The Thinking Woman
240 pages, 6 x 9
3 colour images
Paperback
Release Date:16 Oct 2020
ISBN:9781978819900
Hardcover
Release Date:16 Oct 2020
ISBN:9781978820081
While women have struggled to gain recognition in the discipline of philosophy, there is no shortage of brilliant female thinkers. What can these women teach us about ethics, politics, and the nature of existence, and how might we relate these big ideas back to the smaller everyday concerns of domestic life, work, play, love, and relationships?
Australian novelist Julienne van Loon goes on a worldwide quest to answer these questions, by engaging with eight world-renowned thinkers who have deep insights on humanity and society: media scholar Laura Kipnis, novelist Siri Hustvedt, political philosopher Nancy Holmstrom, psychoanalytic theorist Julia Kristeva, domestic violence reformer Rosie Batty, peace activist Helen Caldicott, historian Marina Warner, and feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti. As she speaks to these women, she reflects on her own experiences. Combining the intimacy of a memoir with the intellectual stimulation of a theoretical text, The Thinking Woman draws novel connections between the philosophical, personal, and political. Giving readers a new appreciation for both the ethical complexities and wonder of everyday life, this book is inspiration to all thinking people.
The Thinking Woman, the first work of non-fiction by acclaimed novelist Julienne van Loon (whose career began with a Vogel win for her first novel, Road Story, in 2004) is a knotty, charismatic exploration of the intersection between ideas and lived experience, through six central themes...a surprising and resonant work that cements van Loon's status as a thinking woman well worth reading and following.
There is so much life in these conversations. Words and ideas feel hot, propulsive, uncontained in their implications. Above all else, this feeling of thinking—of thinking out loud, of thinking together, of thinking with and alongside—it’s a very special kind of high.
It’s heartening to read a book that encourages us to challenge our assumptions. To think expansively, and to look at those who do, and how that may be relevant to our everyday. An invitation to a thoughtful life. Julienne van Loon’s The Thinking Woman is that kind of book.
A compelling portrait of the relationship between thinking and feeling.
A fascinating book that will have us all thinking, whether or not we are women.
The Thinking Woman is also much more than a thematically organised collection of essays that bring the dense theories of living feminist and female philosophers to a general readership. In many ways the book is also a revelation, as it marks van Loon as an extraordinary memoirist, able to draw convincing parallels between her own life and the academic arguments of her philosopher subjects without descending into cant or mawkishness. Van Loon manages to move confidently and convincingly between discussing her early love of trees and her first job working at a Dagwood Dog truck, to Julia Kristeva’s theory of subjective horror and Rosi Braidotti’s concept of bios/zoe.
Towards the end of van Loon’s journey through her interviews with these impressive women, she asks: where are you at? It is a question she says we should all be asking each other, not so much for our physical whereabouts — though that can be crucial when a friend is in trouble — but to enquire about our own journey of becoming in the precarious world we inhabit... The Thinking Woman does a lot to help us think about how we can, how we could, even how we should, deal with our own feelings, and find the fluidity of imagination to live thoughtfully and fully.. I await volume two.
Show[s] us why and how philosophy matters in achingly personal, human terms...The quiet delight of this book is not just in watching its women think but understanding how and why they slice the world the way they do; locating their ideas in a biographical context, as the unique product of a life. A woman's life.
Here is an absolutely original work that may upend the certainties governing your days and nights. Reader beware.
The Thinking Woman displays the myriad of ways we strive to maintain our freedom and to survive and flourish brilliantly.
The Thinking Woman, the first work of non-fiction by acclaimed novelist Julienne van Loon (whose career began with a Vogel win for her first novel, Road Story, in 2004) is a knotty, charismatic exploration of the intersection between ideas and lived experience, through six central themes...a surprising and resonant work that cements van Loon's status as a thinking woman well worth reading and following.
There is so much life in these conversations. Words and ideas feel hot, propulsive, uncontained in their implications. Above all else, this feeling of thinking—of thinking out loud, of thinking together, of thinking with and alongside—it’s a very special kind of high.
It’s heartening to read a book that encourages us to challenge our assumptions. To think expansively, and to look at those who do, and how that may be relevant to our everyday. An invitation to a thoughtful life. Julienne van Loon’s The Thinking Woman is that kind of book.
A compelling portrait of the relationship between thinking and feeling.
