"Feminist Play with the Abject"

Mechthild Nagel

abstract

Western philosophers share a peculiar obsession for that which

they have deemed objectionable and cast aside.’ I claim that while

Plato maligns ontologically the object under scrutiny (be it hair,

mud, or poetry), he re-inscribes a fetishistic desire that hauls the

object back into the thinker's field of vision. His god's-eye

viewpoint is governed by Apollonian values, i.e. an explicit appeal to

order, reason, and temperance. This judgmental gaze seeks to malign

and repress Dionysian perspectives, i.e. that which is cast as Other

to reason (e.g. chaos, frenzy, insanity). Yet, I maintain it’s a

fetishist disavowal, because his quest to suppress, to subordinate or

2

to tame the Other, makes it all the more appealing--to the

philosopher. This move to contain, to constrict, however, is itself a

coercive move that receives little attention in philosophical

discussions of the Apollonian order of things. What this paper

attempts to show is that insidious violence is one of the mask, albeit

effective masks of Appolonian rationality, even when authoritative

voices (judges, philosophers, scientists, etc.) appear to enunciate

disavowals of proliferation of repression. My critique of traditional

and feminist perspectives draws on the work of Judith Butler, Charles

Mills, and Slavoj Zizek and make use of a foucaultian framework.

3

Western philosophers share a peculiar obsession for that which

they have deemed objectionable and cast aside. In a famous exchange

between Socrates and Parmenides in Plato’s dialogue Parmenides,

Socrates, prompted by the senior interlocutor, downplays the

ontological status of dirt, hair, mud, and other ‘vile’ entities which

do not seem to take part in the forms of the good and beautiful

(130c). In the Republic, Plato raises trouble with mimetic

representation of artwork whihc he deems as being ‘twice removed from

reality' and being ‘a mere play.’ I claim that while Plato maligns

ontologically the object under scrutiny (be it hair or poetry), he re-

inscribes a fetishistic desire that hauls the object back into the

thinker's field of vision. His god's-eye viewpoint is governed by

Apollonian values, i.e. an explicit appeal to order, reason, and

temperance. This judgmental gaze seeks to malign and repress

Dionysian perspectives, i.e. that which is cast as Other to reason

(e.g. chaos, frenzy, insanity). Yet, I maintain it’s a fetishist

disavowal, because his quest to suppress, to subordinate or to tame

the Other, makes it all the more appealing--to the philosopher. This

4

move to contain, to constrict, however, is itself a coercive move that

receives little attention in philosophical discussions of the

Apollonian order of things. What this paper attempts to show is that

insidious violence is one of the mask, albeit effective masks of

Appolonian rationality, even when authoritative voices (judges,

philosophers, scientists, etc.) appear to enunciate disavowals of

proliferation of repression. My critique of traditional and feminist

perspectives draws on the work of Judith Butler, Charles Mills, and

Slavoj Zizek and make use of a foucaultian framework.

What consequences does this ontological move have for play

activities? After all, Plato seeks to tame ‘non-serious’ activities,

in their tainted association with poetry? The repression of play

(paidia) is not quite successful, because the disavowal of mere

amusements rekindles the philosopher's desire to toy with it. In this

case, the formula of fetishistic disavowal goes like this: "I know

. I am invoking Nietzsche's concepts of the Apollonian and Dionysian (cf. Birth of Tragedy).. I am invoking Nietzsche's concepts of the Apollonian and Dionysian (cf. Birth of Tragedy).

5

very well that play ought to be repressed; nevertheless (I believe) it

is part and parcel of my discourse.” So, even in his infamous mimesis

critique, Plato sneaks in playful applications, without ‘confessing’

to us that this is what he’s doing. Poets who imitate are admonished

by Plato to come up with a good reason why they ought not to be thrown

out of the city. At the end of Book 10 of the Republic Plato throws

in a conciliatory remark that life would be rather dull without play

or mimesis. Even though Plato's play is intended to be fairly

domesticated and imbued with Apollonian values, this ideal seems to

running away from him in the elusive character of Socrates, a sophist-

trickster who excels in myth-telling and in setting up his webs of

conjuring tricks by letting the sophists fall prey to their own

eristic, i.e. verbally combatative, traps which they set for their

interlocutors; Socrates's eristic bravadour is superbly played out in

the Euthedymus.

