Pynchon fan (and more) Martin Paul Eve on DFW

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

I've never read Wallace's essay "Authority and American Usage", but the 
way abortion is, according to Eve, treated there reminds me of Paglia's 
view on the issue.

Camille Paglia:

+ ... Despite my pro-abortion stance (I call the term pro-choice “a 
cowardly euphemism”), I profoundly respect the pro-life viewpoint, which 
I think has the moral high ground. I wrote in “No Law in the Arena”: “We 
career women are arguing from expedience: it is personally and 
professionally inconvenient or onerous to bear an unwanted child. The 
pro-life movement, in contrast, is arguing that every conception is 
sacred and that society has a responsibility to protect the 
defenseless.” The silence from second-wave feminists about the ethical 
ambiguities in their pro-choice belief system has been deafening. The 
one exception is Naomi Wolf, with whom I have disagreed about many 
issues. But Wolf showed admirable courage in questioning abortion in her 
1995 essay,“Our Bodies, Our Souls,” 
<http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2013/01/naomi-wolf-abortion-our-bodies-our-souls>which 
was reprinted at the 40^th anniversary of Roe v. Wade by the New 
Statesman in London three years ago ...

... There is a moral hollowness at the core of Western careerist 
feminism, a bourgeois secular code that sees children as an obstruction 
to self-realization or as a management problem to be farmed out to 
working-class nannies.

Liberals routinely delude themselves with shrill propaganda about the 
motivation of “anti-woman” pro-life supporters. Hillary deals in those 
smears as her stock in trade: for example, while campaigning last week, 
she said in the context of Trump’s comments on abortion, “Women’s health 
is under assault in America”—as if difficulty in obtaining an abortion 
is more of an assault than the grisly intervention required for surgical 
termination of a pregnancy. Who is the real victim here?

Or we have Gail Collins, former editorial page head at the New York 
Times, asserting last week in her column,“Trump, Truth, and Abortion,” 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/02/opinion/trump-truth-and-abortion.html?_r=1>“In 
reality, the anti-abortion movement is grounded on the idea that sex 
outside of marriage is a sin….It’s the sex, at bottom, that they 
oppose.” I saw red: where the hell were these middlebrow Steinem 
feminists of the prestige Manhattan media during the pro-sex insurgency 
of my rebel wing of feminism during the 1990s? Suddenly, two decades 
later, Collins is waving the sex flag? Give me a break!

To project sex phobia onto all pro-lifers is vulgar. Although I am an 
atheist who worships only great nature, I recognize the superior moral 
beauty of religious doctrine that defends the sanctity of life. The 
quality of idea and language in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, 
for example, exceeds anything in grimly utilitarian feminism. In regard 
to the Commandment “Thou shalt not kill,” the Catechism says: “Human 
life is sacred because from its beginning it involves the creative 
action of God….God alone is the Lord of life from its beginning until 
its end: no one can under any circumstance claim for himself the right 
directly to destroy an innocent human being” (#2258). Or this: “Human 
life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of 
conception. From the first moment of his existence, a human being must 
be recognized as having the rights of a person—among which is the 
inviolable right of every innocent being to life” (#2270).

Which embodies the more authentic humanism in this area—the Catholic 
Catechism or pro-choice feminism? If the latter, then we have much work 
to do to develop feminism philosophically. In “No Law in the Arena,” I 
argued from the point of view of pre-Christian paganism, when abortion 
was accepted and widespread: “My code of modern Amazonism says that 
nature’s fascist scheme of menstruation and procreation/should/be 
defied, as a gross infringement of woman’s free will….As a libertarian, 
I support unrestricted access to abortion because I have reasoned that 
my absolute right to my body takes precedence over the brute claims of 
mother nature, who wants to reduce women to their animal function as 
breeders.”

There are abundant contradictions in a liberal feminism that supports 
abortion yet opposes capital punishment. The violence intrinsic to 
abortion cannot be wished away by magical thinking. As I wrote: 
“Abortion pits the stronger against the weaker, and only one survives.” 
My program is more ideologically consistent, because I vigorously 
support abortion but also call for the death penalty for horrific crimes 
such as political assassination or serial rape-murder. However, the 
ultimate issue in the abortion debate is that, in a modern democracy, 
law and government must remain neutral toward religion, which cannot 
impose its expectations or values on non-believers.

In anin-depth piece in the Boston Globe 
<https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/02/16/for-pregnant-women-two-sets-rights-one-body/5Pd6zntIViRBZ9QxhiQgFJ/story.html>two 
years ago, Ruth Graham summarizes one view of the controversial emerging 
concept of fetal rights in cases where a pregnant woman has been 
attacked or killed: “It is progressives who have historically pushed to 
expand civil rights, yet who now find themselves concerned about the 
expansion of rights to fetuses.” Progressives need to do some 
soul-searching about their reflex rhetoric in demeaning the pro-life 
cause. A liberal credo that is variously anti-war, anti-fur, vegan, and 
committed to environmental protection of endangered species like the 
sage grouse or spotted owl should not be so stridently withholding its 
imagination and compassion from the unborn. +


https://www.salon.com/2016/04/07/camille_paglia_feminists_have_abortion_wrong_trump_and_hillary_miscues_highlight_a_frozen_national_debate/


