Selected Essays | Siri Hustvedt on Simone Weil

On this episode of “Selected Essays,” Siri Hustvedt joins us to discuss Simone Weil’s “Human Personality” and her own essay “Scapegoat,” which appears in her recent collection Mothers, Fathers, and Others (2021).

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Jessica Swoboda: 0:05

Hey everyone. Welcome to selected essays, a podcast series from the point magazine about essays you should read, but probably haven't. Each episode we'll be talking with writers about an essay that's influenced one of their own. My name is Jess Swoboda. And usually I'm here with my co-host Zack Fine, but today, it's just me as your host. Don't worry though, Zack will be back for the next episode. Today we have Siri Hustvedt on the podcast. I spoke with Siri about Simone Weil's essay "Human Personality," which was written in 1943, and also about Siri's essay "Scapegoat," which is the final essay in her most recent essay collection, "Mothers, Fathers and Others." Siri's the author of a book of poetry, many essay collections and works of nonfiction, and several novels, including the International Best Sellers What I Loved and The Summer Without Men, as well as The Blazing World, which was long listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2014, and won the Los Angeles Book Prize for Fiction in 2015. Her work has been translated into over 30 languages, and she's also a lecturer in psychiatry at Cornell Medical College. We hope you'll enjoy this episode and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. If you have questions, comments or anything else, send an email to selected essays at thepointmag.com. We'd love to hear from you. Hi, Siri, thanks so much for joining us on selected essays.

Siri Hustvedt: 1:47

I'm happy to be here.

Jessica Swoboda: 1:50

So you've selected Simone Weil's essay"Human Personality," which was written during the last year her of her life in 1943. Can you tell us a little bit about her life and then what this essay is about?

Siri Hustvedt: 2:04

So Simone Weil was born into a secular, affluent Jewish family in Paris. She was one of two siblings. They were both prodigies. Her brother became an important mathematician in France. She had the best of all possible educations for a person in France at that time, including a girl she went to Lycee at(....), which is was a renowned institution. And from there, she went to the ecole normale in 1928. That was a year after they had first admitted women. She was the only woman in her class, she wrote on Descartes and she graduated in 1931. I think at the top of her class. She had a deep interest in the suffering of others in the drama of oppression, sympathy with workers, she was attracted to Marxism. And after she graduated, she taught at Lycee that she found boring. But she also then began a life of what might be called Praxis or praxis, right that she worked in factories with unskilled female laborers, including an a factory that made electrical components. Weil was never very good at this. She was fired a couple of times. And she was, you know, a famous among people who knew her for being clumsy. She couldn't fulfill her quotas. Nevertheless, the experience of working on assembly lines in this in these really terrible conditions, was life changing for her. She understood what it meant to be dehumanized and humiliated. She also was rather remarkably, a fighter in the civil war in Spain. She called again her friends -- I believe this is in a letter that she couldn't hold a rifle. She was terribly near-sighted, so she would probably never kill anyone because she couldn't, you know, fire at a target. Not long after her stint as a warrior, she stepped in boiling oil and had to retreat. From her brief period as a soldier, she went to Portugal and in Portugal, she had what I think was her first movement toward Christianity, when she heard some peasant women singing ancient Christian hymns. And the insight she had was that Christianity was the religion of slavery. From there, she was in Italy for a time and had a mystical experience that she wrote about as forcing her to her knees for the first time. Then she, when this is you have to remember, so this is in the 30s. But then, with the Nazi occupation of France, she fled with her parents, they ended up in New York. But she was eager to be much closer to the war. By then, as you understand, she had given up her earlier pacifism. And she wrangled her way into a job in England, working for Free France, that is undertake de Gaulle, and she had a plan to I believe, have nurses jump out of planes into occupied territory to save, do what they could for injured soldiers -- de Gaulle read this and famously said, but she's mad. So that program, right didn't work. But the period that we're talking about when she was in England, she was writing at full force, plague plagued by gruesome, headaches, migraines, she was eating very little, she had eaten in a troubled way from childhood. And she died of tuberculosis that was probably aggravated by her a form of self-starvation in 1943 34 years old, which

Jessica Swoboda: 7:54

is, which is wild, to think through and to think of how much she produced before the age of 34. And to know and then to think, too, that a lot of her work didn't become read until after her death. So she never very until was residence, she would have her

Siri Hustvedt: 8:10

Her work on the Iliad was published during her lifetime, but most of it is posthumously published.