In fact, it is really Aristotle who endorses a purely

intellectual, rational playfulness and puts a full stop to Dionysian

masquerade. Life, he reminds us, is serious and not play. There is

very little indication in Aristotle's writings that gives us an

6

impression that he secretly clings onto Dionysian revelry--although,

again, his fascination with Euripidean tragedies as best tragedies is

another instance of fetishistic disavowal--this of course, requires of

us (pace Nietsche) to recognize Dionysian play elements in Euripides’s

work). After all, Dionysus, god of many names, has a terrifying

frenzied persona in Euripides's play The Bacchae: he incites

Pentheus's own mother to murder her son, because she mistakes him for

a wild animal while she is under the god's Bacchanalian spell.

There is one common feature in the otherwise diverse play

discourses of the Presocratics, Plato, and Aristotle. This is

agonistic play, a display of violence in the form of a verbal duel

which usually entails that somebody or something is toppled, cancelled

out. In the texts of Homer and Heraclitus it occurs in the metaphor

of child's play, that is, in confounding sand towers and in playing at

draughts. The gods appear in a child's disguise and tinker with human

fate--they are the ultimate puppeteers. In post-Socratic

philosophical discourse such agonism usually appears in the form of an

ostentatious presentation of the putatively better argument. At the

same time, philosophers have maintained that their discourse is

7

precisely not play, or at least not of the frivolous kind: As stated

above, this malediction of (Dionysian) play can be traced back to

Aristotle. The so-called artist metaphysicians (Nietzsche, Deleuze,

Fink, Gadamer) pay serious attention to play and thus contribute to a

paradigm shift, but they do not explore sufficiently the

subjectivities of players who have been placed as outsiders to Western

metaphysics.

Recent feminist epistemological thought (e.g. Haraway, Anzaldúa,

. In chapter 6 of Book X of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle revisits the question of the nature of happiness. (1176a30; cf. Book I.6) Happiness is thought to be self-sufficient, Aristotle observes, and desirable for its own sake; yet, virtuous actions also belong to happiness. The activity of happiness has to be contrasted, Aristotle goes on, with playful ones, contrary to the dominant opinion. To put it crudely, for Aristotle, striving for happiness does not consist in indulging in amusement. (1176b9) This instructionis arguably a stark contrast to the Homeric and Heraclitean predilection for thearistocratic life, clearly synonymous with indulging in play--not toil. But here in the NE, Aristotle admonishes his audience (the corrupt archons, phauloi, supporting the tyrant ruler) that a life in accordance with virtue is serious and not a play. The following quote explains this dichotomy between play and seriousness: "And we say that serious things [spoudaia] are better than laughablethings and those connected with amusement [paidia]..." (1177a) Aristotle affirmshere unambiguously that play and seriousness are opposites. Aristotle emphatically denies playfulness any claim to seriousness, in fact "to exert oneself and work for the sake of amusement [paidia] seems silly and utterly childish." (1176b) Moreover, playing games for amusement's sake is "played out"against "serious" activities of the virtuous person (in chapter 6), the philosopher (in chapter 7), and the legislator (in chapter 9); play is also castin opposition to work (ergon).

8

Singer, Bell, and Lugones) opens up the monolithic (white, male) play

domain for contestation by playful subaltern selves. Using feminist

insights, e.g. casting aside the vision of the 'arrogant Eye,' they

try to confront the 'warrior' mentality that is so prevalent in play

discourse. Yet, some have perhaps gone too far in hastily displacing

agonistic play (via abstract negation) by postulating a conflict-free,

maternal, woman-centered play perspective, which emphasizes a

particular kind of world-travelling and loving perception (cf.

