The Republic of Dissent

Bed rest

I'm being forced to take some time off. So I will be posting sparingly or not at all.

Full circle

To come back to my favorite theme of this year so far: 68, here is an interesting take on it from Frank Furedi:

So, what should be our verdict on 1968? For better or worse, it was a year when many Western societies could no longer ignore the cultural revolution that threatened to undermine their traditional values. And in that sense, it represented an important historical moment. However, it is far from evident who bears responsibility for the events of the Sixties – the students marching on the streets of Paris, London and Berlin, or sections of the ruling elites who lost belief in the cultural legacy that underpinned their authority? Sadly, the decline of traditional authority has not been matched by the emergence of an enlightened, future-oriented alternative. Today, figures of authority rarely speak the language of human values. Instead they hide behind a cynical, technocratic worldview, and subject public life to the narrow instrumentalist logic of performance, delivery and best practice. Many of yesterday’s student radicals have been integrated by this new Establishment. They have opted for a small-minded, politically correct worldview that readily complements the political class’s ceaseless desire to ‘modernise’ and ‘reform’ its institutions.

I’m still wondering whether the 68 generation created anything and I don’t think that they did. Its major contribution was the legitimation of egocentrism in a globalizing world, which explains why it is still unable to let go its past believing that 68 changed the world.

Two steps back

I'm taking a couple of steps back from I'm doing because I've realized that in my rush to act and to live as fast and as much as I can, I have forgotten to enjoy my various experiences and to meditate. I've decided to slow down to force myself to enjoy the process more and to be  less obsess with time and action.

Silence

Difficult decisions

I have difficult decisions to make and I don't want to make that. However, I don't have any choice, it is either decide or perish. I've just realized that to act is not always to fix and that sometimes, you can make things worst for yourself when you refuse to accept failure and believe arrogantly that with will and effort, you can always make things better and change your life. It is hard to accept that it may often be better to go with the flow than to resist and to fight back when life punches you in the stomach.

Being and Jouissance

Slavoj Zizek on the heritage of May 68:

What survived of the sexual liberation of the 1960s was the tolerant hedonism easily incorporated into our hegemonic ideology. The superego imperative to enjoy thus functions as the reversal of Kant’s “Du kannst, denn du sollst!” (You can, because you must!)—it relies on a “You must, because you can!” That is to say, the superego aspect of today’s “non-repressive” hedonism (the constant provocation we are exposed to, enjoining us to go to the end and explore all modes of jouissance) resides in the way permitted jouissance necessarily turns into obligatory jouissance. This drive to pure autistic jouissance (through drugs or other trance-inducing means) arose at a precise political moment: when the emancipatory sequence of 1968 exhausted its potentials. At this critical point (mid-1970s), the only option left was a direct, brutal, passage a l’acte, which assumed three main forms: the search for extreme forms of sexual jouissance; leftist political terrorism (RAF in Germany, Red Brigades in Italy); and, finally, the turn towards the real of an inner experience (Oriental mysticism). What all three share is the withdrawal from concrete socio-political engagement.

There is something true to the notion that jouissance has become central to our time because the focus is no longer on thought, meditation, and thoroughness, but on feeling, orgasms, and immediacy. The obsession with jouissance is revelatory of the fact that, nowadays, to be you must either jouir, have an orgasm, or refrain from doing so, which explains why hell is no longer others but impotence, alienation, and the mere possibility that existence may not be about feelings and that raw jouissance is a just merely another form of enslavement, which reinforces nothingness. This fact explains why even pain, “sin,” privation and personal morality have become sources of jouissance. It is for this reason that Sunday’s sermons in big American mega-churches look as gigantic orgies where the goal is to get high on Jesus and on the fact that he is leading his followers to more stuff and thus to more jouissance.

Camus thought that the worm of absurdity was within the human heart and he was right. The saddest thing about the 1960s and its so-called sexual liberation is that they didn’t liberate sex, but that they maximized the absurdity of human existence by divinizing jouissance in order to kill thought in an attempt to eradicate the possibility for people to be miné, to be undermined. In our world, it has become difficult to find Roquentins, people who like the hero of Sartre’s Nausea think and think and think without jouissance blocking their awareness of absurdity, without seeking to escape nothingness. However, it is easier to find Estelles, people who, as the heroine of No Exit, cannot live without jouissance. In our world, the most important things are the mirror and other’s people gaze because they accentuate jouissance by externalizing it thus making it the main means of self-actualization and self-worth.

Religion and nastiness

Interesting thoughts from Julian Baggini on Religion, nastiness and extremism:

Religious doctrines have little to do with extremism and general nastiness. [Dan] Dennet made the fair point that some religions are more vulnerable to abuse by extremists than others. I agree that it’s certainly no coincidence that there have been no Quaker suicide bombings. But in general, whether someone is a Muslim, Christian or atheist is not, over the long sweep of history, a very good predictor of whether or not that person will be murderous. Those that are often have little grasp of their religion’s teachings anyway, so whatever is to blame it’s not theology. So, fighting extremism by fighting religious metaphysics seems inefficient to say the least. It may not be totally useless, but it doesn’t attack what’s critical.

Purple Wednesday

Too tired to blog (thanks to Pennsylvania, I had a long, but wonderful night), so here is a song that expresses what I'm feeling, it is Clic Clic by Mc Solaar.

To learn to be Clark Kent

The Sarkozy presidency is almost one year old and it is funny to notice how much things have changed. A year ago, Sarkozy was the superman politician that can going to anglo-saxonize France by revolutionizing the way it is governed and by changing some of its old traditions, which much of the world considered archaic. In short, a year Sarkozy was not only fresh and hip, but he was considered a superhero who would be better than Chirac in every way because he wasn’t afraid to take risk and to implement reforms. A year later, France and the world has realized that Sarkozy is Clark Kent and that he may not be the best Frenchman since Alexis de Tocqueville. A lot has been written about the loss of Sarkozy’s mojo and personally I believe that it is too early to consider its presidency to a failure. I believe that those who are disappointed were incredibly naïve and blinded by their own wishful thinking because the bar was set so high for Sarkozy that it was unavoidable that he was going to disappoint. Moreover, I have trouble to believe that the French electorate and the press (French and foreign) bought the message of Sarkozy’s cheesy and unrealistic campaign which promised not only to get rid of the inheritance of May 68, but also to make human rights a central part of French foreign policy by changing the nature of politics and refusing hypocrisies. Experience has shown that every time a politician promises to change politics, all s/he is saying arrogantly is that s/he is so wonderful and so heroic that her/his election will change human nature and a system, which is the way it is usually because it reflects the identity of the country. That is what happened to Sarkozy. He was forced to realize that he was the president of France not of an Anglo-Saxon country and the French are conservative. They like their political institutions and don’t want to have Tony Blair at the head of their state. The challenge for Sarkozy to have a successful presidency is to accept France and to accept to govern as Clark Kent, that is as man who has weaknesses, but who can manage to do always the right thing for his country.