A fascinating book that will have us all thinking, whether or not we are women.
The Thinking Woman is also much more than a thematically organised collection of essays that bring the dense theories of living feminist and female philosophers to a general readership. In many ways the book is also a revelation, as it marks van Loon as an extraordinary memoirist, able to draw convincing parallels between her own life and the academic arguments of her philosopher subjects without descending into cant or mawkishness. Van Loon manages to move confidently and convincingly between discussing her early love of trees and her first job working at a Dagwood Dog truck, to Julia Kristeva’s theory of subjective horror and Rosi Braidotti’s concept of bios/zoe.
Towards the end of van Loon’s journey through her interviews with these impressive women, she asks: where are you at? It is a question she says we should all be asking each other, not so much for our physical whereabouts — though that can be crucial when a friend is in trouble — but to enquire about our own journey of becoming in the precarious world we inhabit... The Thinking Woman does a lot to help us think about how we can, how we could, even how we should, deal with our own feelings, and find the fluidity of imagination to live thoughtfully and fully.. I await volume two.
Show[s] us why and how philosophy matters in achingly personal, human terms...The quiet delight of this book is not just in watching its women think but understanding how and why they slice the world the way they do; locating their ideas in a biographical context, as the unique product of a life. A woman's life.
Here is an absolutely original work that may upend the certainties governing your days and nights. Reader beware.
The Thinking Woman displays the myriad of ways we strive to maintain our freedom and to survive and flourish brilliantly.
JULIENNE VAN LOON is the author of three critically acclaimed novels: Road Story, Beneath the Bloodwood Tree and Harmless. Her honors include the Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award and an appointment as Honorary Fellow in Writing with the University of Iowa. She is an associate professor with the writing and publishing program at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.
Foreword
by Anne Summers
We women are so accustomed to having unfriendly or even abu-sive adjectives and epithets hurled at us that it is a rare, and very welcome, experience to be described as ‘thinking’. It is, when you think about, so unusual, contradictory even, that it is startling. Instead of the usual descriptions – ‘bitch’, ‘aggressive’, ‘shrill’, ‘ball-breaking’ – that portrays us as upsetting the natural order of things, we are characterised as thoughtful, as people who want answers to the big questions of life.
This book aims to ‘connect philosophical thinking and every-day life’ and Julienne van Loon has done this in an intriguing way. The book is partly a memoir, telling often disturbing sto-ries of her childhood, becoming a mother, joining the academy, leaving a long-term relationship, losing a best friend to a violent end, travelling, learning, thinking. It is also an exploration of the themes that have preoccupied her in life and at work and which are the organising themes of this book. The six chapters explore love, play, work, fear, wonder and friendship, through interviews with ‘thinking women’ and stories of her own experiences. It is an absorbing and, at times, challenging brew. I found myself stop-ping to think on almost every page as ideas swirled up in new ways, or new contexts, and forced me to ask the same questions of myself that van Loon was asking as part of her meditation. It is an energising and provoking experience and that it is so unfamiliar is a testament to the originality of this book. We are not used to such philosophical explorations being linked to the stuff of everyday existence, yet we should be. How else do we arrive at understanding, or enlightenment? At the insights that brace us to continue to propel ourselves forward? There are many in this book but perhaps the one that resonated most with me was the description of friendship as ‘a project that has no end’. What a perfect way to think about the wonderful, rewarding yet often infuriating relationships we have with our close friends. I am still turning this thought around in my mind and using it to examine the friendships I value.
Of the six thinking women she interviews, only one, Nancy Holmstrom, she says, can be labelled ‘a capital P philosopher’ in that she is employed as such at a university. The others are the novelist Siri Hustvedt, the feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti, the media studies professor Laura Kipnis, the writer and historian Marina Warner and Julia Kristeva, a psychoanalyst, novelist and feminist philosopher. But they are each women who continue to think deeply about the fundamental questions of life and who were willing to share their thoughts, as well as their precious pri-vate time, with their Antipodean interrogator. The result is a fascinating book that will have us all thinking, whether or not we are women.
by Anne Summers
We women are so accustomed to having unfriendly or even abu-sive adjectives and epithets hurled at us that it is a rare, and very welcome, experience to be described as ‘thinking’. It is, when you think about, so unusual, contradictory even, that it is startling. Instead of the usual descriptions – ‘bitch’, ‘aggressive’, ‘shrill’, ‘ball-breaking’ – that portrays us as upsetting the natural order of things, we are characterised as thoughtful, as people who want answers to the big questions of life.
