Despair Satire Fleabag pt 1 PDF

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Despair Lesson 2: Selfhood & Satir Satire e to explore this week: Questions ♦ How does Kierkegaard’s formula for Selfhood shift us from “Outrage” to Despair, implicating us in critique from within? ♦ Is satire a form of “Critique from Within”? ♦ Is Fleabag a satire?

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Unit 2 (Despair) Today’s Read Readings: ings: • Andr e aLongChu&Emme t tHa r s i nDr a ge r , “ Af t e rTr a ns S t udi e s ”( GLQ2 019 ) • Ma r i s s aBr os t off, “Not e sonCa i t l yn, orGe nde rTr oubl e :On t heCont i nue dUs e f ul ne s sofCampasQue e r Me t hod”( Di ffe r e nc e s2 017 ) Today’s W Watching: atching: • Fl e a b a gSe a s on1, e p6 ; Se as on2 , e pi s ode s12 optional reading: • Kyl aSc hul l e r , “ TheAf t e r l i ve sofI mpr e s s i bi l i t y , ”The Bi o p o l i t i c so fFe e l i ng( Duke2 018)

Harry [the director of Fleabag] was convinced that the greatest love story we had to tell was that between Fleabag and herself. I shuddered at the sentimentality of it, but I knew it was true. Waller –Phoebe W aller Bridge (412)

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Selfhood & Kierk Kierkegaard’ egaard’ egaard’ss Critique from Within

Here’s the formula for selfhood laid out by Anti-Climacus, Kierkegaard’s most religious pseudonym, in The Sickness Unto Death: (first function: the 3 syntheses): “A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between the two…. (second function: relating to the 3 syntheses): If… the relation relates itself to itself, this relation is the positive third, and this is the self…. (third function: willing or not willing to be a self): ”The human self is such a derived, established relation, a relation that relates itself to itself and in relating itself to itself relates itself to another. This is why there can be two forms of despair in the strict sense.” Let’s notice how singular (ie. utterly specific to each individual’s existence) and dynamic this formula is. (It will be entirely different, depending on when, where, how, and what we are going through). Notice, too, that this is a relational account: we have relations to ourselves, first and foremost, but our syntheses are also entangled with relations with others (friends, lovers, kin, strangers), with social scripts and norms, and with social/political structures. Ultimately, there’s an overarching hope, offered by Anti-Climacus, that the most intense despair gives rise to “faith”: “The formula that describes the state of the self when despair is completely rooted out is this: in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it.” This formula is the very definition of faith (372).

“Selfhood” & Critique: A R Reflective eflective Activity First, take some time to sketch out expressions of the three syntheses in the formula of selfhood. These are abstract variables on their own, and so the challenge is to convert them into concrete ingredients of your own selfhood, each of which you negotiate, assess, and realize in your own way. Where’s the drama of selfhood, for you, in each of these syntheses? (For each of us, there will likely be a drama that is immediately more obvious than others: this will be valuable to note, as you do this exercise). Where’s the tension between flexible self-creation and the securities of givenness? The 1st synthesis: Where does boundlessness (of values, qualities, ideals) connect with or contradict the here and now (like laws of the body, or society, or community, or family)? The 2nd synthesis: How does uncharted openness (of the future, or of time itself) connect with or contradict the pull of the past or the bustle of time or the interruptions of a flashback?

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The 3rd synthesis: how does the unconstrained openness of possibility or potential (in activities, or choices) connect with or contradict the givenness of pressing mandates (in biology or social scripts)?

Opening beyond the concrete, boundless Infinite: __________________________

Concrete factors, grounded in space, time, bodies &

Finite: ______________________________

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Eternal: __________________________

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Temporal: ______________________________

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Freedom: ________________________ __________________________

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Necessity: _______________________________ _______________________________

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Second, let’s reflect on how “the self” relates to itself.

What’s the quality of your relations to your relational dramas? Am I really this? Am I proud or ashamed of this? Can I live with this? (See Mooney, 1049). What affects or even meta-affects are at play in your relations to the syntheses? What do you celebrate, bemoan, grieve, affirm? Where are you complacent, and where is there some energetic improvisations at play? What real or imagined relations with others are essentially part of these dramas of the syntheses? Is there an inner theatre of dream life or inward conversations that animate any of these dramas? Let’s remember one of our definitions of “affect”: the ability to affect and be affected (Chu & Harsin Drager, 112). To affect: to assert values, to shape dynamics, to open up and push against limits To be affected: to be shaped by others, experiences, norms, inheritances So where do your relations (to your syntheses) affirm how you are affecting the world (leaving palpable traces of your selfhood), and where do your relations (to your syntheses) affirm how you are affected (manifesting the impact of somethings or some peoples in your selfhood)? ((can you detect agency and also accident as ways that you make sense of your self, relationally?)) What “critique from within” can you detect in your meta-affective and relational selfhood? In a critique from within, we are implicated in the most essential ways because it is our very selfhood that stages or dramatizes the critique. For example, are there norms that your meta-affective self is working to shift or transform? Are there ideals or values (of desire, of gender, of political or religious identity) that your relations-to-the-relations are actively re-negotiating? Are there relations to others that are in the process of shifting, thanks to your self-relations?