Making love in French

The Guardian has an interview with George Stein in which he says the following about the relationship between languages and eros activity, with which I agree:

Sex, Steiner thinks, is mediated by language in interesting ways. "I have every reason to believe," he writes, "that an individual man or woman fluent in several tongues seduces, possesses, remembers differently according to his or her use of the relevant language." This isn't an unexpected position for Steiner - who has written extensively on translation and "the polyglot condition" in general - to take. But eyebrows have been raised over his arresting examples of multilingual sex-talk, which draw on his own characteristically recondite experiences. A French lover, he writes, once distracted him "in, as it were, mid-flow" by using a tricky subjunctive pluperfect ("Proust may have been among the last to handle these with ease"). "V", whose dreams were filled with "cats, chamberpots and left-handed firemen", liked Viennese place names: "Thus 'taking the streetcar to Grinzing' signified a gentle, somewhat respectful anal access."

I think that language conditioned the way one seduces, interacts with, and makes love to somebody. From my own personal experience, I know that my relationships have been different and that those differences have more to do with language than with culture. I’ve also realized that sex has in different meaning, a different shape, a different taste, which make difficult to view purely as something one does for reproductive purposes. What I’m trying to say is that French is a more erotic and more sensual language than English and that more often than not, it forces me to make sex an erotic experience, which it isn’t always in English. There is a reason why it is less disturbing to read Lolita in French than in English and that reason is that Humbert Humbert sounds less like a perverted bastard because he writes well and know how to talk about eroticism.

Fighting the lords of war

Tony Judt argues in an article in the New York Review of Books that one of the reasons why America has become increasingly willing to use force and is willing to use torture in this century is because it has never learned some of the most important lessons of the twenty-first century and has forgotten the ones that it did learn:

With the exception of the generation of men who fought in World War II, the United States thus has no modern memory of combat or loss remotely comparable to that of the armed forces of other countries. […] I believe it is this contrasting recollection of war and its impact, rather than any structural difference between the US and otherwise comparable countries, which accounts for their dissimilar responses to international challenges today. Indeed, the complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans understand—in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacifistic fantasies —seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well. Most Americans have been fortunate enough to live in blissful ignorance of its true significance.

[…] Ignorance of twentieth-century history does not just contribute to a regrettable enthusiasm for armed conflict. It also leads to a misidentification of the enemy. […] We are slipping down a slope. The sophistic distinctions we draw today in our war on terror—between the rule of law and "exceptional" circumstances, between citizens (who have rights and legal protections) and noncitizens to whom anything can be done, between normal people and "terrorists," between "us" and "them" —are not new. The twentieth century saw them all invoked. They are the selfsame distinctions that licensed the worst horrors of the recent past: internment camps, deportation, torture, and murder—those very crimes that prompt us to murmur "never again." So what exactly is it that we think we have learned from the past? Of what possible use is our self-righteous cult of memory and memorials if the United States can build its very own internment camp and torture people there?

Judt offers only part of an explanation because it doesn’t answer why a few European lefties such as Bernard Kouchner and André Glucksmann, who know as much about the twentieth century as Judt have become willing to fight wars or rather to intervene to use Benedict XVI language in countries in the name of human rights and for humanitarian reasons. My own explanation to this puzzling turn of history is that to these humanists the most important lesson of the twentieth century is that war is preferable to injustice, to genocide because it prevents them or at least stops them from becoming bigger crimes, crimes against humanity. To them, the use of force and other methods, objectionable most of the twentieth century, has become like the use of an amputation of a body part to prevent the spread of cancer throughout one’s body. Their argument is that war is an evil, which can become a good even if it not used as the last resort as long as its objectives are noble. Thus, the goodness of war depends not on whether it is an effective method to achieve a goal or whether everything was done to prevent it, but rather on its objectives. One of the problems with history is that it isn’t a thing in itself since people must interpret it and do so with the help of their own experience and biases.  One of the troubles with the beginning of this century is precisely the fact that people have sacralized, objectifies, and politicized history in attempts to justify both follies and the unjustifiable.

The politics and the art of defection

David Edgar in the Guardian on the defection of writers such as Christopher Hitchens, and Martin Amis from the left to the right:

As former victims of political delusion, these defectors claim a unique authority. But there is something quite particular about spending the second half of your life taking revenge on the first. Inevitably, however complete the conversion, what defectors think and do now is coloured by what they thought and did before.

[…] For, let's be clear, the alliance to which the new defectors object - the alliance enabled by a multiculturalism that sought to give visibility and confidence to entire communities - is not just between a few deluded revolutionaries and the odd crazed Muslim cleric. […] Many of the usual pathologies of defection can be detected in the current crop. The attack on multiculturalism - so often sold as a reassertion of Enlightenment principles - often masks a distinctly unenlightened reassertion of hierarchic and traditionalist thinking.

[…] Martin Amis's elegant prose shouldn't blind us to his seeming obsession with the Muslim birth rate as a "gangplank to theocracy" ("Has feminism cost us Europe?" he asked in an Independent interview). David Goodhart, editor of left-leaning Prospect magazine (who describes the 60s as "the decade that sharply eroded authority and constraint"), argued in his pamphlet Progressive Nationalism for a two-tier welfare system, the teaching of imperial history in schools, the creation of a migration and integration ministry, the raising of citizenship test hurdles, the reassertion of the monarchy and the army as nationally binding institutions, the banning of certain forms of dress from public buildings and the reintroduction of conscription. That several of these proposals are now government policy is an indication of how Gordon Brown's golden thread of British liberties has thickened into what looks more like a whip.

[…]Whether they like it or not, the current defectors are seeking to provide a vocabulary for the progressive intelligentsia to abandon the poor. So, for civil libertarians, the divide is no longer between left and right, but between authority and personal liberty. For atheists, it is between secularism and religious belief. For some American and European feminists, it is between women's rights and a multiculturalism that validates Muslim patriarchy. For a number of former leftwingers, it is between the social solidarity of a conservative working class and the demands of multicultural newcomers.