This book aims to ‘connect philosophical thinking and every-day life’ and Julienne van Loon has done this in an intriguing way. The book is partly a memoir, telling often disturbing sto-ries of her childhood, becoming a mother, joining the academy, leaving a long-term relationship, losing a best friend to a violent end, travelling, learning, thinking. It is also an exploration of the themes that have preoccupied her in life and at work and which are the organising themes of this book. The six chapters explore love, play, work, fear, wonder and friendship, through interviews with ‘thinking women’ and stories of her own experiences. It is an absorbing and, at times, challenging brew. I found myself stop-ping to think on almost every page as ideas swirled up in new ways, or new contexts, and forced me to ask the same questions of myself that van Loon was asking as part of her meditation. It is an energising and provoking experience and that it is so unfamiliar is a testament to the originality of this book. We are not used to such philosophical explorations being linked to the stuff of everyday existence, yet we should be. How else do we arrive at understanding, or enlightenment? At the insights that brace us to continue to propel ourselves forward? There are many in this book but perhaps the one that resonated most with me was the description of friendship as ‘a project that has no end’. What a perfect way to think about the wonderful, rewarding yet often infuriating relationships we have with our close friends. I am still turning this thought around in my mind and using it to examine the friendships I value.
Of the six thinking women she interviews, only one, Nancy Holmstrom, she says, can be labelled ‘a capital P philosopher’ in that she is employed as such at a university. The others are the novelist Siri Hustvedt, the feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti, the media studies professor Laura Kipnis, the writer and historian Marina Warner and Julia Kristeva, a psychoanalyst, novelist and feminist philosopher. But they are each women who continue to think deeply about the fundamental questions of life and who were willing to share their thoughts, as well as their precious pri-vate time, with their Antipodean interrogator. The result is a fascinating book that will have us all thinking, whether or not we are women.
Introduction
The thinking woman exists: she is alive and well. Browsing through the philosophy sections of some of the world’s best bookshops, and indeed through the staff listings in philosophy departments at any of our most prestigious universities, one has to be sharp-eyed and persistent to find her. Sometimes, she has been cast out from capital-p Philosophy as a discipline and a category. Often, she was never admitted to those schools in the first place. In fact, the thinking woman can frequently be found having a better and more playful time elsewhere: she is with and amongst the novel-ists, artists and activists; she has flourished in the social sciences and humanities more broadly; or she has made it on her own as an independent scholar. Life, for the thinking woman, can be messy and complicated. She is and is not a philosopher. She is rarely a household name. When she gets too powerful, there is a remarkably consistent method for bringing her down: a combination of ridicule, smear campaign and forced exile. These are some of the reasons why her work has so much to offer.
Six years ago, I set out to write a book profiling living female philosophers, a book I hoped would work to connect philosophical thinking and everyday life in a manner that values and validates the work of some of our leading female philosophers, and that speaks to those of us trying to make sense of how to live now. I had particular themes in mind: love, friendship, work, play, fear, and wonder. I had questions, too. Is love a good investment? In what form should women participate in work under capitalism? How necessary, how vital, is friendship? I began reading widely, in earnest. I began to wonder who we might define as a female philosopher.
And then, what is philosophy?
As I write this introduction, sitting at a familiar café benchtop on an ordinary weekday morning, I look to the other end of the long room, and see a woman looking back at me. She is dark-haired and spectacled, her profile eerily similar to my own, and as she leans forward, elbow on the table, she tilts her face slightly to rest against her hand. She is looking back the length of the room at me, not with recognition but with an open, contemplative gaze. She is thinking. For a second, I mistake her for another version of myself.
Philosophy need not be a closed and cloistered corridor. It need not be a space exclusively for the Y chromosome and the elite. In a secular, contemporary world, many of us who are untethered from organised religion – or at least less firmly bound by it than our parents or grandparents might have been – can find both solace and instruction in the rich and rigorous examination of mean-ing that goes on and through the work of philosophy. It is, in its broadest definition, the art of making sense of things. By things, in this instance, we can mean those pertaining to the bigger picture: existence, reality. And yet the work I profile here frequently knits together the big picture and the small: I find the role of lived expe-rience in the work of the women I profile in this book vivid and impactful.
