{"id":154687,"date":"2021-09-22T12:47:19","date_gmt":"2021-09-22T16:47:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=154687"},"modified":"2021-09-24T17:04:44","modified_gmt":"2021-09-24T21:04:44","slug":"a-woman-and-a-philosopher-an-interview-with-amia-srinivasan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/09\/22\/a-woman-and-a-philosopher-an-interview-with-amia-srinivasan\/","title":{"rendered":"A Woman and a Philosopher: An Interview with Amia Srinivasan"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Photo: Tereza \u010cerve\u0148ov\u00e1\/Morgenbladet<\/p><\/div>\n

When Amia Srinivasan published her essay \u201cDoes Anyone Have the Right to Sex?\u201d in the <\/em>London Review of Books in early 2018, several months into the public discussions surrounding #MeToo, it provoked many strong feelings\u2014not to mention gave the world the sentence: \u201cSex is not a sandwich.\u201d Opening with a reading of the incel manifesto written by the perpetrator of the Isla Vista killings, it became a far-reaching meditation on the ideological, political, and public dimensions of sexual desire and how we might begin to think more critically about them.<\/em><\/p>\n

Srinivasan trained as a philosopher at Yale and then Oxford, where she has since established herself at the heart of the old boys\u2019 club that is analytic philosophy. In 2019, she was given the Chichele Chair in Social and Political Theory once occupied by Isaiah Berlin; she is the first woman, the first person of color, and the youngest person ever to take up her post. Most readers, however, will know her for her rich and entertaining pieces in magazines like <\/em>The New Yorker and the <\/em>London Review, including my favorite, a 2017 paean to octopuses\u2014\u201cthe closest we can come, on earth, to knowing what it might be like to encounter intelligent aliens.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Srinivasan\u2019s new book, <\/em>The Right to Sex<\/a>, is a collection of bold yet subtle essays, equally distinguished by their capaciousness and economy, full of sharp turns and trapdoors. It offers a formidable account of the workings of race, class, and institutional power within our sexual politics. \u201cThe Conspiracy against Men\u201d swiftly dismantles many common misconceptions about false rape accusations, Title IX, and cancel culture, some of which have grown invisible through repetition. There\u2019s a piece on the fierce and profound engagement of Srinivasan\u2019s students with once derided antiporn figures like Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, whose arguments have a new force for those who feel that online porn has meaningfully structured their own consciousness and sexualities, and another on the increasing coziness with state and corporate interests that has marked mainstream UK and U.S. feminism over the past few decades. \u201cOn Not Sleeping with Your Students\u201d upends a cherished Ivy League defense of professor-student romances, making the case that people who initiate students into new ways of thinking might well (and arguably should) inspire feelings of excitement and attraction\u2014yet their responsibility is precisely to direct those feelings to advance the student\u2019s learning, not to gratify the professor\u2019s vanity or lust. That essay, Srinivasan told me recently on Zoom, \u201cis the one that I\u2019ve had women most consistently write to me about.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

When did you become a feminist?<\/p>\n

SRINIVASAN<\/p>\n

I had no relationship to feminism growing up. I remember distinctly a French teacher in school\u2014I guess I was in sixth form\u2014asking which of us identified as feminists. And we looked at her as if she was asking, Which of you identify as Levelers? Right? Some historical category that just seemed completely inappropriate and also deeply unsexy. And then, when I was an undergraduate, I\u2019m horrified to say that among the mainstream humanities students, feminism wasn\u2019t seen as something very intellectually serious.<\/p>\n

So, feminism was an entirely extracurricular thing that I came to as a graduate student at Oxford. Literally what happened was that one summer, my best friend, who was then a grad student in philosophy at NYU, handed me a copy of The Second Sex<\/em>, and I think she had a copy of The Feminine Mystique<\/em>. And she just said, Look, I think it\u2019s about time that we read these.<\/p>\n

And then a little later on, I ran a reading group in feminist philosophy. What was great was that it brought out of the woodwork lots of students who you would have thought wouldn\u2019t be interested in this stuff. We were all writing dissertations on epistemology and metaphysics and philosophy of language. People who seemed like very mainstream analytic philosophers turned out to be having these subterranean, dissenting inclinations and desires.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