L'Académie Française and decay

Anita Elash had an excellent article earlier this week in the Globe and Mail on the Académie Française and its struggle to remain the center of French cultural life. My point of view that what is ailing that old and conservative French institution is that it has never accepted that French culture is never stagnant, but continuously evolves and that French is not solely the language of the French. The point is that l’Académie Française is plagued today by its inability to accept that French culture isn’t solely French and to take advantage of its internationalization instead of resisting by being afraid of the world and of change. Aimé Césaire, one of the best French poets, died yesterday in Martinique away from the Métropole and the glories that it usually gives enthusiastically to the masters of French literature. The fact that Césaire was considered solely as le “nègre fundamental” and that his work was considered to be first black French, because of its négriture, shows that the Académie doesn’t know how to defend French because in a futile and chauvinistic attempt to preserve French language and culture, it is helping them to die. Sugary excerpt:

With an average age of 79 among members, seven of the Immortals - as members of the Académie are called - have died in the past 18 months. The remaining members have rejected as unworthy a string of potential candidates to replace the departed ones. Even after Mr. Dabadie's election, six of the 40 seats are still empty, the most since the Second World War.

And critics say that in its hard-line quest to define precisely what is and is not proper French, the academy has made itself irrelevant.

"[It] is fading away like an era," philosopher and poet Michel Deguy wrote in the daily newspaper Libération. "It is asphyxiated, rarefied, empty."

Even members of the literary elite, who have traditionally formed the academy's ranks, seem to agree. Novelists Milan Kundera, Patrick Modiano and Philippe Sollers have all refused invitations to join. Mr. Sollers has dismissed membership as something "reserved only for the mediocre; those who will leave no trace behind."

[…] The academy still goes by the same rules established in 1635. Its members wear traditional gold-braided uniforms and feather-plumed hats and carry an ornate sword when they meet in the domed conference hall in the centre of Paris where they have always met.

Its main work - producing an official French dictionary - has moved at a snail's pace. The latest edition was started in 1935, but there are so few volunteers to do the editing that the committee is still working on the letter "r."

When it does issue lists of words it deems inappropriate, most French people, including editors of French dictionaries, dismiss them as hopelessly out of date. Earlier this year, it named more than 500 mostly English words it wants to see banished from the French language, including "e-mail," "blog," "supermodel," and "Wi-Fi."

Evangelism is a challenge to progress and modernity

This sugary excerpt from Bernice Martin’s review of books on what she calls the “new American Evangelism” worries me because I think that nothing good can come from the increasingly evangelization of American society and of its politics:

The terms of engagement in America’s “culture wars” have been subtly changing since the 1990s with the economic, intellectual, social and political coming of age of many Evangelicals in the Bible Belt. This has been brought about by the rise of the oil and real-estate industries, and the occupational and geographical mobility of a considerable part of the younger generation of Evangelicals. They have flocked not only to Evangelical private colleges but also to the Ivy League universities (partly through radical access initiatives after the 1960s) and on to New York, Silicon Valley and even Hollywood as lawyers, bankers, IT professionals, academics and filmmakers.

They constitute a new cosmopolitan Evangelical stratum, as concerned with ecology, AIDS (and not with policies exclusively dependent on abstention) and with human rights worldwide as with traditional questions of personal morality. They are also less solidly Republican. They bring their Christian principles into the boardroom and the caucus in exactly the same way their secular and liberal peers advance their own interests and values. And they are as embarrassed by some of the opinions of the Evangelical masses, and the polarizing media celebrities who mobilize them, as are secular liberals. There is a new Evangelical intelligentsia and it is a power to be reckoned with: Books and Culture, the Evangelical answer to the New York Review of Books, is its public face.

[…]You would not guess that most Evangelicalism lies on the soft end of the spectrum with a stress on “heartwork”, personal moral conversion and sincerity, as in Methodism and many of the megachurches, which is where George W. Bush and the Billy Graham ministries fit. It is rigorous moralism, strict biblical inerrancy, messianic nationalism and apocalyptic fervour that are mainly represented by Bates: he sums it up as “hardline reactionary Protestantism”.

Nor would you guess that even those with official beliefs in the Apocalypse don’t usually let it affect their day-to-day lives – they pay their mortgage and insurance even if they read violent fantasises about the cosmic war after the Rapture, or pore over prophecies of the End Times a-coming.

The world neither began nor ended in 68

When I don’t know what to be thankful for (as it is the case so far this year), I always thank my fading lucky star that I wasn’t born during the sixties and that my mother in May 68 was young enough that she didn’t feel the need throughout my upbringing to talk to me about the importance of that time and the illusion that its so-called revolution is still worth divinizing or diabolizing. I have to admit that the only thing that I believe is worth glorifying in the sixties is the literature and the art even though the fact that Camus dies at the very beginning of that decade was already the sign that something was dying within French literature. Anyway, I don’t get the sixties and the fact that too much blame and praise is placed on that decade as if nothing happened before or has happened since. I, thus, find that there is something morbid in the celebration of the fortieth anniversary of 68 and of May 68 particularly in France because it is too nostalgic or resentful and that nostalgia or resentment usually clouds one’s judgment and ability to analyze correctly the past.

Alain Badiou, who can be too extreme in his analysis and his conclusions, has an excellent essay, which is an extract on his book on Sarkozy De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom? on May 68, Sarkozy, and France. This essay has the merit of being incisive and thus thought-provoking even though it contributes to the mystification of 68 and intellectualizes Sarkozym, which I believe is still at the moment solely  an ideology based on impressing the media and seducing the electorate, but not at governing and managing the day to day affairs of a country as France. In other words, I am contending that Sarkozysm is everything but a political philosophy and that explains its modernity and its adaptability even though I agree with Badiou that there is something worrisome about Sarkozy because it is based on fear and contempt of différence, newness, and the contradictions of modernity. Sugary excerpt:

For Sarkozy, the evils of May 68—forty years ago—have been constantly invoked as the cause of the current ‘crisis of values’. Neo-Pétainism provides a usefully simplified reading of history that links a negative event, generally with a working-class or popular structure, and a positive one, with a military or state structure, as a solution to the first. The arc between 1968 and 2007 can thus be offered as a source of legitimacy for the Sarkozy government, as the historic actor that will finally embark on the correction needed in the wake of the inaugural damaging event. Finally, there is the element of racism. Under Pétain this was brutally explicit: getting rid of the Jews. Today it is voiced in a more insinuating fashion: ‘we are not an inferior race’—the implication being, ‘unlike others’; ‘the true French need not doubt the legitimacy of their country’s actions’—in Algeria and elsewhere. In the light of these criteria, we can therefore point: the disorientation that goes by the name of ‘Sarkozy’ may be analysed as the latest manifestation of the Pétainist transcendental.