Third, let’s reflect on the status of willing. Anti-Climacus predicts that there are two kinds of willing: not willing to be a self (one kind of despair) or willing to be a self (a more intense kind of despair, that ultimately leads to faith). Where might you detect the more intense kind of despair (willing to be a self) in how you are relating, at this moment in your life, to your relations?

II.

Satire as Critique fro from m Within (shifting fro from m Outrage to Despair)

Outrage: authenticity, sincerity, the serious, a bifurcation between “real” from “fake”, “hero” from “interloper”) (Borstoff 3, 5, 7, 14). Satire or camp: artifice, mimicry, imitation, comedy, the uncommitted, melodrama

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Satire is a genre that gains effects by frustrating normal expectations about the kinds of resolutions provided by stories cast in other worlds (Chu, 105). Camp is a way to generate a satirical commentary on the conventions of the unattained effect (Brostoff, 2). “’This is our task, to write a trans satire.’” (Chu, 104). “ trans satire, I think, has the potential to become a real, substantive methodology—not rejecting narration as such (which is impossible), but trying to learn how to write without optimism, or maybe how to be optimistic without being hopeful. Then again, I do suspect that writing without optimism is also impossible, insofar as I am persuaded by Lauren Berlant that all attachment is optimistic, if we describe optimism as the force that moves you out of yourself and into the world in order to bring closer the satisfying something that you cannot generate on your own but sense in the wake of a person, a way of life, an object, project, concept, or scene. [Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 2011, 1-2] “‘Perhaps what I mean, then, is writing without political optimism, that is, writing without the subsumption of all optimistic attachment under the sign of the political. Call this a bitter optimism, maybe…. real bitterness, the bitter disappointment of finding out the world is too small for all our desires, and especially the political ones’” (Harsin Drager, 105-6). Critique from Within: an example from philosophy: Talia Mae Bettcher (on the Hypatia crisis, as cited by Brostoff, 16) “There are not many journals like Hypatia in philosophy. And I’m glad that it exists. And if (it’s a BIG if) we’re at all interested in doing work in professional philosophy, then we need journals like Hypatia. But this also means that we need Hypatia to hold itself to standards that are different from mainstream philosophy, standards that mainstream philosophers may not even understand. This puts Hypatia in a highly fraught position. “On the one hand, it needs to be the kind of journal that secures reputability within the profession of philosophy. This is crucial in helping junior professors who do work at the margins be taken seriously. On the other hand, it can’t merely replicate the standards of reputability with the profession without annihilating its reason for existence. Of course, this is precisely the dilemma that all of us who work at the margins face. It’s one of the many double-binds that characterize work at the margins…. I don’t say any of this to excuse Hypatia for what happened. But I do think it is important to frame the issue within the larger context of a shared struggle in ‘doing philosophy’ at the margins and to recognize the treacherous ground on which we attempt to work.” Where can we find Critique from Within (ie. satire/camp) in Fleabag? Norms do not exist, and so “the desire for the norm consists, in terms of its lived content, in nonnormative attempts at normativity”: nonnormativity is what wanting to be normal actually looks like... making do, in the gap between what we want and what wanting it gets us (Chu, 107). How gendered is the despair that we encounter in Fleabag in the three assigned episodes for today? (Season 1, last episode; season 2, first two episodes). After all, Andrea Long Chu writes, women carry the “baggage of gender” with them (109)

III.

Satire, Selfhood, & Fleabag

Kierkegaard himself staged a kind of satirical drama with selfhood. For example, referring to The Sickness Unto Death, he wrote in his journals: “One seems to detect in Anti-Climacus … a Christian on an extraordinarily high level. I would place myself… lower than Anti-Climacus” (JP VI, 6433). Phoebe WallerBridge’s character, Fleabag, likewise seems to stage a kind of satire of selfhood. Who is Fleabag? “I was twenty-seven and in a cynical spiral. Convinced my work and my brain carried less value than my desirability, a rage grew in me at the invisible lectures I felt I was getting all the time about how to be a woman, how to be a feminist. That the world measured a female’s worth only by her desirability. . . . Everywhere I looked there were inexplicably naked women—posters on the Tube, adverts for toothpaste, dog food…. I was teetering on the edge of a depression. From there, I looked down into the abyss and at the bottom of it was Fleabag looking up at me, in lipstick. “Her attitude. Her humour. Her ability to sum a person up and eviscerate them with a single, brutal insight is what drove me to write her…. The bitter author of her own tragedy. It was her fault. She could not complain, she couldn’t blame it on anyone. She didn’t feel sorry for herself and she didn’t attribute her flaws to any one event or ordeal that she had experienced. One day she woke up with an audience watching her so she did the only thing she could—she put on a show.” (Waller-Bridge, 407). Season 1, episode 1 Fleabag and her sister Claire are at a “feminist lecture.” The Lecturer asks, “Please raise your hands, if you would trade five years of your life for the so-called ‘perfect body.’” Fleabag and Claire