Jessica Swoboda: 8:20

And then can you provide a bit of a summary of the essay that we'll be discussing today? I know that it was like a daunting task, I was thinking, how would I how would I summarize this?

Siri Hustvedt: 8:30

So the essay in English is called "Human Personality." In French, it's called La person a (...), which means the person and the secret. Now, even though this sounds in English, as if it's some kind of psychiatric document, it has nothing to do with "Human Personality" in the way we think of it. It is really an argument against a philosophical and theological position called personalism. It was first used by the German theologian Schleiermacher. Now, all you have to know about that there are many different kinds of personalisms. But all one has to know is that those ideas took as their sort of origin epistemological ontology, you know, they're the idea of being and how you know what, you know, from the single person. What Weil is arguing about is precisely against that position and she wants the reader to understand that a human being is not a collection of rights, individual rights. But what is to be valued in the person is precisely what is not personal, what is impersonal.

Jessica Swoboda: 10:26

I do want to start with just entering us into the text. And now when you wrote to me, you when you're communicating earlier, you said to me, I keep returning to this remarkable essay, which has one of the most beautiful openings in the history of the forum. And so I'm hoping that you can read that aloud to us and then explain for us what you find so beautiful about the essays opening.

Siri Hustvedt: 10:51

These are the first sentences of the essay. You do not interest me. No man can say these words to another without committing a cruelty and offending against justice. That slays me every. I mean, I find it so I mean, so bracing. And so, like Weil, you know, when she's at her best, she cuts through all crap, right? And she has a combination of what I think of as Cartesian rigor. She wrote about Descartes, Descartes, clarity, and rigor with a tremendous passion for whatever she's writing about. These traits are really what I admire most in her even when I disagree, disagree sometimes rather, strenuously was her position. But the this these first sentences to say to another person, you do not interest me. I do agree entirely, that that is a form of terrible injustice. That because we share a species B that's taken from the early marks, and I'm twisting it around, but we do share a species B, that commonality in itself should entail interest. And William James, another philosopher that I have great admiration for, talked about the horror, of being cut off from others, of walking into a room and not being seen --- the nightmare of no recognition. I think these ideas are linked here. It is that we should not because of our shared reality, annihilate others, through no interest, you do not interest me.

Jessica Swoboda: 13:33

That's a really provocative way of understanding it. It is really piercing to read that first line. And understanding the difference between you do not interest me and your person does not interest me seems central to getting in and entering into the essay as a whole. Yeah, what what do you take her to be saying about their difference?

Siri Hustvedt: 13:55

it's very strange. I mean, she makes some Yeah, very strange arguments here. But I think what she's saying is that what is an injustice is not saying that aspects of a person's, you know, personality, the things that you add up, you know, their looks or their tone of voice or gestures or what have you. That you're not allowed to dismiss those things. This is okay. Those features of a person we're allowed to joke about, we're allowed to make fun of, perhaps, put aside it is the impersonal human species being that we can't ignore. I think that's what she's saying. She goes on to make a really peculiar remark about putting the eyes out, poking the eyes out of a man walking down the street, and then saying that, you know, she could do that and he would remain, you know, the same person, which I think is to be perfectly honest nonsense. I would agree. He would not remain the same and why she chooses that I have no idea. But she is building this argument that it's a respect for something else for this good thing that the person, and this I think is rather deep, that the person has an expectation of goodness, and that every person does. Now, is that true? Or is that not true? I would translate that, and this is whenever you translate someone's ideas, you are always doing some harm to them. But I would translate that as the fact that human beings do, even in the most dire circumstances cling to hope. And hope, is the expectation of good. It is nothing but that.

Jessica Swoboda: 16:25

Right? It can't.

Siri Hustvedt: 16:26

And it's not optimism, right? Because Weil is definitely not an optimist. Optimism means that you expect a good outcome. Right, and she's definitely not that.