[…] At first sight there may seem something strange about the new President’s insistence that the solution to the country’s moral crisis, the goal of his ‘renewal’ process, was ‘to do away with May 68, once and for all’. Most of us were under the impression that it was long gone anyway. What is haunting the regime, under the name of May 68? We can only assume that it is the ‘spectre of communism’, in one of its last real manifestations. He would say (to give a Sarkozian prosopopoeia): ‘We refuse to be haunted by anything at all. It is not enough that empirical communism has disappeared. We want all possible forms of it banished. Even the hypothesis of communism—generic name of our defeat—must become unmentionable.’

What is the communist hypothesis? In its generic sense, given in its canonic Manifesto, ‘communist’ means, first, that the logic of class—the fundamental subordination of labour to a dominant class, the arrangement that has persisted since Antiquity—is not inevitable; it can be overcome. The communist hypothesis is that a different collective organization is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labour. The private appropriation of massive fortunes and their transmission by inheritance will disappear. The existence of a coercive state, separate from civil society, will no longer appear a necessity: a long process of reorganization based on a free association of producers will see it withering away.

The sixties, May 68, are the epitome of a bland and empty narcissism, which next generations only gadgetized and perfected because it divides the world into who say either that paradise is lost or that paradise is the present, hope, which one can decipher is the stupid, appalling, and unfortunately à la mode sentence: we are the ones we have been waiting for. The best of the sixties is exemplified in one man, Daniel Cohn-Bendit (I would have said Bernard Kouchner a few months ago). Cohn-Bendit who was the leader of the French Students who rocked France with their manifestations, had the courage to grow up, to embrace politics and its imperfections, and to recognize that May 68 wasn’t a perfect revolution. By doing so, contrary of too many of his peers and his foes, he avoided the traps of passéisme and of anarchism in order to remain ferociously loyal to the youth that he once was.

Girlification

Polly Toynbee has an article in the Guardian responding to the one from Erica Jong, which addressed what she believed to be the stagnation of feminism since the Seventies and the fact that it failed to fulfill its promised. Toynbee argues that the problem is girlification:

Ambitious women hit their head on glass ceilings, but worse is the fate of women glued to the floor: two-thirds of the low-paid are women. The jobs they do - caring, catering, cleaning, cashiering - are low paid because they always were "women's work". For as long as the minimum wage stays below a living wage, woman and children will stay poor. Most poverty would be solved if the jobs women do were equally valued. But the old attitudes remain: women are "natural" carers, cooks and cleaners.

Where does it all begin? The motherhood penalty starts in pregnancy, when 30,000 women lose their jobs, never mind what the law says. […] The pink disease is far worse than it was 20 years ago. "Princess on board", read the yukky signs in family cars. It's almost impossible to buy toys now that are not putridly pink branded or aggressively superhero male. Bikes, sleeping bags, lunch boxes, nothing is neutral now, everything Barbie and Bratz. Princess tiaras, fairy and ballerina dressing up, pink, pink everywhere - and it damages girls' brains. That's before you start on thongs for seven-year-olds and sexy slogans on three-year-olds' T-shirts.

A report from the American Psychological Association shows how sexualisation harms girls - and it's getting worse, more of it and more extreme. One study showed how anxiety about appearance harms brain function: girls were asked to try on a swimsuit or a sweater in a private dressing room, supposedly to give their opinion. While waiting they were asked to do a maths test. The girls given swimsuits did much worse than those in sweaters, as thinking about their bodies, mostly negatively, undermined their intellectual self-confidence.

At ever younger ages, girls are judged - and judge each other - on appearances. Who needs government lectures on obesity when every pressure already is to be thin, thin, thin? Girlification is worse than ever it was. So what happened to university women's studies and liberation from stereotype?

I don’t find Toynbee’s girlification argument very convincing because it emphasizes external factors to the detriment of other ones. The truth is that too many women view femininity either as burden, a burqa necessary to hide ugliness or weakness or simply as something that doesn’t give one any choice about one’s essence and life’s choices.

The land where politicians never die

Spiegel has one of the best articles on Italian elections and the third return of Silvio Berlusconi to power. It is must-read because it explains why Italians keep reelecting a man who is never able to deliver on his extravagant promises. Sugary excerpt:

Berlusconi walks into the room. He is short, squat and his smile seems to travel across his face like a nervous tic. "Silvio! Silvio!" It is his fifth parliamentary election campaign, each of which he has approached as a new man. He is now 71. But up on the stage, enveloped in a cloud of his own words, lights and adoring supporters, Berlusconi is no old man or marionette. For them, he is the same old Berlusconi: the perfect election machine.

"Watch out!" he says. "The leftists want to rig the elections once again. They have the professional training to do so." He makes it sound as if the Bolsheviks were storming the gates of Viterbo.

Berlusconi's anti-communism is as unconvincing as his hair, his teeth and his eternally youthful virility. It is as artificial as his slogans, his TV programs and his parties. But, by the same token, it is just as perfectly conceived and presented.

One thing about Berlusconi is real: his message, a blend of hatred for the left and the worldview of the manager of a discount chain store. The audience in the Viterbo gymnasium eats it up. For those who think that all politicians are liars, Berlusconi would have to be the cream of the crop. Nevertheless, many Italians still believe that he is capable of bringing about change, even if this means nothing more than reforming the feudal tax system.

Why on earth would anyone want to vote for this man? Silvio readily supplies the answer: "The pre-payment of the sales tax will be abolished in the first cabinet meeting" -- applause -- "as well as the tax on first-home buyers" -- applause -- and "the public administration will be digitized. We will continue the projects stopped by the leftists, and we will build new nuclear power plants and the bridge to Sicily."