Lugones, Frye). Such play may have therapeutic value and is

especially appropriate for consciousness-raising groups which seek to

end women's complicity in misogynist violence. In other contexts,

however, a more promising, determinate negation of agonistic play is

the invocation of the trickster or coyote, who toys with masks (cf.

Haraway, Singer). The trickster is a mythic pendant to the Greek god

of wine--and I argue that the Dionysian play has been tamed, if not

eclipsed from Western philosophical thought since Aristotle till Hegel

and Nietzsche, who have reclaimed a non-intellectualist Dionysus. We

. Even Jürgen Habermas's discourse theory which claims to espouse an 'uncoerciveforce' is marked by agonism.

9

need to explore a feminist re-interpretation of Dionysian powers and

of strategic resistances within the ludic horizon while avoiding a

romanticization of playful desires. What kind of Dionysus do we want

to conjure up for our purposes? A Euripidean or a completely

different kind of trickster, such as an Angelus Novus or a Coyote?

Let us first turn to the trope of Walter Benjamin's Angelus

Novus. In order to its meaning we need to look at the role of

melancholy. Is the play of mourning part of this (other) game?

Melancholy links play with violence insofar as a person overcome by

such a mood toys with suicidal tendencies. It is the gap between the

messianic and materialist perspectives. The Angelus Novus is the

placeholder of this gap. This angel of history manifests the promise

of a materialist aesthetic gaze, facing the ruins of history (of war,

genocide, diseases, and catastrophes piling up) and catapulting the

repressed past into 'Now-Time.' Such understanding of history

differs from historicism, because it does not rely on linear,

'monumental,' dead narratives. The materialist historian disrupts

such smooth concatanation by exploding the chains to crystallize the

revolutionary potential of a particular historical event. Such

10

geneaological writing risks however being sentimental, romanticizing

imagined revolutionary moments of the past. And in fact, Benjamin's

'Now-Time' is messianic and redemptive, yet it avoids a utopian

masquerade of a coming community. This strategy comes to the fore in

the simile of the Angelus Novus:

[The angel] would like to be tarrying with the past, the ruins inorder to awake the dead and repair what is broken. But a storm blows from paradise, which is caught in the angel's wings and is so strong that the angel cannot close her wings. This storm carries her inevitably into the future, to which she has her back turned, while the pile of ruins increases sky high in front of her. That, which we call progress, is this storm.

Angelus Novus stares down melancholically the past; with this

simile our historical materialist wants to reinscribe a messianic time

(or Now-time) capturing revolutionary moments of the past to awaken

the consciousness of the (European) left. The task of the historian

is "to establish a notion of present as 'Now-Time' in which splinters

of messianic time are blasted in [eingesprengt]. Benjamin's angel

grapples with the dialectics of frozen time and redemptive chances and

wants to disavow quietist bourgeois melancholic sentiments. It is

indeed a curious paradox, that is, to engage in a critique of ideology

11

(of capitalism, of progress) and to hold on to melancholy associated

with capitalist dream-time, from which we need to awake. This angel

is no trickster though. Like Nietzsche’s trope of the camel, it is

burdened with a spirit of gravity, yet, prophetically warns us not to

engage in naive teleological historicism.

For less gloomy play instances one needs to turn to the coyote

who can heal "with humor and wonder, we wear the agonistic moment, not

the burdens of the past, but beware [...], in our second stories we

turn the mood, liberate the chickens, autistic colonists, and

overthrow the world that you remember, and learn to count on the

clock."

Feminist Encounters

. Benjamin, 1980, Thesis IX. Benjamin refers to Paul Klee's painting of an angel, entitled Angelus Novus.. I borrow this differentiation from Pensky, 1993, p.16.. Cf. Benjamin, Theses XVIff.. Ibid. pp.697-98 (translation, MN; emphasis in italics, MN).. Ibid. Anhang A, p.704. The idea of messianic splinters shot through Now-Time is borrowed from Kabbalistic tradition. The mirror of the Kabbala broke and itssplinters fell all over the world. (cf. Sholem, Die Kabbala). On dream-time, cf. Pensky, 1993, pp.214.". Vizenor, 1988, p.19 (a narrative of the woodland trickster of northern Minnesota).

