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Philosophy For Our Times
Should we be transgressive? The limits and potential of transgressiveness | Catherine Liu, Rowan Williams, Josh Cohen
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- [00:03]
Catherine Liu
Liberal world, the radical liberal world, and I'm not going to call it leftist because I don't think it's materialist at all. There has been since 1968, an institutionalization or even sacralization of transgressing norms.
- [00:19]
Josh Cohen
And this has been very the barrier that seems to be transgressed is perilously close to the authoritarianism that it wants to be transgressing. So can transgression be vitalizing and healthy?
- [00:36]
Host
Hello, and welcome to Philosophy for Our Times. Today's episode is the Good, the Bad, and the Transgressive. Continuing slightly on the themes of last week's episode, this one will feature a panel of diverse speakers, including Catherine Liu, the provocative cultural theorist Josh Cohen, a professor of literary theory and trained psychoanalyst, and Rowan Williams, a theologian and former Archbishop of Canterbury. They engage in a heated discussion on what should be considered transgressive in society and whether it should be allowed. Without further ado, I'll pass it over to our host.
- [01:23]
Moderator
Hello and welcome to our session on the good, the Bad, and the transgressive. Let me set out the theme and then I'll introduce you to our speakers. So every act of transgression weakens conscience, it was said, and that was the view of many thinkers. And indeed to this day, we typically see the transgressive breaking rules, acting cruelly, and being bad as unacceptable. But some argue its status is unknown and transgression might be necessary and desirable. Breaking rules with the intention to transgress is essential, they say, if we are to challenge authoritarian systems of thought. Recent research shows individuals express freedom and agency through breaking such norms. And whilst cruelty is universally condemned, studies have shown that people who cause harm and later reflect on their actions report an increased sense of moral awareness. Should we accept that transgression is a vital part of a healthy culture, central and necessary for humans to flourish? Or should we seek to remove transgressive behavior from all public and private life? More radically, is there a worry about enforcing talk of right and wrong, bad or wicked, in the first place? And should we be more skeptical about the use of these moral terms? Now with me to discuss this, we have Rowan Williams, who's the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, is an acclaimed theologian, writer, and pastor. And in addition to his 10 year post as archbishop, Lord Williams has also enjoyed an esteemed academic career as a writer and thinker. George Cohen is a distinguished academic in American literature and critical theory and also a trained psychoanalyst. He is the author of several books, including how to Read Freud, Catherine Liu is a professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine, renowned for her incisive critiques of contemporary culture and political dynamics. So would you join me in welcoming our speakers? So we've got some pretty big terms being bandied about and we're going to have to break them down and refine them a little. But all of the speakers are going to be invited to answer the same exam question. So I'll just put it to you and we'll figure out exactly where we go from there. So Rowan, first for you, should we accept that transgression is vital to a healthy culture? Is it central and necessary to human flourishing?
- [04:13]
Rowan Williams
Transgression is a word that needs defining, isn't it? Yes. And my worry with that introductory paragraph, if I may say so, is that it has one philosophical confusion per line in it. And I really don't know. I'm not blaming you, I'm inclined to agree, but I wouldn't know where to start. And transgression, clearly there is being used in the sense of the unconventional rule breaking behavior that projects us from one frame of reference into another. And in an authoritarian setting, of course that makes sense. But the confusion there is between transgression and sin, that is a real distortion of the integrity of an acting subject. To say that transgression in that sense was necessary to an individual or a society would be to say that at some point it's good for us to be self destructive. I think that's rubbish.
- [05:06]
Moderator
I wonder if I could press you on that a little bit, that there are people who think that if they were never, for whatever reason challenged to have to act in a right or wrong way because life just protected them from that, would they get virtue by default? Or do we have to find ourselves sometimes challenged to go against rules?