Berlusconi may be a joke to the rest of the world, but not in Viterbo. No one here is interested in the litigation still pending against the godfather, in cases involving the bribing of witnesses and tax evasion on a grand scale. And the past charges of financial misstatement, corruption of television staff and senators? No problem, say his supporters. Everyone knows, of course, that judges are left-wingers who fetishize the law. And the man's bawdy sense of humor? "Meno male che Silvio c'è!" None of this is important, say his supporters in places like Viterbo. All that matters is that the government keeps its hands out of its citizens' wallets.

I have to say that Berlusconi reminds of Sarkozy. They both view politics as a TV show in which they are the star and where the goal is nothing more than to entertain the electorate rather than to provide it with results to improve their lives. In other words, they are both great at politics campaigning, but bad, to put it mildly, at governing their countries although there is still some hope for Sarkozy to succeed in Blairizing or Clintoninzing (Bill) himself.

Difficult truths

It's Sunday and because I'm able to allow myself to be pensive I'm realizing that one of the biggest problems that I have is to learn to accept my mistakes and not to look back in anger or in sadness at the past. I am in the middle of Jonathan Littell's Les Bienveillantes and I have to admit that I'm struggling with finding the right distance to appreciate the work without just finding it amazing because everybody who read it either loved it or hated it. The point isn't that truth hurts, which isn't in my opinion a bad thing, but that it can be unhelpful and harmful when one doesn't have the tools to deal it and not to be stuck in the blazing acidity of its consequences.

Hope and Feminism don't go together

Erica Jong on the hopes that she had for Feminism in 1968:

In 1968, there was a great feeling of hope that things might change, that women might escape from beatings and rape and malnutrition in the developing world, and that, in our supposedly civilised world, they might find law degrees, medical degrees, political advancement and economic parity with their brothers and fathers. Not to mention their husbands.

But it has not come to pass. Yes, women have law and medical degrees in great number, write books by the carload and are good at it (why should we be surprised, when our first great poet of love, Sappho, was a woman?), but the world is still not a level playing field. Women are still not safe on the streets or in their own homes. And they comprise, with children, most of the world's poor.

We have spilled oceans of ink, cut down forests of trees, blazed through the internet in light, and the world is still dominated by the sex-bearing appendages rather than clefts. Why? That is the subject for a future book. But I can say that the hope I felt in 1968 has evaporated. Last week, a woman commentator on a supposedly progressive network called Hillary Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro "whores". She was suspended, but she'll be back. Women columnists still make their fortunes by attacking other women, as in the age of Clare Boothe Luce. It is, in fact, a time-honoured way to get a book contract or a political appointment. Trashing one's own gender remains a path to advancement.

[….] Perhaps women hating women is just a shoot off the poisonous vine of misanthropy. We ourselves are the evil empire. And if we elect fools and knaves to hasten our planetary demise, perhaps it is because these monsters represent our own desires for self-destruction.

1968 was a brief flare of hope for the human species. It was extinguished. The thugs with jackboots are back. Some of them have vaginas. Or, as Oprah would say, "vajayjays". Talk about the problem that has no name: we can't even name our own clefts.

Feminism, founded by Mary Wollstonecraft, advanced by Virginia Woolf, Eleanor Roosevelt, Gloria Steinem and Hillary Clinton, has become nameless again. Perhaps a new generation will rediscover it like the shard of an ancient cooking vessel. Perhaps someone will name it again. I'll be there.

I think that feminism started with the naïve misunderstanding that that it was going to make women better people and to increase women’s solidarity as if people when given choices always make the right ones. Those indeed were false hopes because women are never going to agree on anything not even on the utility for them to agree to disagree because disagreements, strife, conflicts, hate directed toward their own sex is never an impediment to success. It is hard to say but Nietzsche was right when he stated that “Behind all their personal vanity, women themselves always have an impersonal contempt for woman.” I'm not sure that the fact that feminism has stalled is a bad thing because I believe that it was always a limiting and limited philosophy/ideology, which only few women could understand without falling in the trap of believing that it was about the sublimation of the second sex. When I read Gillian Tendall's following statement on Simone de Beauvoir when reviewing A Dangerous Liaison, Carole Seymour-Jones's book on Sartre and Beauvoir relationship (Graham Robb's review is better) , I understand that the problem  is that even women descend from apes:

Let me put my cards on the table. On many occasions, both in France and in England, I have heard or read women of my own generation, the generation of the daughters that Simone de Beauvoir did not have, say what an important book her Le Deuxième Sexe was to them in youth, how it shaped their thinking. I listen uncomprehendingly. To me, this, Beauvoir's most famous work, is a baggy, old-fashioned French academic thesis, groaning under the weight of piled-up examples of all kinds and dates. Many of its assertions were already out-of-date in even mildly liberal circles long before it was written. Yet in spite of its over-copiousness it has huge gaps in coverage and central areas of obtuseness. To believe, as Beauvoir apparently did all her life, that 'a woman is not born but made' is already a substantial handicap. A worse one, however, was her complete inability, remarked upon even by her most sympathetic contemporaries, to understand maternity as anything but a stultifying trap.

So why do I bother with her - and what business have I reviewing this new and deeply subversive biography? Surely I am already a hostile witness? Well, no. For Les Mandarins, with which she won the Prix Goncourt in 1954, was one of the first novels I read in French, and I opened my heart and mind then to her classic talent for creating a world for the reader to enter, to her excellent ear for speech, and to her wonderfully assured style, both crisp and sensitive. Since then, I have read her other novels and stories, though not all with the same pleasure, and have absorbed into my heart and mind a number of passages from her memoirs which (it has become increasingly apparent) were to some extent fictional constructions too, just as her novels were versions of her own life. She has been badly served by English translation into a mid-Atlantic compromise idiom, which has no doubt further obscured the gifted novelist behind the feminist icon. It is my hope that in a future generation, when the variegated causes she and Sartre sought to espouse have become just part of the tapestry of history, and Sartre himself has been relegated to the semi-obscurity where he mostly belongs, that the best and truest of Beauvoir's writing will still raise a response in readers' breasts.

Existential Friday

Not much to say, just a lot of unanswered essential questions torturing my brain, but thank god for this beautiful song. The singer is Martin Rappeneau, the song is Ça m'est égal .