12

Before we look at the subversive play of the trickster, let us

turn to the promises of a feminist manoever of disentangling play from

agonism. We need to pose the question whether there is a way to

undermine the necessary connection of play and violence. Mindful of

Benjamin’s critique of the aestheticization of politics, Girard's and

Bataille's fascination with sacrificial ritualistic play seem

callous--Bataille's sentimental fixation on the aesthetics of torture

rituals is especially manifest in his Tears of Eros. In Linda Bell's

feminist espousal of a Sartrean ethic 'in a violent age' we see an

attempt of avoiding an exoticization of violent play: playful

activities may be used as revolutionary strategies to undermine the

oppressive regimes of racism, classism and sexism. We may ask

however, what happens if play used by feminist revolutionaries turns

violent? Do we need to domesticate the Dionysian forces unleashed in

the movement of playful performativity? Can we ever prevent mockery

from turning into uncontrollable frenzy? The problem associated with

a repression of it, i.e. the moral intervention from a god's eye

. Allison Weir (1996) critiques feminist sacrificial logics of identity and deems the turning of the Other inside/out a bad move.

13

perspective ('you ought not to follow those kinds of rules!'--is not

adequately theorized in Bell's analysis of revolutionary game.

Linda Bell also observes that women have been identified with

play, with mocking laughter, and non-seriousness, throughout Western

thought. So, it seems desirable to claim play in such a way as to

defy or to queer the categories imposed on the feminine, the fair

gender. Plato sends away the slave women flute players when the

discourse turns to serious matters, such as a discussion of 'what is

love?' in the Symposium. Feminine, erotic flute play dilutes grave

philosophical subject matter. Increasingly, after Plato, Western

philosophers tend to send women away, not only because they play too

much (or the wrong kind of game), but because they lack the grasp of

abstract principles. In the Theatetus, Plato gives an account of

Thales being mocked by a Tracian woman--and this mockery haunts (male)

philosophers to this day signifying a crisis in representation.

However, Bell's claim that western philosophy has spearheaded a

feminization, i.e. hysterization of all types of play, may be too

strong. After all, white male thinkers, such as Heidegger, Gadamer,

and Eugen Fink, have reclaimed a particular aesthetic type of play as

14

a guiding thread to their hermeneutic/phenomenological methods. Yet,

their play is not politicized, i.e. discussed within the matrices of

power but within a fairly apolitical (i.e. conservative,

traditionalist) aesthetic horizon. Feminist and Marxist play

theorists on the other hand have provided corrective perspectives and

contextualized play within the political and ethical sphere, as well

as have raised political concerns in their aesthetic considerations

(e.g. Judith Butler, Herbert Marcuse, and Maria Lugones).

Bell's theory of revolutionary play outline a specific set of

rules. She puts forth certain conditions, which include the

following: raising awareness which is "clear, critical, and

oppositional," so that mistakes can be minimized and certain kinds of

risky play practices be avoided, such as S/M. The player should be

aware of the danger of cooptation and not use play/parody as a safety

valve. Rather, good play should be ongoing, take people by surprise,

and could exaggerate oppressive conditions to work as antidote. Play

activities may not be used as a parody when they would only work to

reenforce the status quo, as in Mardi Gras carnivalesque festivals

where the oppressive authorities are ridiculed and law-and-order

15

immediately restored after the end of the transgressive practices.

Bell's analysis has great appeal: She avoids a romanticization of

play and warns of carnevalesque masquerades which have cleansing,

purifying functions to appease Volkszorn which might otherwise produce

a political revolution. In addition, she raises caveats about certain

expressions of play which straddle the divide of peaceful and violent

sentiments, as in sado-masochist practices, in part because such

practice seems repulsive to the ethnographic Eye and because the

boundaries of consensus and coercion are too fluid and hence already

transgress correct playful desires.