Unknown: 16:39

An expectation that there can be some good out there. So. So, you know, there's, there's a difference. You know, putting the eyes out, I don't know,

Jessica Swoboda: 16:55

One of the things I was trying to work through, as I read this essay was what prohibits us from seeing the impersonal or being able to understand it. And it seemed to me that first was that we're very intent on asserting the personality asserting the person foregrounding the person, and then the second thing seemed to be submerging ourselves in the collective and she uses submerge, and I don't know, if it's a translation issue, I don't know if the French would suggest submerge, but that suggests this total loss of the self this total loss of agency passivity, it's just an entrance into passivity. And so, what is keeping us from the impersonal Why is it so sacred, why is it so hard to to see?

Siri Hustvedt: 17:46

Well, of course, you know, everything has a context right. So, the return or the interest, I think, the contemporary interest in Weil always has to be draped in our own perceptions, right. We are in a world of group and you know, what is called often identity politics, if you will, and I think this has become fractious, right, a fractious reality, right. So that people are submerged in an identity and what Weil is saying is that, really, it is impossible for the group, especially political groups, to speak for, you know, the deep individual experiences of, of human beings. And to avoid affliction, she is asking for every human being, to have the room and time to cultivate attention. That is something that I think most people living in contemporary Western societies feel a profound lack of, right? And that individualism, the self, the great pad itself, of neoliberalism, right, you know, which was something that she did not know about. She was dead before the real rise of neoliberalism, where the self is everything and collective life has been battered to pieces the you know, commerce or exchange, buying things to pad the singular self, or advertising on Instagram, your perfect singular life, I think has proved to be part of the malaise of contemporary culture. So when people read someone like Weil, who is arguing for the throwing off of that obsession with the self, you know, I did it, I made myself the self made man, this, this isn't an old thing. And it repeats itself in it, especially in U.S. culture, but certainly in Western culture in general. And now because of globalization all over the place that we make ourselves, right, that we literally are, I don't know how we do that as last time I checked, we were all born out of the body of somebody else. Right, we were not only born out of the body of someone else, we just stayed inside that body, and we had to be cut away from that body. This is me, of course, not Weil. She never says anything about pregnancy and birth. But it's my little sounding board. And this, I think, is only a further argument for the A form of binding one person to another. And as we all know, there are now philosophers that are talking about a much larger kind of binding to other species, not just our species being but the recognition that we are part of a fragile, connective tissue.

Jessica Swoboda: 22:27

I wonder if it's even possible for for individuals in contemporary society with how beholden we are and steeped we are in the attention economy and capitalism to cultivate the type of attention that Weil that Weil wants us to? And what we might need to change in our individual selves in order to do that, and it's something I've thought a lot about with her. Yeah, I don't know.

Siri Hustvedt: 22:55

Well, it's a big question. I. I also think that one of the reasons that reading Weil is a tonic is not because again, you have to go down the line with her ideas, or embrace the transcendent or end up with, you know, truth, beauty and God, but rather, because you are in the presence of a rigorous mind, that is questioning the platitudes that we all are subjected to that are pounded into us, and you bring up capitalism, and I think it's very important to recognize the degree to which we accept the idea of capitalist realism, you know, which was a phrase, gosh, what's his name, now, English philosopher, he killed himself will come to me anyway, he coined this phrase, because what happens in the culture is that propaganda produces this idea that it cannot be any other way. Right, right. This is just how it is, you know, unionism is dead, you know, this is speaking against Weil actually, there are ways to organize and I am not opposed to group identities. I think we understand that forms of group identity are very important. They're, politically significant. There is a actually a little link, I think between Weil's idea of the, the impersonal equality and critical race theory, which began as I think most people know, as a legal theory, and then was expanded. But the idea in critical race theory is that individual rights before the law are not enough, because they rest on a notion of equality of all people that has not yet been established. So just to focus on the individual, as if he she, or they were completely separated from the rest of what's going on in the world is a kind of lie, right? Because, uh, some people are silenced. And some people are free to speak. So, in terms of free speech rights, that Weil, you know, glancingly comes on she says, Well, some people can't even speak. So how, how are we then to recognize their equality with the rest of us, when the tools are not even there for them when they cannot attend? Because they haven't. Um, they have been so afflicted, that they can't speak. These are very important points, I think that can be taken in a number of different directions. And she allows that

Jessica Swoboda: 27:07

Your comment there just made me think, do you think that's why when she talks about rights, saying, Oh, you to say I have the right or you have no right to is to what she says a vocal, late and war and awaken the spirit of contention, but when to use the language of justice, or what you're doing to me is not just, you may touch and awaken at its source, the spirit of attention and love. And so is that what you were saying there? Is that why she associates righs with war, and just with the attention that she so wants to cultivate?