- [05:29]
Rowan Williams
We have to find ourselves challenged to go against conventions because conventions very often are part of the slavery that holds us in self destructive addictive patterns of behavior. So transgression, if it simply means stepping across slippery, stepping across the line of what's conventional, by all means. But what's it for? In what context is it making sense? Certainly you can say that virtue, whatever exactly you're meaning by that, virtue in our complicated time taking world requires a bit of edge, a bit of provocation, and is arrived at through struggle and confusion. Yes, absolutely. But virtue as a state is a life giving attunement to what's true.
- [06:18]
Moderator
Thank you. So one might have to hold oneself to rather high standards to achieve that.
- [06:24]
Josh Cohen
Perhaps.
- [06:24]
Moderator
And I'm going to move on To Josh, same exact question for you. Should we accept that transgression is vital to a healthy culture, central and necessary for human flourishing?
- [06:36]
Josh Cohen
I also have a bit of a suspicion of the binary at work in the question. If you want to have a discussion that is exploratory rather than sort of social media polarizing, then you have to recognize that the distance between these terms, between transgression and say, compliance or obedience is maybe more proximal than we imagine. I would of course say this coming from where I come from, but Freud wrote a wonderful, very short, almost a vignette, really a character study called Criminals from a Sense of Guilt. And his suggestion there was that there's a certain kind of pathology which turns to criminality, not in a sequence from criminality to guilt, but the other way around. You commit a crime because you feel guilty, and perhaps the crime that you're thinking of, the crime that you feel is embedded in you, is so egregious that you can't bear to carry it around. So instead you displace that feeling to. To a sort of something perhaps more trivial, still bad, but not the kind of epic scale crime that is there at the heart of your unconscious. And that exculpation of guilt by sort of justifying your criminality retrospectively, it points to a way in which transgression and obedience are in a kind of complicity with each other. And I'll just give a couple more examples before turning over Adorno with his mid century social theorist T.W. adorno and his companion in Thought, Horkheimer. They have this discussion of the ultimate transgressor, the Marquis de Sade. This is sexual transgression. Of course, the libertine. And the libertine Juliet in the titular heroine of Sarde's novel creates a kind of orgiastic community around herself, of pure sexual indulgence. And what they point out is in their study of it, is that their system of sexual pleasure resembles irresistibly a cold authoritarian system. Mechanized, compulsory. Again, the barrier that seems to be transgressed is perilously close to the authoritarianism that it wants to be transgressing. So can transgression be vitalizing and healthy? It can be if we recognize its limits. If we start from the recognition that there's no such thing as pure transgression, that I don't sort of plunge into some airy space of amorality, sort of freed from whatever it is. I stand against that. If you challenge and cut across existing morality in a way that is sort of wary and aware of what you're opposing, I think it then happens with a good deal more humility. It's a way of almost cultivating humility.
- [10:42]
Moderator
So it's very interesting that you point out humility as a perhaps very useful constraint. Because that idea, the sort of benign view of transgression as freeing ourselves from authoritarian constraint or limit, you're describing it as something much more like a striving for control. And maybe people feel even more bound when they're striving for that indefinitely rather than thinking of themselves as free.
- [11:10]
Josh Cohen
And I think Rowan's right when he describes the impulse for kind of omnipotent control to be in command of life, in command of law, that that feels more self destructive than liberating.
- [11:28]
Moderator
Right, Good, thank you. So I'm hoping that Catherine's going to take on the same challenge of having a very good go at this question. And the question to remind you is, should we accept that transgression is vital to a healthy culture, central and necessary for humans to flourish?
