not actually belong to me. When I tried to discuss this problem with friends, they would say things like: “Listen to your gut!” Or: “Flip a coin and when you see how it lands, you’ll know what you want.” My friends didn’t understand that my problem was not that I didn’t have gut feelings, but that I had gut feelings I couldn’t trust. They advocated the idea that deep down there was in fact a reliable feeling that I could find by using tricks. I believed them; that is, I believed that maybe I’m just too dumb to feel what my innermost self wants. Ever since then I’ve wanted to free myself from my stupid influences and to be entirely myself. But if both are true at the same time, then there is no such thing as this pure, good, true self, only my enormous longing for one. Then there is only a self that is both right and wrong. I may screw up my whole life because of my unreliable gut feeling-compass.

            The Tami in her head nods. But Carla is dumbfounded: oddly enough, the insight that it may be impossible to avoid making a mess of everything is comforting. Maybe because it means that the problem is not Carla’s responsibility. Carla decides to read Butler again from the beginning. With that she slips back into bed, rolls onto her side, and falls asleep.

           It takes several weeks for her to notice that Butler doesn’t offer her any solutions, but only describes the problem. And yet Carla’s constant sense of being of two minds feels different since that night. Butler has given Carla’s simultaneous trust in and mistrust of herself a right to exist. Gender Trouble becomes a kind of Bible for Carla.

~

2016. Carla is sitting in her reading chair. She spreads her favorite mohair blanket across her lap and picks up a book of essays by Judith Butler that she hasn’t read yet: Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Her boyfriend Nils is in the next room correcting exams. Carla likes to read while Nils is working in the next room. It’s homey, and if something gets her worked up, she can go over and interrupt him and tell him about it. He’ll furrow his brow at first, but then he’ll want to know.

           Judith Butler has been with Carla all these years. For a long time now, she has been able to effortlessly understand her sentences in German as well as in English. Carla has read many of her books, attended her talks, and argued with, and sometimes a little bit against, her in her own essays. She has taught seminars on Butler, given talks on Butler, participated in political panel discussions on Butler; Butler is one of about eight key anchors in Carla’s system of thought.

            Carla starts reading an essay and immediately the Butler feeling kicks in: how circumspect and deliberate this thinking is! How kindly Butler looks upon people! Butler writes about how, according to Levinas, the face of the other unsettles me by letting me feel their pain. This other throws me off track, catapults me out of my complacent ego and onto a deeper level of my being. Butler writes with Levinas that the face of the other says to me: you will not kill me. But at the same time the face of the other is also a provocation: it simultaneously incites me to violence, even to killing. Something floods up inside Carla. She lets the book fall into her lap and breathes deeply. There it is again, the oceanic feeling that Carla has every few weeks and then forgets about again: Carla is part of the whole. Connected with everything. A drop of water in the ocean. Permeable. Open. Happy to flow with everything. It is the best feeling she knows. Carla closes her eyes and enjoys the vastness.

            Carla’s life consists in becoming a little more stressed out every day, which, over the course of several weeks and without her noticing, leads to an ever-thicker armor closing in around her—until suddenly: a good concert, a day in nature, great sex, or, occasionally, reading theory allows her to exhale deeply and to reconnect again with the vastness. Sometimes the feeling lasts only for a few minutes, sometimes for days. It’s incredible: she is forty-five years old and has been going through this cycle of becoming constricted and opening up to the vastness for years, and yet she still forgets about it again and again in her everyday life. Never when things have become constricted does vastness seem possible. This time the vastness probably has to do with a specific Butler thing: Butler describes—as so often—two opposing movements. Here it is the simultaneity of the impulses to spare and to kill the other. (Today Carla recognizes a Hegelian figure here. But although Carla appreciates Hegel, Butler’s vastness is much vaster than his.) The idea that these two opposing impulses could be active in her at the same time allows Carla to relax. Butler has accomplished this several other times by describing other opposing forces. This has loosened sometimes tiny and sometimes large knots in Carla, because it gave contours to something that before had only been a spooky incongruity. While they are spooking, incongruities can’t be grasped, but they make Carla feel vaguely guilty. With Butler the incongruities acquire clear contours. Yes, Carla too has felt this in herself: wanting to help someone and at the same time wanting to hit them and destroy them. It is surprising that something as simple as resolving an incongruity into two opposing movements can still change Carla’s perspective and bring about such a great sense of relaxation. Once she has understood that two movements are taking place at the same time, she doesn’t have to fight either of them; then they are simply a relationship. And Carla can finally think about something new instead. She is intrigued by the fact that this figure turns her into a drop in the ocean. This had also happened when she first encountered Butler, even if the themes of constriction and vastness were not yet as important to her then.

           Carla leans back and feels into the oceanic within her. Everyone needs the oceanic. Like Carla most people find it in nature or in music or in sex or in intoxication. Feeling anger and pain in therapy also connects people to the vastness. But Carla doesn’t know anyone besides herself who becomes vast in this way by reading Butler. Whereas she does know a few people who find the oceanic in Deleuze, or, worse, in Heidegger. Or in Richard Wagner or Céline Dion. In something that Carla perceives as pretentious, self-absorbed, dishonest, or superficial. Carla suspects that vastness comes about when reading theory—much like in therapy—when a truth is articulated that is valid for the person, but which they have not yet recognized. The fact that this feeling of vastness is evidently triggered in some people by bad music and Heidegger because, presumably, this music and Heidegger touch on the inner truth of these people, is creepy to Clara. If that is true, then there are off-putting, pretentious, and even dishonest inner truths, which, it seems to Clara, it would be at the very least negligent to take as one’s guide. Nevertheless, she trusts her own oceanic feeling completely. This is because, over the years, the feeling of the ocean has become one of the strongest—and possibly most reliable—measuring tools of her inner compass, which continues to be both right and wrong at the same time.

            Carla finishes her tea. She will keep reading tomorrow. Now she will go and interrupt Nils and talk with him about the fact that Butler says that the other challenges us both to gentleness and to violence and that this for Carla is surprisingly true. It will probably also be true for Nils. Or he will say something else about it that is interesting. And then they will go into the living room and open a bottle of wine and Carla will talk again about how strange it is that people love Heidegger and find the ocean in him. And then Nils will talk about music and the oceanic. Carla gets up and folds the mohair blanket. Her compass, whose needle so often points in two opposing directions, has not guided her badly so far.

xxx

With the kind permission of Matthes & Seitz, Berlin

Translation: Millay Hyatt


[1] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge: New York, London 2007, p. 194 (first published in 1990).

About the author

Veronika Reichl is a writer, lecturer, and illustrator living in Berlin. In 2023 her book Das Gefühl zu denken (The feeling of thinking) with short stories on reading theory was published in Germany by Matthes & Seitz Berlin.

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