So this was partly a rebellion against the institutional experience you were having?<\/p>\n

SRINIVASAN<\/p>\n

It was an expression, I think, of a certain kind of intellectual frustration I was experiencing from working in a very narrow analytic mode. On one hand, I found the emphasis on clarity and precision important, and I\u2019m grateful for it. On the other, I found it stifling, and I was worried that the parts of my brain that I valued the most\u2014the parts that engaged with literature and poetry and history\u2014were being pruned away. So, it was a reaction to the analytic philosophy training I was getting. And also a reaction in another way, which is just that philosophy is a very male-dominated discipline, and that has all the results you would expect, plus some that are harder to articulate unless you\u2019re in that kind of environment. Mich\u00e8le Le D\u0153uff has this great line in Hipparchia\u2019s Choice<\/em>. I\u2019m going to butcher it, but it goes something like, When you\u2019re a woman and a philosopher, it\u2019s useful to have feminism to be able to understand what is happening to you.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Do you think of your nonacademic writing as connected to what you publish as a philosopher? And how do you see the relationship between philosophy and politics?<\/p>\n

SRINIVASAN<\/p>\n

We should have a much broader understanding of what counts as philosophy and what counts as political theory. A lot of the great feminist texts are profitably read as both, and that\u2019s something I try to get across with my students. Reading The Dialectic of Sex<\/em> is a lot like reading The Republic<\/em>, for example. They\u2019re both thrilling, weird, carnivalesque, problematic, very cool, imaginative texts that bear deep engagement.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t spend much time thinking about whether what I do is philosophy or not. I just write about what I\u2019m interested in. Unlike some people who are philosophers by profession and interested in social and political issues\u2014especially the imperfect social and political realities with which we are faced\u2014I have a vast amount of time for totally pointless things. I was supervised by two philosophers who work in very abstract epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of language and logic, and I would absolutely hate the idea that they would have to show the political relevance of what they do. While the arts and the humanities more broadly have an important social and political function, their justification should never rely on that function. And so, I\u2019m very worried about an impetus to make the humanities politically relevant. I don\u2019t think their political importance lies in their relevance. When they are<\/em> relevant, that\u2019s a lovely thing, because it would be a tragedy to leave politics to the politicians or the social scientists.<\/p>\n

I think the truth is, if I had a different set of skills, if I could choose, I would much rather be an artist than a philosopher. I mean, what better thing is there to be able to do than create something absolutely beautiful?<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Speaking of beauty, in the book you quote this wild, vertiginous passage from Beauvoir about what sex might be like if the sexes were equal.<\/p>\n

SRINIVASAN<\/p>\n

Right, exactly. That is also something I wanted to bring out from these classic feminist texts that people often misread or just misremember or misconceive as being resolutely dour and pessimistic and boringly political. You see this in someone like Shulamith Firestone, who ends by talking about being freer to love. You see it in Valerie Solanas talking about the emancipation of the imagination. The emancipation of the imagination, of course, is central to Andrea Dworkin, this person we think of as being so relentlessly negative about human and social life. But she\u2019s got this vision. She just wants more! That\u2019s the thing I would like people to know about a lot of feminist texts, is that they\u2019re just not satisfied. It\u2019s not negativity. It is a deep desire to bring about other kinds of imaginative possibilities, and a dissatisfaction with the constraints on imagination, on women\u2019s imaginations in particular, that they viscerally feel.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

So, in thinking about our desires as political, as social\u2014not individual, in some sense\u2014is there a tension there when we consider what to do about them? What would be a collective way of addressing the politics of desire?<\/p>\n

SRINIVASAN<\/p>\n

When I first wrote what is now the title essay of the book, I was trying to point out a largely unremarked upon tension between the commitment to consent-centric sex positivity and intersectionality. If you\u2019re going to really think about the relationship between, say, racial domination and patriarchy, then you\u2019ve got to think about the racial formation of desire. This isn\u2019t a particularly new thought. Angela Davis takes Shulamith Firestone to task for failing to do precisely this.<\/p>\n