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raise their hands, alone among many other women. Fleabag whispers to Claire, “We are bad feminists.” Season 1, episode 4 Fleabag and the Bank Manager, who she’s reunited with at a retreat centre (she’s on a silent retreat; he’s on a men’s retreat). Bank Manager: “I want to move back home, I want to hug my wife, I want to protect my daughter, I want to move on, I want to apologize to—everyone, I want to go to the theatre, I want to take clean cups out of the dishwasher—and put them in the cupboard—at home. And the next morning I want to watch my wife drink from them. and I want to make her feel good. I want to make her orgasm again. And again truly.” Fleabag: “I just want to cry—all the time.” Season 1, episode 6 Claire’s convinced by her husband Martin’s account of a so-called kiss with Fleabag. Fleabag: “Claire, you have to believe me.” Claire: “How can I believe you?” Fleabag: “Because I’m your sister!” Claire: “After what you did to Boo.” Season 2, episode 1 Fleabag and her dad have left the uncomfortable dinner at the restaurant for a break, outside. Dad: “I just wanted to check that you were—that you and I were—you’re being very… [beat] You’re not being naughty.” Fleabag, laughing: “no.” Dad, laughing nervously: “Why?” Fleabag, genuinely: “Because, I guess—” Dad, laughing: “yes?” Fleabag: “It doesn’t matter.” He looks at her. Hurt. Dad: “Oh, well, I—Is that right?” [beat]. Fleabag: “I’m happy for you, Dad.” Dad: “Thank you.” Enormous silence. Same episode. Godmother to priest: “A lot of people would say praying is just talking to yourself in the dark.” Priest, laughing: “Prayer is just more about connecting with yourself at the end of the day. It takes a bit of effort, but it’s a positive way to—” Claire, interrupting: “Yes, I completely agree. Positive energy takes work. In the last six months I have excelled. I just take all the negative feelings and just bottle them and bury them. and they never come out…. I’ve basically never been better!” Season 2, episode 2 Priest: “The funeral liturgy says that life is changed and not ended. I’ve always loved that, if that’s of any help.” Fleabag: “Thank you very much but I really am an atheist.” Priest: “Yes, I gathered that by the smelling of the bible.” Same episode. Counsellor: “Just a girl with no friends and an empty heart. By your own description.” Fleabag: “I have friends.” Counsellor: “Oh, so you do have someone to talk to.” Fleabag: “Yeah,” winking at camera. Counsellor: “Do you see them a lot?” Fleabag, laughing: “Oh, yeah. They’re always there. They’re—always there.” Counsellor: “Why do you find that funny?” [a bit later] Counsellor: “You’ve already decided what you’re going to do.” Fleabag: “So what’s the point in you?” Counsellor: “You know what you’re going to do.” Fleabag: “No I don’t.” Counsellor: “Yes you do.” Fleabag: “I don’t!” Counsellor: “ You do.” Fleabag: “I don’t!” Counsellor: “You do.” Fleabag: “I don-“

IV. IV.

Aff Affect ect Studies, Violence & Critique fr from om Within

Kyla Schuller: “We currently lack a viable ontoepistemological frame that can understand experience as a process that forges the organic and psychic development of the individual and the bonds of the collective, rather than places individuals in direct or indirect competition with one another on account of their accumulated difference” (209) what new forms of belonging are now being imagined? (210). For example, Sylvia Wynter turns to Fanon, considering consciousness to be the outcome of an extended interplay between neural development and social context, rather than the organic outcome of the specialized human brain. “Wynter proposes that scientific accounts of human development must take into account individual subjective experience, such as racialization, as fundamental to the fact of consciousness” (211). “if race is inherited trauma, it is also affective belonging. What if one of the reasons there is so little scholarship on affect and racialization is because we have such scanty language to account for the ways violence registers in the body, the ways resilience, hope, and love take material form?.... A careful assemblage theory could also be a tool to more fully understand the hybrid nature of life itself and to build political models that sustain our collective bonds, rather than subjugating to economic imperatives our very capacities of feeling” (212-213).

Bettcher, Talia Mae. 2017. In “Hypatia and Cultures of Critique,” edited by Lisa Duggan https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2017/05/06/another-day/.

Mooney, Edward. 2013. “Dependence and Its Discontents: Kierkegaard on Being Sustained by Another,” MLN 128(5): 10381060.

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Waller-Bridge, Phoebe. 2019. Fleabag: The Scriptures. Ballantine Books.

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