- [11:45]
Catherine Liu
I'm going to talk about the various frames that this question overlooks, which is we. Look, let's think about transgression within different frames. And this question is too general. Let's think about it in terms of culture, politics, history, economics, religion and psychology. And I'll start with psychology, because I'm here with Josh Cohen. I feel more in a psychoanaly sympathetic milieu. Freud's text that I'm going to talk about is Civilization and its Discontents. And he wrote it in the 1930s, mid-30s, at a time when Nazism was on the rise in the German speaking world. And one of his first and simplest questions was, why is there so much hostility against civilization? And the word civilization in German is kultur. Why is there such hatred of, of the limits and norms that culture puts on us in order for us to have achievements? And I think that Freud and the psychoanalysts who come after him are very, very aware of the fact that the incest taboo is what allows us to enjoy actually. But the sublimation of that taboo does not mean that we literally transgress that taboo. And the idea for Freud was that the father prevents the child who's in this imaginary specular relationship with the mother, who he believes or she believes provides the breast whenever he or she calls, that there is a third party, the giver of the law, which Freud also talks about as Moses, which gives us this idea that there's a limitation to ourselves and to our ability to demand that the world fulfill our needs. And this may be the question of humility that we've been talking about. But I'm not going to talk about humility so much. I'm going to talk about this idea that in the liberal world, the radical liberal world, and I'm not going to call it leftist because I don't think it's materialist at all. There has been since 1968 an institutionalization or even sacralization of transgressing norms. And this has been very, very hubristic and it has given us aberrations like this professor at Harvard. And I know it's under attack. I don't feel like they're victims whatever. Where Gabriella Coleman describes in her book about hackers and hackers and hacktivism from the early 2000s, she gave an assignment to her students to transgress. And then she wrote in her book about how disappointed she was that the students were so poor at transgressing and that they found it so difficult. And I feel like within this radical liberal milieu of non normative convention breaking hubris, there was an idea that we should all be Nietzscheans. And there's something deeply antisocial but also self serving about a professor who gives that as an assignment. And I feel like the norm breaking legacy of my profession has destroyed a respect for each other, for sociality. Maybe this is coming back to this idea of humility and virtue. But the real transgressors of a liberal hegemon as we know it today is the far right. And Trump is transgressing every single norm, constitutionally, psychologically, sexually, and he's getting away with it. And so how can we fetishize transgression from this point of view, from a leftist point of view, we should not fetishize it. Norms and conventions, laws, prohibitions are given to us, transmitted, you know, time immemorial on the question of conscience. However, if you do want to break the law during the anti Vietnam war or during the pro Palestine protests right now, an individual Nietzschean gesture does not a politics make. We have to create a mass communitarian appealing politics to the people. And the liberal senior have not been able to do that.
- [16:05]
Moderator
Catherine, that's very helpful, thank you. So you've laid out and distinguished political, psychological, cultural and other forms of transgression. And I think all of you have picked up something of a theme there about transgression. For what? I mean, for the sake of it seems bad and surely we saw a lot of that in the academy where it seemed transgressive to students to kind of suddenly take on these very fashionable views of relativism or postmodernism, no such thing as truth. One text as good as another. But it's very funny that the transgressive thing now is to resist. That is actually to push back a little bit and talk about standards of objectivity. So I wonder if we go in cycles.
- [16:56]
Catherine Liu
I hate the cyclical idea of history, because then we're just trapped in myth. Then we feel very trapped.
- [17:01]
Moderator
And also, Nietzsche believed in cycles.
- [17:03]
Catherine Liu
He did. He did believe in cycles. So I don't have a good answer to that. I do feel like there has been an exhaustion of liberal ideology and its radical forms, which is this radical pluralism. Each individual point of view is radically monadic. It's legitimized by its own lived experience. There is no shared reality or really even common purpose. And I don't think that it's transgressive to say, let's get away from transgression. I think it is a sign of confidence in the possibility of robust intersubjectivity and shared experience that we can move beyond that.