In the book, I stress that I\u2019m not trying to suggest a project in which every individual sits around thinking about whether their desires conform to their political commitments, much less proposing some sort of Maoist sessions where we all sit around and tell each other whether that\u2019s true or not. Mostly because I just think that\u2019s bad politics. We can look at the history of the U.S. women\u2019s liberation movement to see what happens when a group of people committed to radical social change start to embrace an obsessive concern with the putative mismatch between individual lives and political commitments. At the same time, we need some of that, right? Because that is what distinguishes the New Left from the old Left.<\/p>\n

I want us to have an ambivalent relationship to questions of what it means to render the personal political. What I\u2019m really proposing is something that queer people for a long time have been proposing, which is just to think more imaginatively and creatively about what your desires might actually be. And this brings us to psychoanalysis, because one thing that tradition teaches us is that we\u2019re in the constant business of repressing all sorts of things about ourselves and our sexualities and our affinities. At least some of those forms of repression\u2014maybe not all of them\u2014stop us from living freer lives. So, I\u2019d like to see this project as a liberatory one rather than a disciplinary one. I\u2019m not telling the person who is fixedly straight\u2014whatever that means, but let\u2019s just suppose there are such people\u2014that you have to be queer. But I am saying, Let\u2019s all be a bit more attuned to those instances where we are not listening to desire, but listening to a political force that tells us what we shouldn\u2019t<\/em> desire. I take that to be in keeping with a broader queer tradition.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve had the experience before of being objectified by journalists\u2014the \u201chot philosopher\u201d who \u201cgives good interviews,\u201d et cetera. That\u2019s obviously annoying. At the same time, we\u2019re all embodied creatures. You and I both, for example, appear in the world as quite femme. It seems to me that our experiences of that must structure what we then feel and write about a subject like sexual desire. Is that something you think about?<\/p>\n

SRINIVASAN<\/p>\n

I have so much to say. How much am I going to say on the record? I have nothing close to a reconciled relationship to my own embodiment. Not only in the deep philosophical sense of not having overcome my own mind-body problem\u2014the fact that I have this finite, vulnerable, embodied existence\u2014but I have nothing like a reconciled relationship to my own legibility as a female subject, as a woman. As a young person, my intense fantasy was to be disembodied entirely. I started feeling that when I was probably five or six, but that fantasy stayed with me throughout my teenage years and into college. It wasn\u2019t that I simply didn\u2019t like looking a particular way. I didn\u2019t want to look any<\/em>\u00a0way.<\/p>\n

The other fantasy I had very intensely was about adopting the life of the figure of the sannyasi. Sanyas<\/em> is the Sanskrit word for renunciation. The sannyasi is someone who has renounced everything\u2014their name, their family relations, all property, all civic status. And they have no possessions. They wear an ochre robe and they go out in the world surviving as a mendicant. And it seemed so plainly obvious to me that this was the correct way of being in the world. Refusing to take up or dress in accordance with any kind of social role, an utter refusal of any form of gaze, any form of legibility, any form of relationality, which then, in my young view, would set my mind free. I still find it a very powerful vision of existence. And I still find it deeply painful that we aren\u2019t total authors of ourselves, that we can\u2019t just wake up and be something completely new.<\/p>\n

But when it comes to dressing, I do tend to dress in a relatively feminine way. Part of it is just what makes it easier to go through the world or what feels like a form of armor that one can put on\u2014which isn\u2019t to say I don\u2019t love clothes. I was very happy to appear in Vogue<\/em>, for example. Hilariously, the person who notified me when that piece came out was Jacqueline Rose, on day one. Which I had so much respect for. I remember once Jacqueline walking into the British Library reading room\u2014I didn\u2019t know her then, although of course I admired her\u2014in head-to-toe Chanel. And she sat down across from me, and I sat looking at her in wonder, and I realized I was going to get no work done. So I just picked up my stuff and left.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You mentioned psychoanalysis earlier, and you seem committed to the idea that there are considerable constraints on how much we can know about ourselves. That idea has implications for the politics of desire and of identity, and for politics in general. And it feels in some ways like quite an unfashionable idea now.<\/p>\n