But can we--with Johan Huizinga--always be certain what counts as

good, as authentic play? This is the problem Judith Butler was faced

with after feminists started criticizing her celebration of parodic

performativity in Gender Trouble (1990). Butler eventually conceded

in Bodies That Matter (1993) that not all parodic practices are

politically progressive. Parodic play which does not incite other

subjects to rise up and join in the game loses its revolutionary

potential and simply turns inward, romanticizes the Other and is

. Bell, 1993, p.254.

16

quietist. Euripides's play The Bacchae may serve as insightful

example. Dionysus, the god of wine, calls on the subjects of Pentheus

to cross-dress and assemble on the outskirts of town to participate in

Bacchanalean festivals. Unbeknownst to them these subjects end up

tearing apart the body of Pentheus, led by Pentheus's own mother, who

thinks she is dismembering an animal. This play hints at the

transgressive and violent possibilities of revolutionary practice, by

using parody, mockery, and trickery to empower subaltern subjects who

in turn rise up against an oppressive regime. Dionysus's stern

warning at the end of the play directed at Pentheus's mother and other

kin erases the possibility that the state apparatus would punish the

disobedient subjects in order to restore the status quo, the

monarchical order of things. Yet, it is possible to defend other

readings (the play of différence), which stress the revolutionary

potentiality of the ending, because it is not at all obvious that

Apollonian order will be restored.

Dionysus or Bacchus is the Western pendant to so-called

. This is indeed an interpretation put forth by Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinkain his version of the Bacchae.

17

tricksters in non-Western cultures.' In Navajo narratives, the

trickster is most celebrated in the form of a coyote.

It is a demi-god, sometimes human, sometimes god-like, a being which

defies structuralist analyses; its character is elusive, because it

appears exceedingly intelligent in some tales while in others

exceedingly stupid (like German trickster Till Eulenspiegel). The

trickster of the Navajo and plain Indians also takes on various

shapes, such as rabbit, Ictinike (Omaha for monkey), spider and demi-

god. Often stories describe an encounter between both rabbit and

Ictinike tricking each other.

Donna Haraway describes tricksters as "[r]ichly evocative figures

exist[ing] for feminist visualizations of the world as witty agent.

We need not lapse into an appeal to a primal mother resisting becoming

resource. The Coyote or Trickster ... suggests our situation when we

give up mastery but keep searching for fidelity, knowing all the while

we will be hoodwinked." In invoking the trickster for our purposes

here, we need to be wary of romanticization; no maternal glances

). Welsch, 1981, pp.17-19.". Haraway, 1990, p.199.

18

return our gaze which may want to appropriate them as such. Coyote is

vindictive; he kills and skins his (mostly female) victims in order to

don their feathers and furs to evade his enemies or to set them up

against each other.

In mythologies of Coyote, a recurrent theme is a fixation on the

sacrificial aspects of lives; he toys with death, but despite his

super-sensory trickster abilities, he often is on the losing side of

the game: others outperform his conjuring tricks and even kill him.

Another aspect is the identification of Coyote with the abject--yet in

a comic, rather than tragic way. The trickster plays with excrements,

the ultimate abject, as the following story, a lesson in humility,

makes clear: A beautiful woman spurned the men in her tribe. "Several

wanton suitors constructed a handsome man with shit, dressed him in

fine clothes and directed him to the woman. She was smitten with love

at the sight of him, an outsider; she followed him to the end of the

trail where he melted down to a heap of shit." Coyote appears in many

stories that warn tribal members about hubris; he is a floating

r. Cf. Mourning Dove story "Coyote Juggles His Eyes," 1990.

19

signifier, taking on many masks--desirable and repulsive ones--not

unlike Dionysus, who is called 'god of many names.'

Moralizing about play practices is counter-productive to feminist

discourses, especially when contextualized analysis is abandoned.