- [17:43]
Moderator
I think that's very encouraging to hear and certainly protects us from that sort of slightly flippant playfulness of giving up on those things too quickly. I want to come to Josh and then to Rowan in looking at that feeling, that transgression, where it is for a purpose, where it has some motivation, it is a feeling of trying to deal with something oppressing us. And I want to look at the oppressiveness of notions of being right or good that may be just internalized to such an extent that one feels never able to quite match up to them. And it's a little bit punishing and might actually lead to some of the exculpatory behavior you're talking about, you know, showing, look, I can't keep this up. I have to fail. I have to. And then I. So I want to look at the internal constraints, but I also want to look at the external constraints where again, religions, some of them much less tolerant perhaps, than yours, where again, people are feeling very, very constrained by that. And whether that. That. That. That feels oppressive and the transgression there, whether it comes from scholarship and theological debate or whether it comes from practice, will be in. So let's. Let's do the internal and then look at the external constraints.
- [19:00]
Josh Cohen
Well, to follow what Catherine was saying about the exhaustion of a certain liberal, individualistic notion of transgression, I think one of the frames that psychoanalysis, or the psychoanalysis of culture and society got stuck with was for one of the superego. The superego being that agency within us which has internalized a kind of alien and hostile law that tells us that we're worthless, that makes impossible imperial demands on us, and that sort of forces us into a kind of permanent compliance with ideals which are impossible for us to attain. I think we live now more under the tyranny of what Freud called, in a way that I think circulated much less in subsequent history, the ego ideal. The ego ideal is that image in us of the perfection that our parents sort of.
- [20:10]
Rowan Williams
Yeah.
- [20:10]
Josh Cohen
Projected into us, you know, and. And it doesn't say you must. It doesn't say, this is what I demand of you. It says you can. You can overcome all your difficulties, all your anxieties. It's. It's the sort of the attitude of the positive thinking guru, of the personal trainer who says, you know, you can do another 12 reps if you just try. It doesn't matter if your stomach muscles collapse, et cetera. This version of sort of self overcoming as both a virtue and a kind of possibility of the human being. It's a kind of corporatized Nietzscheanism, I think. And one of the things. One of the ways that we might counter it analytically would be to really put the ego ideal in question, to ask ourselves, what are the ideals? Not just in the consulting room, obviously, but as a society and as a culture, what are the ideals that we impose upon ourselves that. That turn protests, that turn the kind of the call for justice into something heroic, overreaching, the kinds of protests that Catherine was talking about just now, if those are understood in terms of the limits of what we can do, in terms of the constraints of human capacity, it turns us much more, I think, towards a kind of cooperative, mutually dependent mode of action, rather than the sort of the romantic, heroic mode which I think we're enjoined to in so many contexts. You know, even environmental campaigning, especially environmental campaigning, so much of it seems to depend on the kind of heroic body on the line version. Get yourself arrested, destroy property. The problem with that is not just that it's ineffective, but it militates against the possibility of a more modest, concerted action.
- [22:44]
Moderator
So is it about, as it were, understanding different notions of limit, not feeling the limit, so constraining that you're going to necessarily splurge beyond those boundaries and at the same time seeing there have to be limits, but they're limits that we can work within in a practical way?
- [23:02]
Josh Cohen
Yeah, I mean, maybe Rowan can speak to this, because I do think that regardless of one's level of religious commitment. There is, of course, a lesson from religion here because religion builds into itself some sense of limit into its understanding of freedom. It doesn't put freedom and limitation into a binary, but instead limit is a condition for freedom.
- [23:25]
Moderator
Right. I mean, Rowan, I really do want to address the thou shalt, thou shalt not. And people tend to think of religions as a little monolithic and unchanging. But in any of these religions there's been development, and that must have come by a little bit of pressure, a little bit of contesting.