Politics and Sectarianism

Feeling increasingly disillusioned about the practicality and functionality of politics in a religious country that views secularism suspiciously, I can only agree with the points, which Avishai Margalit make about sectarianism:

[…] the religious picture of politics is a dramatic one. It is based on the observation that the state, in times of war, asks its citizens to be ready to sacrifice their lives. This concept vitiates the economic idea that politics is merely about the satisfaction of wants. It says that politics is as much about sacrifice as about satisfaction.
Politics as religion is a framework for giving meaning to people’s lives, which goes far beyond maximizing utilities. Politics informed by ideology is a clash of interpretations about what constitutes the collective good, in accordance with which individuals can make sense of their lives. Thus, ideologically informed politics is under the sway of the religious picture; instead of bundles of goods, it provides a bundle of interpretations of the good life. John F. Kennedy’s celebrated line, “Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country,” expresses the religious picture of politics. It appeals not to satisfaction (“what your country can do for you”) but to sacrifice (“what you can do for your country”).
[…]  Sectarianism in politics is an extreme case of viewing politics with one eye—the eye of politics as religion. This does not mean that sectarians are necessarily religious. […] Sectarianism is a disposition to view any compromise as a rotten compromise. It was Trotsky, I believe, who coined the expression rotten compromise: “A compromise is necessary, but not one that is rotten.” Trotsky still believed that he knew the distinction between compromise and rotten compromise, but sectarians believe that this is a distinction without merit.
The sectarian drives the religious picture to its limit. Although the religious picture holds that politics is not conducted in the spirit of compromise, nevertheless it does not preclude compromise on things that are not sacred. The sectarian views every facet of his or her position as sacred and refuses to compromise on anything. For the sectarian, compromise is a sellout, a capitulation, a betrayal of the cause.

Being a lefty is no fun

I agree wholeheartedly with this:

The left is becoming, more and more, a difficult place to occupy. You say you're a liberal? But you don't give to charity every month, you haven't marched in support of Tibet, you're white and you don't have Muslim friends? You've never had an abortion and you didn't protest against the occupation of Iraq? Your parents paid for your education and you took a gap year that didn't involve children in Africa? You didn't take a term out of Manchester University to learn Arabic in the West Bank? You've chosen a career that guarantees upward mobility, a good wage and hence security for you and your family, but does absolutely sod all for the rest of the world? You went on holiday to the US? But you recycle, buy organic, read The Guardian, keep informed of international news and foster deprived kids from south London? Hmm. I'm sorry, but you haven't ticked enough boxes. Over to bar right. The exclusive club liberal is not accepting any more applications for membership in the foreseeable future.

[…] As much as my views and beliefs place me on the left of the political spectrum, I have to say that I feel alienated by the left because of its disingenuous adherence to an unwritten code of hypocritical correctness, and its criteria for "entry" based on ideological puritanism.

The left whether it is British, American or French is so convinced of its own superiority and goodness that it has become lazy intellectually and ideologically because it is afraid to face its own contradictions and to at least recognized that purity and fanatical absoluteness may not be good things. It is for this reason that to be a lefty nowadays and to be content, one has to accept to stop thinking to avoid being undermined by the complexities of human nature and the absurdities of existence.

To be a beautiful French Black talented woman and to have no exit

Ramatoulaye Rama Yade is a beautiful French black and talented French politician who is sometimes referred as Sarkozy’s Condoleezza Rice because she works under the Foreign Minister (Bernard Kouchner) and is the Human rights Secretary. With all of her assets, one would have thought that Yade would be ensured to have a bright political future in France, but as Tim King asserts correctly she stuck in a mold due to her race and gender and may have nowhere to go:

[…] she is in a closed cubby-hole of a ministry, with no way out. Think about it. The ministry of human rights isn’t really a ministry – it has no mission, no agenda, no crack team to back up the otherwise empty words which is all she can offer. As Azouz Begag found in the previous government, working as a coloured face in a meaningless ministry like “Equal Opportunities” or “Human Rights” is a one-way ticket in the wrong direction.

Rama Yade has learnt the hard way that she can’t mention human rights abuses in “le pays des droits de l’homme” itself (in the overcrowded prisons, or the repatriation of sans papiers): when she tried, going to see some immigrant squatters faced with eviction in a Paris suburb, she was keenly and patronisingly reprimanded by her seniors. If she can’t mention France, she can only pass judgement on other countries. But the countries with human rights abuses are the very countries where the market for French goods is still strong, or with which France needs to remain on good terms (the USA for example with Guantanamo Bay). Twice now she has put into words what most of us think: first about Colonel Gaddafi being a dictator and more recently about the Olympic Games. But both times she has been made to look ridiculous by her senior colleagues. When the President went with a huge entourage and much pomp to China last November, he made the last minute decision to leave Rama Yade ignominiously twiddling her thumbs at home.

Now she knows she has the choice of either speaking out and having her wrists slapped, thus being made to look a fool in public, or saying nothing and being forgotten. Either way she is side-lined for the next job. For apart from the fact that she clearly has very definite thoughts about human rights, it is probable she accepted the job as a stepping stone, and so she needs to shine. Her contemporary and white male equivalent, Laurent Wauquiez, has just been promoted from spokesman (where the job-definition is to shine) to junior minister in charge of employment – a real job with targets and measurable success (or failure). She is stuck, losing out whether she acts or does nothing. The Ministry for Human Rights is an empty shop window. [Emphasis added].

The problem for Yade is that what made her succeed quickly, her smarts, her guts, her gender, and her race, is not what is limiting her options and putting a ceiling on her future even though the possibilities given whom she is, what she represents and what she can do should be limitless. In France, politicians don’t know what to do with talented members of minorities who are ambitious and won’t shut up after they are given a ministry. The fact that Rama Yade finds herself stuck so soon in her political career, that she can never escape the received ideas that when you are Black and French and a minister, you should be satisfied and not only ask, but not want more, shows us that France still hasn’t fully accepted that it is the motherland and not the borrowed country of people who do not look Gaul and yet want to be treat as French and not as symbols. The trouble with people who are viewed as symbols is that they almost never last because as the novelty of their presence and success fade, they become ordinary. People, in politics, don’t like it when minorities in politics are ordinary, they want them to be special, to make them feel great about themselves for voting for a difference that will change the world and not just do what politicians do.

Reverse Colonization and indigenous rights

From the Brussels Journals, this sugary excerpt on the supposedly increased urgency for true Europeans to create an indigenous people movement:

Genetically speaking, native Europeans have thus lived longer on the same continent than have Native Americans. […] Yet a Scottish councillor, Sandy Aitchison, was chastised for using the term "indigenous" about native Brits. Why is it considered ridiculous or evil if Europeans assert our rights? Is it because we are white? Everybody's supposed to keep their culture, except people of European origins? Is that it? Why is colonialism bad, except when my country, which has no colonial history, gets colonized by Third World peoples?