Siri Hustvedt: 27:41

I think that's really the distinction she's making. Right? And if you ask yourself, I mean, I've asked myself this for a long time, if we believe in equality, which for me, means something radical, which is that every human life is worth as much as every other. Right? This is a this is a big statement. We know that human beings are not alike, in their narratives, in their privilege, in how they are able or not able to develop their own gifts. All of that is unequal. Right? So to say, that you believe in equality is not to say that you believe everybody's the same, right? Right. In fact, we're amazingly different. And around the world, we have amazingly different social ways of organizing ourselves. So differences are huge. But that notion of every life being as worthy as every other life is a kind of faith issue. We can't prove that. I mean, I can't give you a formulation, which will explain that that is, in fact, part of my secular faith. Right. And there are people who are continually arguing against that. Right, right, that that actually there are human hierarchies. Weil's argument which ends up in God's lap, if you will, is nevertheless an argument about a kind of faith in the equality of every single human being, being of essence much value, not just because you have the same rights in front of the law, but something deeper than that. And I think that's what you're posing. Right? What is it that can allow us to think about an idea that is not just a more pinched notion of attaching certain rights to a human body.

Jessica Swoboda: 30:32

I want to return to the idea of affliction. And I think you've read from this passage earlier. But if we can return to it again, the the second passage that you've selected,

Siri Hustvedt: 30:45

Yes. This is, this is also amazing, I think human thought is unable to acknowledge the reality of affliction. To acknowledge the reality of affliction means saying to oneself, I may lose at any moment, through the play of circumstances over which I have no control. anything whatsoever that I possess, including those things, which are so intimately mine, that I consider them as being myself. There is nothing that I might not lose. It could happen at any moment, that what I am might be abolished, and replaced by anything whatsoever of the filthiest and most contemptible sorts. This isn't dramatic statement.

Jessica Swoboda: 31:50

It is why did you select this passage?

Siri Hustvedt: 31:54

Well, because I think it's true, I think that the way most of us live, quite naturally, is we expect that the patterns of the past will be repeated in the future. That is how we manage our lives. The truth is, that at any moment, every person can be struck by something cataclysmic from sudden war, to the death of the person you love most in the world, to fatal illness, to earthquake, blood, fire. All of this can annihilate not only the patterns of your everyday life that you depend on, but can wound you so deeply, that you no longer recognize yourself. And beyond a certain place. This is something Tzvetan Todorov has written about. Starvation, you know, utter isolation that happened, both in the Nazi death camps and in Stalin's camps. There's beneath a certain requirement. People cannot have agency or the ability to care. Now, we are all vulnerable to this. Some of us are more patted than others in middle class lives, but that doesn't mean that lightning cannot strike. It can strike, and indeed, it does strike. So to live and actually know this. I do think that's helpful.

Jessica Swoboda: 34:09

And to think that, that she herself died at 34. I mean, that's quite a cataclysmic event. I'm assuming she didn't anticipate an early death, or maybe she did, given how she lived her life up until that point.

Siri Hustvedt: 34:22

I mean, there's a very interesting, and it's been written about a great deal, and we might as well go there, at least, briefly, which is that Weil's masochism has been talked about a lot. I mean, there are a number of biographies of her life. And it does seem clear that she sought out situations that were painful. Now, she clearly did this for philosophical reasons as well. And we can never know. Right? The full inside being of another person. And she proud, it seems quite clear that she died a virgin, and that she had eating problems always, even though she uses metaphors of food continually in her work. One way I would like to frame this is that because she was a woman, these aspects of her private life have taken on a prominence that they never do for male philosophers. And, for example, Hume, a beloved philosopher, had a complete nervous breakdown in 1729. It took him years to recover from this. And that breakdown is always framed in terms of how hard he studied, and he couldn't get philosophical ideas out of his mind. So it almost becomes a kind of, you know, his masochism. His failure to take care of himself becomes a, you know, part of this voluminous brilliance of this hard working young man, whereas in Weil's case, it's framed as self harm and masochism. I think we must attend to those differences, because when Weil died, she was working at her peak. And despite the fact that she suffered from