SRINIVASAN<\/p>\n

It is unfashionable. To think of the self as being obscure to oneself. I think you\u2019re right to point to the phenomenon of identity politics as having something to do with this. It\u2019s very important as people pursue the politics of recognition, to think of themselves as having a sovereign inalienable right to declare themselves to be something, to know themselves, and for their declarations of knowledge to be taken as dispositive.<\/p>\n

And yet there are places where we risk overstating our ability to know ourselves. So if we think about something like trans politics, it\u2019s very familiar to us that if you want a liberatory, trans-inclusive feminism, you need to take trans people at their word when they tell you who they are. But it\u2019s important to notice that a kind of epistemic overconfidence is often in play when you\u2019re thinking about trans-exclusionary feminism. This is a point I take from Jacqueline Rose, who says the question to ask of trans-exclusionary feminists is, Who do you think you<\/em> are? How is it that you think you have such a reconciled relationship to your sexed body and your assigned gender and the way you are socially read? Her point is that all the ways in which we repress our discomfort and dissidence against the gender system haunt us in our dreams and our fantasies, where we are not stably always women or men. That\u2019s a profound insight. And then the political question becomes, Whose ways of accommodating themselves to the oppressive system that is gender become socially sanctioned, and whose ways aren\u2019t?<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a related issue with the way we sometimes talk about men, as if all men have a reconciled relationship to their manhood. As if it\u2019s an easy thing, the demands of a certain kind of masculine performance, for both those men who fit it and don\u2019t fit it. The idea that there\u2019s no drama there, no anxiety there, I think is descriptively wrong and politically not particularly useful.<\/p>\n

The right to be able to tell stories about ourselves is very important. It\u2019s also very important that we have the right to change the stories we tell about ourselves. And that the stories we tell about ourselves are stories we tell in communion with other people. So much of what I say about myself is formed through what I\u2019ve learned from other people who\u2019ve helped me make sense of myself.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

The book covers a lot of tricky, fiercely contested ground. Do you worry about being misinterpreted?<\/p>\n

SRINIVASAN<\/p>\n

Are we going to write in a way where we could not possibly be misread? That kind of writing is bad writing. I was struck by this wonderful short review of my book in the Irish Times<\/em> by Naoise Dolan, when she said something like, \u201cSrinivasan isn\u2019t worried about being misread. She\u2019s not writing in a way that stops her from being viciously misread by her enemies.\u201d I wasn\u2019t trying to deliberately leave myself open for misreading. It just never occurred to me to write in a different way. But now I see that writing that wants to fearlessly engage with complexity is always going to be open to misreading. That\u2019s true of so many great feminist texts, texts that open themselves up in those ways that I think continue to pay dividends.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why you teach people like Dworkin or Firestone?<\/p>\n

SRINIVASAN<\/p>\n

Everyone remembers Firestone\u2019s line about shitting a pumpkin, which of course is not even her line\u2014she\u2019s quoting a friend. But what people forget, for example, is that extraordinary chapter \u201cDown with Childhood,\u201d on the oppression of children, which I love teaching my students because for so many of them it just feels like this disclosure of something they\u2019ve wanted to say for so long about, for them, pretty recent experiences of being thwarted and infantilized and undermined and controlled as children.<\/p>\n

Then she gets into freeing children\u2019s sexuality, and pedophilia, and we\u2019re in very murky and difficult territory. But there are certain feminists in this #MeToo moment who basically think we shouldn\u2019t be reading Firestone for that reason. And it strikes me as profoundly anti-intellectual, but also as totally lacking what my colleague Rachel Fraser here at Oxford has called the carnivalesque in feminism. The importance of wackiness and weirdness and strangeness and audacity. I think it would be very sad if we lost that.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You see that as an important quality for feminism specifically, or any movement?<\/p>\n

SRINIVASAN<\/p>\n

It\u2019s important in any radical political tradition. It\u2019s no surprise that utopian writing always has these wacky ideas. I mean, think about More\u2019s Utopia<\/em>, full of these strange possibilities, because the same political imagination that leads to the disclosure of new possible social arrangements also sometimes generates some crazy shit. The broadening of the sense of what\u2019s possible, but also of what\u2019s delightful and interesting about human life, has got to be central to a radical politics.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