- [23:42]
Rowan Williams
All religions do indeed develop their ethical vision over time. And the thou shalt, thou shalt not is, you know, it's a shorthand for what in most seriously evolved religious traditions is essentially a way of saying there is a policy of living which is in harmony with what you are. And that'll take a while to work out. And it'll need some five finger exercises and it'll need a few rather basic things like the Ten Commandments or whatever, just to say that's the kind of thing that actually puts you jarringly at odds with what you owe to one another in exactly the kind of interdependent social unit you want that start with that. And it's a great deal more than just a set of meaningless prohibitions. And it's a great pity, I think, that we've lost largely in modern Western culture the idea that still so powerful in many Eastern religious contexts, the shorthand being the Chinese idea of the dao. There is a harmonic in things. Growing up means learning how to adjust to that. That's law or logos in terms of classical and early Christian thought. But it's not law in the sense of somebody else dropping a set of constraints on you. There is a way things are. There is a way of living truthfully, and there's a way of living untruthfully. And I would say back to the environmental campaigner thing. Living truthfully is precisely living with an awareness of your limits in a complex world. And to put all your eggs into the basket of heroics is possibly a rather short term and even contradictory thing. But what came to mind as you were talking, Josh, was a book that probably not all that many people read these days, and that's Ernest Becker's the Denial of Death, where he talks about the self creation project that modern culture invites us into. You are your project. You create yourself. You justify yourself down to you. So I'm going to sit back and I'm going to let you create yourself while I create myself. And if that's all there is to go on. It's not entirely surprising if what you have is murderous rivalry at the end of the day and untruthfulness, institutionalized untruthfulness. And of course, at the far end, picking up, Catherine, what you're saying, at the far end you have libertarian fascism, so to speak.
- [26:23]
Moderator
I want to come back to that political dimension since we've explored these sort of internal and external constraints. So we don't want to spend time in the moral gym pumping ourselves up. We also don't want to be like Kant, who thought we were on a course of relentless self improvement. I think that the modern culture, as you say, of developing yourself seems very Kantian rather than Nietzsche. You've got talents and you should be developing them. And at the same time, as Rowan says, shouldn't be thinking of that as developing in isolation my project. But what do we owe each other? How interdependent are we? But I want to press back at the interdependence point because for all the horror that we see in the way things are playing out right now in politics, in the world, and in the US in particular, it could be said that people might try to give a justification for some of the transgression by saying, well, look, the project of neoliberalism and globalization, it benefited the successful, but it left the rest behind. There wasn't that thinking of what we owe each other. And for that reason we haven't got time to just gradually adjust. We've got to tear things down, we've got to break them down, we've got to start again. And I'm sure well intentioned people in the MAGA camp are trying to think of it that way. Is there any justice in thinking of things like that?
- [27:50]
Catherine Liu
Are we projecting ourselves into MAGA world? I think it's good to think dialectically. There is no MAGA without, I think, a liberal hubris that we've all been talking about a little bit in different ways. But I think that, and I talked about this in my academy talk, and it just came out that a study of American families and individuals has shown that 60% of Americans have trouble securing the minimum requirement for dignified lives, which means transportation, housing, education, leisure time. And this institute has given a more holistic picture of what it is to be human in a society that rather than just having gdp, median GDP metrics. And so if you imagine there are the majority of Americans who feel completely abandoned by the global, by austerity, by globalization, and by the liberal institutions like higher education that Keeps coming up with more far fetched ways of dealing with each other that sort of the common sense mind rebels against. So I feel like there is a wholesale abandonment of the working class. You cannot have a stable society with this much economic polarization. Of course you're going to have this political polarization. But I want to get back to this idea of like the intellectual, the spiritual, the theoretical leaders who are, you know, so hubristic right now. And one of the things that I think we've lost sense of in my profession and, and partially it's because of the success of the counterculture, it's partially because of the success of the capture of the institutions by that post 68 generation. I know I keep going back to this, but I'm sorry, I have to is that every time a professor or a left leaning academic speaks, they think they're speaking to the entire world. There is no frame. I have colleagues in faculty meetings who are like, I am speaking truth to power. I'm like where is the power? Where is the power? We're trying to determine how many credits a student needs but graduate. So there's this heroics and you're always thinking you're transgressing with regard to a power and you're absolutely not able to actually speak to communities, constituencies, much less to the working class. And part of this is this kind of post 68 hubris where we've reached an idea that we are always dissenting when in fact the professional managerial class has been enshrined as the spokespeople of capital to the rest of the world. And the environmental issue is very much salient here. Why is there no mass movement for environmental policies? Because environmentalists usually come from wealthy elites and they tell everyone that they're really bad people because they don't recycle. We look at the consumer end of practices rather than the production end of practices. Part of this is that you feel that we have this enshrinement within the individual, within the lifestyle, within self optimization of improvement. I always like to say when you feel like there is despair about actually improving a lot of the world, all you have is home improvement and self improvement.