Jessica Swoboda: 36:55

And I feel like we can have a whole other terrible headaches, something that I've also suffered from migraines, she would work through them. And she also took great passion and joy in her philosophical thought, writing, and ideas. I do think there were moments when she felt nearly ecstatic with the pleasure of that kind of work. And again, I just want to note how differently the male philosopher and the female philosopher are treated in these respects. And that separating the private lives of male philosophers from their work is routine. I mean, Nietzsche too suffered from horrifying debilitating headaches. And yet we don't think of him as like the migraine philosopher. Right, right. So, you know, misogyny sneaks in all the time. conversation about the misogyny inherent in philosophical literature, political science worlds and the way women's work is characterized and discussed versus, versus a man's.

Siri Hustvedt: 38:34

But, yeah, go ahead. I just wanted to say something that's very important to me, too, that then that Simone Weil even before the French philosopher, Maurice Merleau Ponty was talking about embodiment, she was talking about embodiment, as the ground for all our thoughts and intellect. So in this way, she was very much opposed to Descartes, separation of the mind and the body. She most definitely separated, you know, what you think of, of the earthly from the heavenly and from God, but she understood deeply that we are embodied creatures. And our thought, attention, and creativity are absolutely dependent on those bodies.

Jessica Swoboda: 39:36

And I mean, you can in your novels like The Blazing World, for example, Harriet burden, the main artist, for her artistic creation is such an embodied experience and aesthetic reception and experiences also an intensely embodied experience. Yeah, so yeah, that's very much present. You can see that commitment of yours throughout throughout your essays and Your novels? Yeah, very, very clearly,

Siri Hustvedt: 40:03

I do not believe that our minds hover above our bodies in two separate realms. I think we are our bodies.

Jessica Swoboda: 40:20

I just have one more question about Weil before we transition into your essay"Scapegoat." And that question is, so Susan Sontag reviewed the collection in which this essay first appeared, and she called"Human Personality" the one great essay in that collection. And I'm wondering for you, what earns "Human personality", the title of a great essay,

Siri Hustvedt: 40:43

For me, and I read this essay first, I think when I was in my early 20s. And, again, we can talk about embodied responses. I felt shaken up by the essay. And this for me, in my own reading, is what I keep. It's not that I don't remember ideas. But the ideas worth keeping, mulling over and thinking about, are always emotionally charged. You know, memory is, is consolidated by emotion. And the great writers for me, always have that passionate kick, whether you agree with them or not, you know. And so, what makes this a great essay is, I think, the courage and passion of her thought, which refuses the truisms and platitudes of her day. And they included very much the idea of, of human rights, you know, that she didn't live into the post war period, but they were working on the idea that you would have a list of human rights. And, and she did not think this was enough.

Jessica Swoboda: 42:31

Yeah, I couldn't agree more that the things don't stay in my memory unless they move me emotionally in some way. Otherwise, I will forget I even read what it is or encountered what it is.

Siri Hustvedt: 42:44

Yeah, there's actually evidence for this, even at a molecular level. So I think we're quite safe. Arguing that you forget what you don't care about. Right?

Jessica Swoboda: 42:58

Which, yes, it's in terms of academic criticism, there's a lot I don't care about. So there's a lot I forgot.

Siri Hustvedt: 43:06

There truly, that is, I think institutional and Weil would have really strongly opposed the churning machinery of institutional academic writing. So what I think of as small writing coming out of particular, discipline disciplines, this includes the sciences, by the way, where you trot out the usual suspects. And my feeling is that if I can look in the back of a book, at the bibliography and know simply from looking at the bibliography, exactly what is going to be written in the first part of the book. I don't need to read that. And we have become so specialized, so institutionalized, if you will, fragmentation in our thinking that this is, I believe, a very damaging aspect of contemporary life. crossing borders something that Weil did routinely is all often frowned upon in academic institutions if people want to get ahead.