Western Europeans have in recent years accepted more immigration in a shorter period of time than any society has ever done peacefully in human history. If we want a break we have the right to do so. What we are dealing with is not "immigration" but colonization, and in the case of Muslims, internationally organized attempts to conquer of our countries. If non-Europeans have the right to resist colonization then so do Europeans. Switzerland, Sweden, Finland and Norway hardly have any colonial history at all. The Germans had a colony in Namibia. Why should they accept millions of Turkish Muslims, who have a thousand years of brutal colonial history of their own, because of this? There are hardly any Britons in Pakistan today, so why should the Brits allow huge numbers of Pakistanis to settle in Britain? And if the Algerians can demand independence from France, why can't the French demand independence from Algerians?

I like cultural diversity and would hope this could be extended to include my culture, too. Or is Multiculturalism simply a hate ideology designed to unilaterally dismantle European culture and the peoples who created it? If people in Cameroon or Cambodia can keep their culture, why can't the peoples who produced Beethoven, Newton, Copernicus, Michelangelo and Louis Pasteur do the same? As Rabbi Aryeh Spero points out, European elites insist "on the primacy of indigenous cultures and religions when speaking of other faraway regions, yet find such insistence arrogant when it concerns the indigenous culture of its own lands."

My first reaction when reading these arguments is to be astonished by the fact that it is being made seriously without the person making realizing their stupidity and irrationality. Then, of course there is the question of how would indigenous Europeans would be determined, what criteria would be used, genetics, race, or something else? I wonder if for example, if somebody who, as Alexandre Dumas, has some non-European blood in her/his ancestry would be considered indigenous or if someone who looks “un-European” but who can trace her/his roots in Europe would be considered Europeans. The idea is so ridiculous because it is a gimmick created to make cheap points about European identity and immigration. What it shows that implicit within the concept of reverse colonization is the idea that assertion that the ideals behind colonialism are righteous for after all, blood, genes are everything, one has the right blood or does not, and there can be any mixing and everyone, everything must remain at their place. I think those who believe that the true Europeans, the pure bloods should start an indigenous movement to stop the so-called colonization of their continent should instead invest their time and energy in creating a time machine. This would give them a better chance to change history, to pre-empt any attempts by their ancestors to go outside of Europe, to mix with the wrong people, to civilize “Europeanize” them and to initiate what is called, today, globalization.

The right to be girly and to kick a*s

This is a typical American debate where the goal is to make an important discussion entertainment and edgy rather than instructive and thought-provoking. There is no resolution because to debate about women, feminism and its issues in America is like questioning God's existence in front of ferociously religious people in a Mega Church. The point is that America doesn't know what to make of feminism because it is obsessed with its own good goodness and that it has troubled accepting that girlishness and femininity can be complex and can be about kicking a*s and being amoral or immoral.

Canada and Bilingualism

Konrad Yababuski has written a must-read essay in the Globe and Mail on Canada, and bilingualism, which shows that it is in too many cases a failed policy. Bilingualism can only work when the two languages to be learned are considered equals and when it isn’t more valuable to learn one than the other or not to know it. In Canada, it is obvious that French is only indispensable in Québec and even then it is possible to survive without it on a short stay especially if one pretends not to be an English speaking Canadian. In the rest of Canada, French is so absent that one would never know except for the street signs written in both languages that Canada has a French speaking population. Jean Chrétien, the former Prime minister, used to state, mostly during times when Québec was deciding through a referendum whether to secede from Canada, that Canada without Québec isn’t Canada and that Quebec without Canada isn’t Québec, I believe that that the “language question” puts that affirmation in doubt. Sugary excerpt:

If English Canadians cared about learning French, they would. That is simply human nature. Around the world, everywhere, when people need and want to learn a language, they do. .

[…] If learning French is a luxury in English Canada, most people in Quebec consider learning English a necessity. Yet Quebeckers know they are playing with fire. You'd be hard-pressed to find a Quebecker who does not feel he or she has been personally and professionally enriched by learning English. But when census data show, as they did in December, that mother-tongue francophones now make up less than 50 per cent of the population on the Island of Montreal, and less than 80 per cent of Quebec's population for the first time since the 1930s, it gets a people thinking in survivalist terms. It gets a newspaper such as Le Devoir to write this headline: "Historic retreat of French in Quebec."

The issue gets framed — more or less — in these terms: Without a thriving francophone metropolis at its core, Quebec will be reduced before long to a Louisiana with sugar shacks.

Each of the solitudes maintains a tortured relationship with the language it doesn't speak first. English Canada needs the French fact to distinguish itself from the United States, but apparently not enough to become truly bilingual. Quebec needs to learn English to thrive in North America and avoid a retreat into isolation, but fears that each step out of its shell might deprive it from the option of going back.

Nonchalant sexy French women

Debra Olliver argues that the French women’s nonchalance makes them sexy, a point, which I find hilarious because it is shallow and limits itself to a titillating stereotype :

[…] Granted, French feminism didn't play out the way it did in Britain, and was not nearly as militant as it was in the US - no British or American feminist could declare what French feminist Sylviane Agacinski once did: "We want the power to seduce and be seduced. There will never be a war of the sexes in France."

For many sociocultural reasons there has always been more complicity between men and women in France than in Anglo-Saxon cultures, and that complicity breeds a different kind of woman. This is at the heart of fascination with French women. Franco-American actress Charlotte Rampling once said that "French women have been made beautiful by French people. They're very aware of their bodies, the way they move and speak; they are very confident of their sexuality."

Indeed, French culture has made them "like that" - which is very different "from us". And one fundamental difference is that, behind the "yik-yak-yik-yak" that Williams describes, French women fundamentally don't give a damn about much of the moral and social dogma that ties so many Anglo-Saxon women up in knots.