Martin Paul Eve:

+ ... Wallace’s own political orientation is relevant to a discussion of 
his treatment of abortion in “Authority and American Usage” since he 
explicitly states, in that essay, “that [he] has encountered only one 
serious objection to this Pro Life + Pro Choice position”, which 
concerns “certain facts about [Wallace], the person who’s developed and 
maintained it”.^84 
<https://olh.openlibhums.org/articles/10.16995/olh.538/#n83> 
Notwithstanding, then, the difficult positionality of Wallace, the 
argument presented in the essay is that a form of simultaneous 
doublethink is required wherein “the only really coherent” position is 
to be both “Pro Life” and “Pro Choice”, at the same time.^85 
<https://olh.openlibhums.org/articles/10.16995/olh.538/#n84> Wallace 
hinges this thesis on the vitalist tenet that “the question of defining 
human life/in utero/is hopelessly vexed” and that, under this situation 
of “irresolvable doubt”, “it is better not to kill”. At the same time, 
Wallace resorts to an individualist (or even, one might posit, 
neoliberal-esque) screed that, under the same situation of doubt, he has 
“neither the legal nor the moral right to tell another person what to 
do”. The paragraph ends with one of several of Wallace’s indirect 
stereotyped attacks on feminisms, in which he interpellates a fictional 
man-eater who brands him “Just Another Shithead Male”.^86 
<https://olh.openlibhums.org/articles/10.16995/olh.538/#n85>

There is, of course, a long school of post-structuralist thought from 
the 1960s onwards that argues against reductivist binary thinking on 
ethical and political grounds, most notably stemming from Jacques 
Derrida’s influential work on presence. The holding of two beliefs 
simultaneously that are opposed to one another indeed seems based on 
such a premise. Yet, is this not, to some extent, the very 
“equivocationary horseshit” to which Pemulis referred in the Eschaton 
game? For, as Derrida claimed, it was his belief that “deconstruction 
loses nothing from admitting that it is impossible”.^87 
<https://olh.openlibhums.org/articles/10.16995/olh.538/#n86>

This is not just an excuse to throw stones at deconstruction from an 
ethical glass house. Such ideas of non-contradiction run to the core of 
a post-critical philosophy. Meillassoux notes, for instance, that 
contemporary correlationist philosophers must take care not to justify 
“the universality of non-contradiction”.^88 
<https://olh.openlibhums.org/articles/10.16995/olh.538/#n87> Yet, this 
is precisely what Meillassoux goes on to do, arguing that “a 
contradictory entity is absolutely impossible, because if an entity was 
contradictory, it would be necessary. But a necessary entity is 
absolutely impossible; consequently, so too is contradiction”.^89 
<https://olh.openlibhums.org/articles/10.16995/olh.538/#n88> Whether a 
“belief” can be construed as an “entity” in an analogous sense to 
Meillassoux’s is another matter. However, it remains of interest that 
both Kantian and speculative realist philosophies adhere to the 
principle of non-contradiction, which Wallace’s essay violates.

It is also clear, though, that Wallace’s argument is 
an/indefinite/deferral of ethical decision making on his part, since the 
doubt he has is branded as “irresolvable”, even while he timestamps this 
doubt to “[a]s of 4 March 1999”. And, indeed, it is “irresolvable doubt” 
on which Wallace’s argument for ethical inaction stands. For, notably, 
Wallace displaces ethical decision making onto others, “especially if 
that person feels s/he is/not/in doubt”. Doubt, then, but also affect; 
“feels”. Despite the rigorously logical nature of Wallace’s argument, 
non-intervention turns on structures of feeling and the belief, or 
otherwise, in a vitalist notion of sanctity of life.

Yet, there are also some extremely questionable comparisons made around 
this affective structure of belief in Wallace’s essay. For instance, 
religious belief is held by Wallace to be as strong a belief as a 
woman’s own belief about her bodily autonomy, the “ideological or 
religious convictions” that Wallace says “override reason” and lead to a 
“wacko dogmatic position”. Knowing the mind of God here is equated with 
the embodied (“ideological”) knowledge that women might have of their 
own bodies. In actual fact, though, if Wallace followed his own logic 
more thoroughly, he might see that his argument for non-intervention on 
the Pro-Choice side is stronger. For when the argument is reduced to 
participation within a liberal spirit of “democratic tolerance”, the 
1973 Roe vs. Wade decision gave the outcome of the US’s constitutional 
stance on abortion (which is not to say, of course, that ethics and the 
law equate to one another).^90 
<https://olh.openlibhums.org/articles/10.16995/olh.538/#n89> Since 
Wallace couches his argument in terms of a democratic spirit, though – 
and since he also notes that he has not the “legal” authority to 
override the Pro Choicer’s stance (but he does not note that the Pro 
Lifers’ stance has already been democratically, legally denied) – 
Wallace’s argument is, ironically, more in favour of the Pro Life 
stance, even while it purports a balanced neutrality ... +


Am 24.03.20 um 12:57 schrieb Mark Kohut:
> https://olh.openlibhums.org/articles/10.16995/olh.538/
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