- [31:16]
Moderator
So I like that. So I've been thinking about this for years. Very much in the consumer, very much in the consumer. It shows very much in the consumer society. But does that mean that we should sign up for a little bit of transgressiveness in our politics now?
- [31:31]
Catherine Liu
What do you mean?
- [31:32]
Moderator
Well, the breaking of codes and norms and standards where we've been subscribing to the rule of law, where we've been saying that we will abide by international rules and international bodies. How transgressive are we prepared to be or allow to meet some of the conditions that you've just been talking about where a lot of people are left out of success and prosperity?
- [31:56]
Catherine Liu
I think that one thing that would begin with the project should begin with the lack of democratic transparency in these institutions, global and national as well. And this happens on a macro level, it happens on a micro level. But what I'm really concerned with is the role of the academic and the intellectual here. I think we've abdicated our ability to reason for a kind of false identification with egos, with elite, actually. And so we identify with enjoyment, but also with punishment. You know, we're always telling people that they are not accepting our rules, but then we also say, oh, we love. We love all the popular culture things that everyone else loves. What we have is an ability, a unique ability to see a totality, to not speak to just power, but to actually understand what is broken in our communities. As a Asian American woman within the academy, I see other minority people often construed and reified as representatives of their community. I am not an elected member leader of the Chinese American community, nor should I ever pretend to speak to that community. But the liberal elites want me to do that. And I think that we should understand what comes out of leadership that's democratic. One comes out of leadership that is moral. What comes out of leadership that is intellectual. We have no understanding of this anymore. And I blame this hubristic generation of boomerites who can't have 68. I blame Edward Said. I blame the Birmingham school. I blame hippies. Sorry. And just say, like, we're at the vanguard. The vanguard of what?
- [33:44]
Moderator
You've just lost a lot of he on.
- [33:45]
Catherine Liu
I know, I'm sorry. I like to be contrarian. I'm transgressing.
- [33:50]
Moderator
You're transgressing.
- [33:54]
Rowan Williams
Well, you know, speaking of somebody born in 1950, I feel in the spotlight here, but I think what needs to be asked here in response to your question, Mary, is when we use transgressive, as you did just then, what we really mean is some kind of disruptive activity in the service of another kind of decision making. Look at the most successful forms of what you might call constructive disruption in the last half century, or a bit more. Look at the civil rights movement. Look at various kinds of nonviolent protests that have actually taken us forward. Transgressive. The word doesn't sit very Comfortably disruptive, sometimes denying the rule of law. No, because exposing yourself to the way the rule of law may clamp down on you, but by so doing, highlighting the fact that the law as it's exercised is not doing its job. Now that. Yes, absolutely. A critical, potentially at times disobedient culture. That's a healthy culture. All right. A skeptical culture to some degree. Yes.
- [35:09]
Josh Cohen
Fine.
- [35:11]
Rowan Williams
Are we creating the tools for that kind of argument? I think that if I hear you right, Katherine, that's one of the questions they're asking. Are we in any sense helping people to have arguments in a culture where actually argument as such is so often just abandoned in favor of position taking, which is another form of heroics, a performative radicalism, which doesn't actually look at changing. I think, yes.