Jessica Swoboda: 44:40

Absolutely. I've personally encountered that resistance, yes. So you've selected the essay "Scapegoat" to pair with "Human Personality" and "Scapegoat" is the concluding essay of your most recent collection mothers, fathers and others and in an interview with Lesley Lindsay and early 2022 you wrote that"Scapegoat" began as part of a failed novel, when I put in a drawer to languish forever, but I retrieved the pertinent pages, revisited them and turn them into a long essay about the meanings of that terrible violence and their resonance with the political hatred we are witnessing now. So can you say more specifically, what compelled you to return to escape go when you did?

Siri Hustvedt: 45:24

Yes, I think I mentioned it as a connection to Weil because it deals with affliction, what she called affliction, Malaz, and what I think is closer to abjection. This is a terrible, small story about the sadistic torture and humiliation of a teenage girl by a woman and a group of children, a 37 year old woman and a group of children, poor white people in Indianapolis. It was a huge story in 1965. And it haunted me, you know, question to be answered as of course, how exactly does this happen? What does it mean? There is nothing, it's Sylvia Likens was is the name of the victim. And, you know, it is so terrible. I mean, they forced her to drink, drink urine, they wrote on her her body with the hot poker, I am a prostitute. The things that happened to this girl, teenage girl are so gruesome. And I use parts of the trial transcripts that are available to everybody going through them was pretty harrowing. But I wanted to use this small story as a way to ask questions about how such things can happen on a very small scale, but then also on a larger scale. When scapegoats become important, I do believe that stories of lynchings racism, that the politics of the Nazi Reich involved the scapegoat mechanism, which is why the one philosopher that keeps coming back there are other people mentioned, but the one that keeps coming back is Rene Girard, who wrote specifically about the scapegoat when he called the scapegoat mechanism, which is when an entire community turns against a single person in his fable as a sacrifice to cleanse the community of what are actually their own problems. Right. It's a it's a beautiful, mystical framework for the question of the scapegoat. But I'm trying to look at the bigger question and also ask, what is it in all of us, right? That makes the scapegoat even possible. And when we do this to other people, when human beings do this to other people, they do lose all agency, they are not able to climb to that place of action. They are forced into a kind of horrible passivity and submission. That that really robs them of their humanity.

Jessica Swoboda: 49:35

To conclude, I want to ask about your writing more generally. And this essay is one example of it. The Blazing Worlds is another and it's that you're constantly pulling on a ton of different sources from a variety of disciplines. I mean, you're a lecturer in psychiatry at Cornell. And so the fact that you started getting your you got your PhD in English at Columbia, and then now you've become an expert and in Oh, whole host of disciplines, you're constantly engaging them in your work. And I'm wondering, one, how do you do it? And two, why is it so valuable to seek answers to questions we have far and wide?

Siri Hustvedt: 50:13

Yeah, so the first answer is that I'm old. I'm 68 years old? And if you are a person who reads and follows your nose over time, the necessary truth is that it accumulates. Very simple answer, I'm old, I've accumulated, what I've accumulated, I think, is a different business because, as I said, we live in a world of specialization. And we rely on people who have a kind of additive reality, they stay very strictly inside their field, and learn more and more and more and more about it. Now, I have to say that we often welcome this kind of expertise, if you think about specialties in medicine, for example, we can be grateful to those people who have just spent their whole lives learning about a particular kind of cancer, or, you know, we gain as a society from this, at the same time, I have spent a life you know, both following my nose, wherever it leads, and that means crossing disciplines. And it means running into material that I really do not understand do not have a background in. And what that requires of me, I'm sorry to say, is to go back to 101. Yes, and, and, you know, no one can know everything, it's, it's, it's absurd, but if I become very interested in something, then I begin at the beginning and work through it. And sometimes, in order to challenge myself, I do what I call reading against myself, I read material that I know will antagonize me. Now, this does not mean reading, you know, right wing propaganda or anything like that, I mean, intellectual work, for example, I spent quite a long time trying to figure out symbolic logic and, and how it works. In analytical philosophy, this is very much against my grain. But I found that those exercises really do have an expanding effect on your consciousness, if you will. And they create a kind of flexibility that I am absolutely certain would not be possible. If I hadn't, you know, tested and pushed myself in, in those ways, because we all like to read what confirms what we already know and love, I can care about what's much harder, is to enter into arenas that are alien to us, that we're stupid about, that require tremendous humility, to begin to learn them. And for whatever reason, I have continued to have an appetite for doing that.