The fact is that sex and sexiness are less moralized and divinized in France than they are in the Anglo-Saxon one. French women are allowed to use and to show their body because it isn’t equated with sin and all kinds of potential disasters of biblical proportions. It is for this reason that women politicians present themselves differently in France and in the United States. Hillary Clinton, for example is allowed a very limited amount of freedom in the way that she uses her body or rather hides it with her clothes while Ségolène Royal had more freedom and was allowed to avoid the desexualizing uniform that is the pantsuit and to wear more revealing and feminine clothes.  Thus, it’s all about sex and morality. In France, when woman shows her legs, people look admiringly without shame and bitchiness and sexiness are not antonyms. In the Anglo-Saxon world, when a woman shows too much skin, she is bad (not in good way) and bitches are almost never sexy because they are considered power-hungry and that it is emasculating. The fact that it was necessary to proclaim that “Bitch is the new Black” to make it less threatening and unsexy proves my point. I think that the difference is just one of nonchalance but rather one of views about quintessence. Anglo-Saxons still believe that a woman’s body is her identity, that she doesn’t own it fully, that she has to be mindful constantly of its tempting nature and to cover it to protect themselves and poor men from a nature who did not equipped them with the will to resist the flesh. The French believe that women are allowed to play with, to use their body as an instrument because it is theirs and because by doing so they are helping men to look and to fantasize about what they cannot touch.

Post-Christian Europe

Sven-Eric Liedman on Religion, Europe, and European Intellectuals:

The image of the world heading into an ever deepening religious enchantment exhibits one big and important exception: Europe. In most European countries, particularly those within the EU-region, de-Christianization seems to progress unchanged. Pentecostalism's advances are merely marginal in most areas and while Islam is indeed advancing, it is mainly due to immigration from countries where Islam is a dominant religion. The spread of both certainly display the same patterns as on other continents; however, in a global perspective, the most noteworthy is nevertheless the confinement of these progressions. The major international surveys on people's religious attitudes and practices, in Europe the European Values Survey and globally the World Values Survey, give an unequivocal picture: Europe is far more de-Christianized than other parts of the world, where Christianity has gained wide distribution, and other religions do not fill the gap that de-Christianization has left behind.
At the same time, Europe has over the past ten or fifteen years experienced an odd, renewed interest in traditional theological questions amongst many prominent intellectuals otherwise associated to irreligious, or at the least non-religious currents. It is not the aforementioned Onfray and Dawkins who with their atheist tracts appear typical. It is rather Jacques Derrida, Alain Badiou, Jürgen Habermas, Slavoj Zizek, Giorgio Agamben and numerous others who have written important works on religion in general, and Christianity in particular. Several of the aforementioned have openly declared that they are atheists, or at least agnostics; Habermas has by Max Weber's example stated that he is "unmusical" when it comes to religion. But they all display a noticeably positive interest in the many religious expressions of our age and of the past. Their intention is not to fight religious faith, but rather understand it and its inherent power. To a great extent, their attention is caught by the political potential in religious faith.

In Europe, there is a aura of mystery around religion and the people for whom it is the most important thing show some modesty because they are too conscious of the fact that religion is a private affair. Religion can be more freely the subject of intellectual discussions because Europeans, more often than not, aren’t exhibitionists with their religious faith, they consider that it is a part of their private lives, which, they don’t have to share and that they don't have to contaminate the rest of society with their religious fervor for it to become valuable. Thus, the religious isn’t above intellectualism because its mysterious and personal nature, the fact that it is hidden or rather confined to the private sphere has made it less sacred, more human, and more importantly omnipresent. This fact doesn’t mean that Europe is irreligious for aft it is impossible not to recognize its Judeo-Christian heritage and not to see the influence that the Church still has in many European societies. What is peculiar and, I believe, great about Europe is that religion isn’t considered great in itself; the religious isn’t superior to reason and has to accept that it can only be unquestioned and sacred in the private sphere when it doesn’t violate laws.

All about feminization

I find the following point made by Mary Jackson in response to the assertion that feminism leads women to depression funny.  I find it funny because t shows that it is possible to assert outrageous things without proof about women, feminism, and its consequences and to be taken seriously. In other words,  feminization is used as a tool to say stupid things and reaffirm old prejudices without defend them rationally. :

Low expectations may keep us content, but they can also make us complacent and, worse still, fatalistic. Feminism has not been an unalloyed good; few changes are solely for the better. But I do not believe it is the main cause of “rising depression” among women. Feminism aside, I would take issue with the very wording of the piece, and of the women themselves, that is with the word “depressed”.

Women generally talk about their feelings more than men do. In the past they might have described themselves as “sad” or “fed up” or said things like “mustn’t grumble”. Now, when unhappy or disappointed – and nobody can avoid unhappiness or disappointment – they are more likely to say they are “depressed” and, as Theodore Dalrymple knows only too well, to demand a pill for it.

[…] Feminism has given women more choices, and perhaps those choices have made us discontented. But that is not a clinical matter. Neither women nor men should call themselves “depressed” when they are in fact sad, lonely, frightened, restless, dissatisfied or angry. Depression is not a feminist issue.

Enduring and exiled voices

Nana Asfour has, in Bookforum, a worth-reading article on Iranian-American women novelists. She makes the point that the fact that those writers are exiled makes them in fact less able than Iranian women still living in Iran to write about present-day Iran in their novels. I am not sure that I agree with Asfour because I think that sometimes exile gives people the required distance to desacralize their homeland in order not only to write about it, but to dare to deconstruct or re-imagine it through fiction. Sugary excerpt:

Regardless of how much or how little Iranian parents reflect on the loss of their homeland, that sense of loss is inevitably transferred to their children. These novels are the product of the children of the immigrant generation; Iran continues to both define and elude them, and fiction provides a vehicle to explore that distant and tumultuous country. Contemporary Iran in particular remains elusive. For those writers based in America, it is a recent history they have not experienced. For now, the task of chronicling present-day Iran is left to the novelists who reside there. (Emphasis added)

[…] Iranian writers, unhindered by censorship and persecution in the United States, are seeking to define themselves, as well as the meaning of their national identity. As Nahai has noted in regard to the sudden proliferation of books on Iran in America, “Iranian women are writing, I imagine, because they live in a place and at a time when they can speak the truth without fear of morbid consequences,” adding, “I think exile has been so good for Iranians, especially for the women.” The late Edward Said, himself an émigré, reflected that “in the United States, academic, intellectual and aesthetic thought is what it is today because of refugees from fascism, communism and other regimes given to the oppression and expulsion of dissidents.” And yet, while expatriate fiction has been for the most part the domain of male writers (Nabokov, Huxley, Auden, and so on), this wave of Iranian women writers is charting a new literary voice—one by women and, for the most part, about women.