- [35:38]
Moderator
The performativeness of replacing truth with like on social media, I think, is one of the worries where that feels like you're an activist because you've liked something. So I'm wondering whether there's been a complacency nonetheless, and maybe what we're seeing in Trump and other regimes who seem actually transgressive in the worrying sense, Rowan, in which they really are being transgressive and not just disruptive, it's beware the backlash. That was a backlash against something where there was culpability. I mean, academics did not question the state of democracy. They had benefited from it, and they relied on it, and we brought it out and we tried to bomb other countries into adopting democracy. But at the same time, our democracy in the west was really rather complacent. It was decadent parties got elected who saw their only job as getting themselves reelected and stop governing. So I'm wondering whether that need to actually examine our own conscience was something that was missing all along.
- [36:45]
Rowan Williams
I think part of it is to cultivate the willingness always to ask yourself, why do I think this is obvious before I act on that assumption? That's the critical and skeptical.
- [36:58]
Catherine Liu
So if I could say something about this, I think that right now there are sort of extralegal forms of censorship around the question of Palestine and Israel, and I think that we should test all those limits. However, I worry that this movement, especially as it exists on campuses, and I don't know if it's the same situation in the uk it'll produce another kind of micro political movement that fails to win mass appeal and that serves the heroic gestures of my class rather than the good of the majority of Americans. So we should all be deeply concerned and speak out about the 2 million Palestinians who are being persecuted and some of them starved to death. On the other hand, I look at this movement and I think, you know, if I were a working class person, I would say, like, what about the 180 million Americans who can't really feed themselves or pay for their car insurance or go to work or pay for, or pay for their health care? So I worry about the nature and the evolution of once again these hot house movements that take up this moral cloak which should be taken up, which tests that test and transgress the limits of what we can say about Palestine and Israel, but fail to follow up with any kind of appealing politics that can win mass movements.
- [38:30]
Moderator
Yeah, I mean, that seems right. I want to come back to some of the motivations for the political transgression. I mean, you could see communities who just feel, especially in the us the deal was that I would work in a factory doing a pretty unpleasant job, maybe doing the same thing, routinized day after day, but I would be able to eventually own my own home and my kids would go to college and they would do better than me. And when it became obvious after 2008 that that wasn't going to happen and the deal was off, there wasn't necessarily a sense of where do we go with policies, but the whole thing needs to be smashed up a little bit. I wonder whether anger as one of the motivations for transgression is quite important here because it's not so much the virtue seeking idea of being a hero and I'm representing myself as standing up to tyranny as I'm angry, I'm angry as hell and I'm not going to take it any longer.
- [39:27]
Josh Cohen
Yes, indeed, but in what mode are we going to allow ourselves to express that anger? There's an Italian psychoanalyst, very interesting thinker, Massimo Recalcati, who came up with a notion of really the predicament of the younger generation today. He calls it the Telemachus complex. Telemachus, of course, being the son of Odysseus, who is trying to protect the maternal space, the maternal home from the suitors. And he's calling for Odysseus to come back home and restore the law. Now it's a kind of transgression in the sense that it's saying to the older generation, not we stand against you and we reject your laws, but on the contrary, you've abandoned a kind of lawful, stabilizing space and we need you back to restore it for us. Now I think that that gives us a kind of internalized notion of authority that is not opposed to the goodness and the creativity and the naturalness of the human being. I think we are saddled. I mean, this is another specter that might be haunting this discussion. Jean Jacques Rousseau. I think we're saddled with a kind of Rousseauistic notion of authority and law as being a kind of foreign imposition from the outside onto the goodness and naturalness of human creativity and morality. We don't have a sense that morality is constitutive of not just social life, but actually of the management of the interior. You know, people like to talk about how Freud, the Freudian unconscious speaks for the venality and greed and voraciousness of the sexual drives or the destructive drives. What it doesn't talk about is that the Freudian unconscious says no as much as it says yes. Repression is also unconscious. The law and prohibition is also part of unconscious life, which I think puts into question this valorization of a naturalness that stands against all forms of authority. So to take it back to the Israel, Palestine question, I think how it feels at the moment in the atmosphere on campus is a kind of. It feels as though there is a kind of rage which expresses itself as a wish to tear down all the authority.