It\u2019s interesting, your attachment to that kind of unruliness. Because you yourself have come up within these institutions and been so successful\u2014you seem the ultimate A student, in a way.<\/p>\n

SRINIVASAN<\/p>\n

I had a profile come out when I got the Chichele, and an old friend wrote to me to say that he thought it hadn\u2019t captured my wackiness and sense of play and fun. I said to him that I don\u2019t think that was the interviewer\u2019s failing. I didn\u2019t show that because I made a concerted decision to try and be taken seriously. There\u2019s plenty of unruliness in my life. But it is undeniably true that I am the A student and in many ways the good Indian daughter who would bring home a 97, and my father would half-jokingly ask me where the three points were. Of course, it\u2019s playing into a stereotype of Indian fathers, which he was knowingly doing. But it also comes from somewhere.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

It\u2019s striking to me, actually, that in this book, which engages with sex, violence\u2014things that can feel so deeply personal\u2014you reveal very little about yourself. Is that in some sense a political choice?<\/p>\n

SRINIVASAN<\/p>\n

These essays are not personal essays in the contemporary mode. I\u2019ve never written personal essays in that sense. At the same time, the essays feel very personal to me. I also have a habit of reading all philosophy as somehow betraying the self. I think that\u2019s true of everything I write, not just these essays, but more abstract and technical pieces of epistemology. I feel myself haunting those pieces in, to me, quite obvious ways.<\/p>\n

One thing is that I\u2019m just instinctively private and want to be left alone. And I\u2019m scared. I\u2019m afraid of the internet and I\u2019m afraid of the indelibility of it, the way that revelations of the self can never be undone. And then you\u2019re always read through those revelations.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m also suspicious of biography as a genre, even as I have this biographical tendency when I read philosophy, which is supposed to be antithetical to biographical readings. But there are<\/em> eruptions of the personal in the book. I have that moment where I make a joke about friends saying about me that I\u2019m practically white\u2014I thought a lot about whether I should keep that in or not. Sometimes what happens in essays is, I have more personal things and then I strip them out. But I decided to keep that. It felt like one of the most personal moments in the book, but for me, that\u2019s always to take a position of intense vulnerability. I think part of the reason I like philosophy is because it… Nothing ever makes one truly invulnerable, but it gives one some immunity, at least some critical distance, some pretense of invulnerability. There\u2019s also a question here about how much of political interest one can learn from my personal experience. I\u2019m very aware of the limits of my own case. I mean, yes, I\u2019m a woman. I\u2019m a woman of color. I\u2019m also just an extraordinarily privileged person and I don\u2019t find my own story terribly interesting, is the truth.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

I\u2019m suddenly thinking of that line in your octopus piece about the zoo and the aquarium\u2014certain creatures being on display in captivity for the good of the species as a whole. That\u2019s probably a very inappropriate connection to make.<\/p>\n

SRINIVASAN<\/p>\n

No, but see, those are the moments for me where I feel like I am… That to me is like a style of personal writing. I don\u2019t write personal essays, but I feel like I\u2019m constantly talking about myself. That octopus essay certainly feels like that. I mean, the dynamics of distance and proximity, knowability and unfathomability, are extremely personal preoccupations of mine, and I just find lots of ways of writing about them. I can be talking about octopuses. I can be talking about technical arguments in epistemology. I think I\u2019m always just working out my own problems with other minds, though\u2014my own mind and the other minds of actual other people I know and love. So maybe that\u2019s a way of writing about the personal, in secret.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Lidija Haas is the senior editor of <\/em>The Paris Review.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On sexual liberation, femininity, and the crucial necessity of wacky ideas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2163,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[67827,1102,1132,7403,2426,17144,179],"class_list":["post-154687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-featured","tag-feminism","tag-interviews","tag-philosophy","tag-politics","tag-psychoanalysis","tag-sex"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nA Woman and a Philosopher: An Interview with Amia Srinivasan by Lidija Haas<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"September 22, 2021 \u2013 On sexual liberation, femininity, and the crucial necessity of wacky ideas.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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