Neither maternal ethics (Ruddick) nor appealing to imagined

communities of third world feminists (Mohanty) are particularly useful

strategies. Playing with violence seems risky to most feminists who

want to eschew warrior mentalities often marking male philosophical

discourse. But while non-competitive world-travelling may be employed

strategically to displace dominant agonistic practices, it is just one

of many Dionysian masks that can be flaunted--and which even may fail

to leave impressions. Perhaps we even need to reconfigure our

political imagination to avoid binary dichotomies, such as agonistic

versus peaceful playfulness; in particular, we need to stop pretending

that non-competitiveness comes only in one 'brand' and not in many

". Vizenor, 1989, p.204.s. "Why Badger is so Humble" is a story about a male tribal member spurning the women in his tribe and pursuing the stranger, Coyote, who has her face painted with many colors (cf. Dove, 1990, pp.135-137).s. On the failure of performative acts of gendering, e.g. drag, see Butler, 1991, p.21.

20

varieties (like agonistic play). The tragic-comic figure of the

trickster reminds us that (human) play can be shot through with both

agonistic and an-agonistic perspectives. A play theorist's purifying

move of squashing deviant (risky, etc.) desires leads her back to a

dogmatic, stifling Apollonian world-order, where dissent and

disruptions are silenced and sacrificed by fetishistic disavowals--yet

the monster is always lurking and on the move of reclaiming its

territories.

. S/M desires and practices may be instructive here. Erotica seem to play on producing many conflicting desires (abjection, repulsion, attraction, trauma) inthe reader's imaginary; she may find herself attracted to both the sufferer's ('victim,' bottom) and the sadist's (top) expressions within the same narrative.Pat Califia's book Melting Point (Boston: Alyson, 1993) is a good case in point.

21

Bibliography

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands, La Frontera. The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987).

Bataille, Georges. Les Larmes d'Eros (Paris: J.-J. Pauvert, 1971).

Bell, Linda. Rethinking Ethics in the Midst of Violence (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1993).

Benjamin, Walter. "Über den Begriff der Geschichte" in: Gesammelte Schriften Band I 2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980), pp.691-704.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble (NY: Routledge, 1990)._______________. Bodies That Matter (NY: Routledge, 1993)._______________. "Imitation and Gender Subordination," in inside/out. Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (NY: Routledge, 1991),pp. 13-31.

Desmond, William. Beyond Hegel and Dialectic (NY: SUNY Press, 1992).

Dove, Mourning (Humishuma). Coyote Stories (Lincoln: U of Nebraska Press).

Euripides. The Bacchae, trans. C.K. Williams (NY: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1990).

Frye, Marilyn. The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1983).

Girard, René. La violence et le sacré (Paris, 1972).

Haraway, Donna. Cyborgs, Simians, and Women (NY: Routledge, 1990)

Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950).

Hymes, Dell H. "Coyote, the Thinking (Wo)man's Trickster," in

22

Monsters, Tricksters and Sacred Cows, ed. A.James Arnold (U of Virginia Press, 1996), PP.108-137.

Lugones, María. "Playfulness, 'World'-Travelling, and Loving Perception." In Hypatia, 2(2), 3-19.

Mohanty, Chandra. "Introduction." In Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, eds. Mohanty et al. (Bloomington: Indiana U Press, 1991).

Pensky, Max. Melancholy Dialectics. Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Amherst: U of Mass Press, 1993).

Ruddick, Sarah. Maternal Ethics (London: Women's Press, 1989).

Singer, Linda. Erotic Welfare: Sexual Theory in the Age of Epidemic (NY: Routledge, 1992)

Vizenor, Gerald. "A Postmodern Introduction." In Narrative Chance. Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures (Albuquerque: U of Mexico Press, 1989), pp.3-16._______________. The Trickster of Liberty (Minneapolis: U of MinnesotaPress, 1988).

Weir, Allison. Sacrificial Logics (NY: Routledge, 1996)

Welsch, Roger. Omaha Tribal Myths and Trickster Tales (Chicago: Sage Books, 1981).

Zizek, Slavoj. For They Know Not What They Do (Verso, 1991)

Notes