- [42:33]
Moderator
Yes.
- [42:35]
Josh Cohen
That are operating in the region as opposed to a mass movement to say we need to restore law, we need to restore norms of interaction and of the relationship between communities. That. That in a way, is a reclamation of something like common decency.
- [43:01]
Moderator
It is, but it's a very ironic vision and one I think all of us would want to sign up to and probably everyone in the room. But I'm kind of wondering whether if Odysseus isn't coming back, the responsibility really has been ceded. And the people before us really did crash the climate. They united the successful against the rest. They've let democracy become very decadent. And isn't rage a legitimate response? I mean, it seems very ironic to think, let us restore what you haven't done. Let us take your responsibility for you.
- [43:37]
Josh Cohen
Well, if rage takes the form of stimulus response, if it's instantaneous and it.
- [43:44]
Moderator
Doesn'T, you realize this is, you know, devil's advocate.
- [43:47]
Josh Cohen
Yeah, of course. No, of course, that's right. And it's important. One does have to recognize the way in which our political culture in the west, around the world, triggers that kind of instantaneous rage. But if we don't have the tools for conversation and for mutual negotiation, that allows us to put a little bit of distance between ourselves and our rage and that. That puts our Rage in the service, not of acting on it immediately, but of actually feeling it. To feel rage is actually to suspend the hastiness of action. You know, if you don't have that moment of suspension, that moment where you feel rather than act, you get something like the obscenity of the shooting of.
- [44:44]
Moderator
The two and sometimes just impotent rage.
- [44:48]
Rowan Williams
The question is, can we understand our rage? That's what I'm hearing.
- [44:53]
Catherine Liu
Well, what I wanted to add to what Josh Cohen just said was I think that one of the things about rage and externalization is that we have prized and fetishized the dissolution of the boundary between the private and the public, between the subjective and the objective. And so we feel because of our social media gadgets and. And we feel this need to immediately externalize what we're feeling. It serves the social media apparatus, but it's also. And this was transgressive maybe in the early 70s and 60s when the idea of women's experience and emotionality among second wave feminists who wanted to change the public sphere because men had spoken in the public sphere in a stoic way and women had different kinds of experiences that should be allowed free expression in the public sphere and should transform the public sphere's capacity for embodying that rage, for allowing the recognition of that rage that was a transgressive moment that was maybe positive and expanded the realm of what was permissible within the public sphere. However, there's a reification and a fetishization of the fact that there should be no difference at all between the public and the private, between the subjective and the objective. And so what you had described about sitting with a rage or even listening to a rage before you actually make other people listen to it. That sense of immediacy is given to us through. Through these gadgets, through this kind of like very superficial and commodified relationality. We live in a culture of superficial confession and superficial action. And so I guess what we're saying is the fetishization of transgressive acting out is actually asocial and bad. The idea of making the space for a rational, communal, collective action means that we have to restore the public private boundary. You don't need to say everything you're thinking. In fact, if you say everything you're thinking, you're probably going to betray the truth of what you're actually thinking or feeling, because it's not an immediate thing. And I think that we are farther away from actually being able to live our personal truths in a public way. And after that boundary has been transgressed.
- [47:29]
Moderator
And the danger of having it mirrored immediately by the echo chamber you talked to. So let me thank all of you, and then let me invite you to join with me in thanking Josh Cohen, Katherine Lear and Rowan Williams.
- [47:44]
Host
Thank you for listening to Philosophy for Our Times. That was quite a lively debate. I tend to believe that the more one fetishizes transgressiveness, the more it will be, the more it will trickle into society. What did you think? Share your opinion by emailing the email address in the show notes below and see you next week for more episodes with the world's leading thinkers on today's biggest ideas. Bye.