Teacher. Mentor. Friend. The fortunate among us would use these words to characterize our relationships with our dissertation directors. Working closely with them over several years we get to know our directors well. They influence our intellectual development and professional lives. We may end up working on the same thinkers they do. We may turn to their work for inspiration, and teach it to our own students. We may emulate their teaching styles in our classrooms and strive to be equally effective as mentors to our own graduate students, as well as our junior colleagues.
As women in our discipline know all too well, the relationship we have with our directors can determine whether or not we finish the dissertation, as well as whether or not we remain in philosophy, or even in academe. I count myself among the very fortunate. Bat-Ami Bar On directed my dissertation, and in the ensuing twenty years she remained my mentor and friend. It is difficult to describe what I experienced when I learned on November 13th that Ami had been hospitalized after suffering a serious stroke. She always seemed to me to be somehow indestructible. That she was in crisis therefore hit me as out of nowhere, and stopped me in my tracks. Moreover, that she, as a philosopher, lived the life of the mind made the nature of her crisis particularly brutal.
When Adriel [M. Trott, the Women in Philosophy series editor] said she wanted to include a memoriam for Ami in this blog series, I said I would like to write it. “You want it structured like a traditional obituary, right?” I asked. “Something about her life and her contribution to feminist philosophy?” No, Adriel said. An account of how Ami influenced me “personally, professionally, and philosophically . . . is the best sort of tribute.” Yes, I thought to myself, but it is also more difficult for me to write. (For more traditional obituaries, see here and here.)
I recall sitting in Ami’s office one day having a conversation about my dissertation when the topic of affect came up. I don’t recall the details of why it did, but I do remember her telling me that neither Arendt nor Foucault, the two major figures in my dissertation, provided resources for addressing affective responses. I joked that this was fine with me, because I didn’t want to deal with affect in my work in any case. She indicated that she didn’t address it, either, and that this was probably why we were both drawn to Arendt. “It is a line of descent,” she observed. And yet Arendt’s work does in fact offer insight into an additional reason why it is difficult to describe, in the wake of Ami’s death, how working with her shaped me as a feminist philosopher. Ami’s death is too fresh; I can’t yet access the “backward glance of the historian” that, in Arendt’s view, facilitates the process of making sense. From an Arendtian perspective I am trying to occupy the untenable position of being simultaneously actor and storyteller. I am endeavoring to speak about an experience – the experience of grieving – of which I am still in the midst, and am therefore also speaking through. “All accounts told by the actors themselves,” Arendt writes, “though they may in rare cases give an entirely trustworthy statement of intentions, aims, and motives, become mere useful source material in the historian’s hands and can never match his story in significance and truthfulness” (192). Another part of what makes this difficult to write, then, is the fear that nothing I can possibly say will be adequate and that I will therefore somehow let Ami down.
One of the most important insights I gained from Ami about being a teacher and mentor is to have high expectations of our students (and junior colleagues) which we in turn commit ourselves to helping them achieve. Both implicit and crucial here is acknowledging that the precise nature of these expectations must be flexible since not all students or colleagues are in the same place. Adopting this set of practices of course means we have to get to know people, and that requires an investment of time. Looking back on how much time Ami dedicated to working with me, I wonder how she managed to direct the dissertations of I don’t know how many other graduate students, teach her classes, do her research, and have a life with her family. And yet there was never a point when she stopped giving her time to answer my questions, work through philosophical problems, and just talk about life. Dedicated mentors, teachers who listen to and take us seriously, may come in some ways to know us better than we know ourselves. Ami was able to discern where, in what ways, and the extent to which I needed to be challenged. She recognized me as someone who would neither believe my work was important simply because someone else praised it nor uncritically accept what someone else identified as its limitations. I had to be brought around to believing in my work, to believe in it fully – not despite but because it was incomplete, contained lacunae, made mistakes.
Arendt and Foucault share the perspective that as a human endeavor the work of philosophy will necessarily be limited, marked by failings, and ongoing. Foucault said he wrote philosophy in order to think differently, and therefore to change himself. “If I had to write a book to communicate what I already thought,” he said in an interview, “I’d never have the courage to begin it . . . the book transforms me, changes what I think” (Remarks on Marx, 27). Self-transformation, of course, generated new questions. Arendt, in one of my favorite pieces of her writing, argues that Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Marx all fail in their respective attempts to overturn the tradition of modern Western philosophy. And yet in her estimation their “self-defeat” makes their work no less “great” or “relevant;” in fact, she asserts, “fundamental and flagrant contradictions . . . [i]n the work of great authors lead into the very center of their work” (“Tradition and the Modern Age,” 24).