Jessica Swoboda: 54:24

So much of what you just said, really resonates with me. A lot of my, I just finished my PhD in English at UVA. And on the one hand, I often joke with my adviser and we both feet we often joke together that we don't feel at home in an English department because our interests are too expansive. And we're criticized by English professors for having these interests in sociology, and political theory and philosophy. And then on the other hand, we're also you're you're speaking about kind of reading against the grain and reading against yourself. I mean, reading against the grain of yourself. And, yeah, a lot of my work deals with sort of the ethics of argument and interpretation. And so thinking about, Oh, when we enter into conversation with people we disagree with, how are we doing it? And often I'm seeing that we don't do it very well. We're often imposing our own terms onto them, and not even listening to them. Because that's, they're coming from a space from which we, which we disagree, and I see that as a harm to the work that we do in academic circles. But just to say that, yeah, what you

Siri Hustvedt: 55:31

use your disciplinary, you know, I'm I, I'm a person who's often drafted, as the, you know, marginal. But let's bring her in, because she can talk about several things. I'm a bridge, I'm the bridge, okay? Often, this really doesn't work at all. I mean, people just talk right? past each other, you know, you bring artists together with scientists. And it all goes terribly wrong. What, what I wants to I gave a lecture at Mass General, was the kind of Grand Rounds lecture, they bring people in. And I lectured on on neurology and hysteria, particularly what this meant, blah, blah, blah. But afterwards, I was taken to visit young scientists who are working specifically on Alzheimer's disease. And they gave me presentations, I asked them questions. And then they were allowed to ask me and this young scientist said, you know, I listened to your talk, and it was clear that you believe that reading philosophy and history and literature for a scientist, was a good thing. But he said, You know, I hang around, and I'm looking at these slides of brains, scans all day. So what, you know, what could this do for me, and, and I said, you know, I'm not advertising this, because I think you'll be more charming at cocktail parties, which you will be, but because it can help you in your own work. And this, I have found to be true, that if you keep digging your row, you know, as in your vegetable garden, and it's just tomatoes. And you never look to the left to the right, and look at any of the other plants that are growing, you will run into dead ends, that can only be solved through another way of thinking. And I deeply believe that the humanities offer the sciences, forms of flexibility of thought that the sciences often do not have. I also think the sciences offer the humanities, certain forms of rigorous thinking that are often alien in the humanities. And that at least understanding something you mentioned earlier, the idea that there are many ways to know, right, so that that means that we can be a piston illogical, pluralists. Right. Knowing does not mean that there's only one path. There are a number of paths of exploring the same problem, you will not get the same answer. I'm afraid you wrote. But as I said in an essay, what you will get the focus zone of ambiguity, right? Out of that focus out of ambiguity, you will be able to ask the next best question. And that's a beautiful thing.

Jessica Swoboda: 59:29

Well, Siri, there's so much I would love to talk to you about No, no that yeah, I can Yeah, no, you're not you're not I want to be I want to be mindful of your time. And just thank you so much for joining us. It's been a real thrill to speak with you today.

Siri Hustvedt: 59:45

Well, you were wonderful, and I really appreciate your having me and it was fun. Actually, it was fun and interesting to return to the essay and, you know, return to her.

Jessica Swoboda: 1:00:01

Thanks everyone for joining us for this episode of selected essays. We'd like to thank Joe Coleman for editing the podcast and Mike Duffy of hand habits for contributing the original music. We hope you'll tune in to our next episode where we'll be talking with a poor batata Polly about Maeve Brennan's last overtures. As always, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and if you have questions, comments or anything else, send an email to selected essays at the point mag.com. We'd love to hear from you. Until next time, listeners.