Ami declared my dissertation defense over when we reached the point where I had to admit defeat: a question was raised that I said I simply couldn’t answer. “You have to let Arendt and Foucault fail you,” she advised. That statement of course implied that I had to learn how to fail, learn how to experience failure. And this would entail neither simply putting a positive spin on it, nor being devastated by it (which is of course also a Nietzschean insight). Ami showed me that the beauty of philosophy, and of life, is that we are always, as Foucault puts it, “in the process of beginning again;” we are always unfolding into the future (“What is Enlightenment?”, 47). There was a photograph on the bulletin board in her office of an aisle framed by rows of books in what she told me was a university library, I don’t recall where. The photo was taken from an angle that made the shelves appear to extend endlessly. “This reminds me,” she said, “that one can never read everything.” Echoing Foucault and Arendt, part of what I heard her saying is something I have repeated many times when teaching my favorite thinkers: “This person didn’t get everything right, but they got some really important things right.” I have tried to practice this insight in my intellectual and professional lives. It reflects the generosity that Ami embodied. She pushed me in order to show me I was capable of more than I thought I was. She held up a mirror that allowed me to see myself as an intellectual, as someone who could have a life of thinking, and writing, and ideas. When possibilities open up for you, when you have the potential for a future you couldn’t previously imagine, you never want to fail the person who made that real for you. You want to prove yourself worthy of the confidence and trust such a person has shown herself to have in you, and the love they have expressed in enabling you to see that in yourself.
In hindsight, then, I think that on that day in her office when we joked about avoiding affect Ami was trying to get me to see that affect is there whether we acknowledge its presence or not. She thought it was better to acknowledge it, to allow it to hover around the edges of our intellectual work even if we chose not to open the door to it completely. During the year that I had a dissertation-year fellowship, I felt intense pressure to finish so I could go on the job market the following fall. I fretted over the inevitable writer’s block and panicked when I had the misfortune to begin thinking differently halfway through the final chapter and had to decide whether to stick with an argument I knew wasn’t working or do some significant rewriting. Ami told me that one of the biggest challenges of writing was figuring out how one wrote, that one had to become aware of one’s own writing process. And a crucial part of doing that, in her view, was also being aware of the fact that “We all write ourselves.” So Ami realized something Arendt didn’t, or at least that she didn’t when she was analyzing action in The Human Condition. Perhaps the actor and the historian can have a kind of relationship and still honor the story. And if that’s the case, then perhaps trying to live up to the confidence and trust and love another person extends to you characterizes a way of living that gets some important things right.
An effect of Ami’s seeming indestructibility is the sense I had that she would always be there. After moving to Cleveland, I still turned to her to consult about really important matters because I knew she would be kind and thoughtful, but especially because I knew she would always be honest. I sought her advice about publishing, conflicts I experienced with colleagues and administrators, chairing my department. We also talked about philosophy. I’ve recently opened the door to affect in my current philosophical projects. Interestingly, I’ve done so precisely in order to explore more fully the problem of violence, a problem that preoccupied Ami throughout her career. I’ve found myself thinking differently and thinking with new philosophers, engaging other philosophical traditions.
I didn’t get the opportunity to discuss this new work with Ami. About a year ago, however, I wrote to ask for her help in teaching Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence.” A group of male students was interpreting the concept of divine violence in a conservative manner and I needed help to correct them. Because the students had found Ami’s work compelling when we read a chapter from The Subject of Violence, and because Ami was a Jewish philosopher, I thought they would listen to her perspective. She described divine violence in the educative sense Benjamin invokes as an ‘“aha” moment after which perspective is shifted.’ She said there is a tendency to emphasize this perspective shift as definitively positive because it opens onto something new. “But,” she emphasized, “destruction and loss take place in that very same moment.”
When my father was dying in January of 2002, just a few months after I began my job at John Carroll, I wrote to Ami and asked whether I should return to North Carolina to be with him. I had traveled there twice that month, classes had started, and I was worried about fulfilling my obligations to my new institution. I feel certain that Ami saw through what I was doing: trying to hide behind my job, using work to fend off my fear and pain. “I think you should go,” she wrote,
if it is clear his death is already imminent. Even if he does not recognize you because of the pain and drugs, you will be there for him That is more important than what will happen this term with your classes. You will not recover what you started and put in place. But so what, really. There are many terms to come. You got this one dad who has been very loving of you.
For me, her response reflects the inevitable interconnection of the continuous unfolding of existence with destruction and loss that she identified in Benjamin. “You need to sit with loss,” she was telling me, “even if all you can do for now is permit to hover around the edges.” I’m taking her advice to heart. I’ve allowed the loss of my teacher, mentor, and friend to hover around me in this writing. Eventually I’ll be able to invite it to sit with me.
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on women in the history of philosophy, posts on issues of concern to women in the field of philosophy, and posts that put philosophy to work to address issues of concern to women in the wider world. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Adriel M. Trott or Associate Editor Julinna Oxley.
Dianna Taylor
Dianna Taylor is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio. She is author of Sexual Violence and Humiliation: A Foucauldian-Feminist Perspective (Routledge, 2020) editor of Michel Foucault: Key Concepts (Acumen, 2010), and co-editor of Feminism and the Final Foucault (University of Illinois, 2004) and Feminist Politics: Identity, Difference, Agency (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007). Her current research analyzes rage and counter-violence as feminist resources for resisting and preventing sexual violence and sexual humiliation.