In my view, the purpose of philosophy is to help us to analyse and therefore to understand our experiences of the world in which we live. Those physical, social and institutional structures we find ourselves negotiating every day – work, family, the neighbourhood, domestic coupledom – are themselves the products of particular ways of thinking. Reading the work of the female thinkers I profile in this book has helped me to think more deeply about the circumstances into which I have been cast, and into which I have cast myself. Their work has led me to examine – often with considerable discomfort – not just the choices I have made, but the extent to which those choices have been complicit in furthering forms of thinking that I don’t actually subscribe to myself, includ-ing some that I actually would prefer to outright reject.
Are my key subjects in this book philosophers, then? No and yes. Yes and no. Given the problems of philosophy as a category that so frequently excludes women, and as a discipline so enamoured by logic as method, I came to categorise the women whose work I write about here as, first and foremost, thinkers. Their work prompts insightful questions about the big things and the small, and this too became a key objective for my own book. I wanted to braid their questions with my own. I wanted to try their observations on. Further, I wanted to prompt and provoke my own readers to look at what happens when we apply philosophy to our own everyday circumstances. It’s not an easy thing to do. It can lead to a radical change of attitude to things we have come to accept. It can prompt us to investigate more fully our own motivations, or, as has sometimes happened to me, give us a deeply uncomfortable feeling of anger or shame.
To develop this book, I travelled widely, spending considerable hours with my interviewees. I sat with Siri Hustvedt in her artfully decorated home in Brooklyn as we shared with one another play-ful anecdotes about childhood and parenting. I climbed the stairs to Laura Kipnis’s apartment in Manhattan, and shared a Thai meal with her while talking fidelity and control in domestic partner-ships. In London, the following year, I fell a little bit in love with Marina Warner’s summertime urban garden. I carried the memory of its lively colour with me across continents as I sat down at my kitchen table in Australia to read more deeply her work on botanical artist Maria Merian. Gradually, The Thinking Woman began to take shape. I travelled again, this time to trace a path along the old canals of the Netherlands to the magnificent front room of the Centre for the Humanities at the University of Utrecht, where Rosi Braidotti and I commenced a friendship through intense discussions about the meaning and potential of friendship. Later, I met with Helen Caldicott in her newly planted back garden in the southern highlands of New South Wales, where we talked about what it takes to care so deeply for the planet that you turn to full-time activism for a period of forty years. Finally, I returned to the United States and to Manhattan, where I met with one of the few women in the book to forge a career in a conventional philosophy department: Nancy Holmstrom. In addition to philosophies of work, Nancy and I compared my experiences of road cycling to hers with running marathons. I still remember fondly the beauti-ful poise of her cat. With Julia Kristeva, I exchanged several emails, but, regrettably, we did not meet in person. I still hope one day to change that.
While I was writing this book, there was plenty happening to prompt one’s thinking about feminism in the public sphere. Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign was dogged by gendered discourse, including ridicule, and ultimately failed. Rebecca Solnit published Men Explain Things to Me. Then the #MeToo movement took flight with the outing of Harvey Weinstein, and many other men in positions of privilege who have been revealed to be sexual predators since. As this book goes to press, Julia Kristeva has come under the spotlight due to allegations about her rela-tionship with the Bulgarian government when she was a young student in France. Was she a spy? The facts are still disputed, but my inclination is to see the allegations against her as part of a fairly common trend: she is possibly the most well-known living female philosopher. She has considerable influence. Tracking the work of the women in this book over decades, including the reception of their work in the public sphere, I am inclined to approach attempts at reputational damage with considerable caution. One sees patterns, over time, and the cumulative effect is dispiriting.
As I wrote, the world kept turning. Rosie Batty won some hard-fought battles for domestic violence policy reform in Australia, even while one woman per week in this country continues to be killed by her partner or ex-partner. Rosi Braidotti’s work on posthumanism has found an increasingly widespread audience in recent years, particularly in the light of the serious effects of climate change. My own life circumstances changed too. I left the father of my son. I moved cities. My child grew from preschooler to confident tween.
I stuck to the themes I had begun with – work and play, fear and wonder, love and friendship – and to my original intentions for the book. I wanted to write a companionable book that val-idates the work of living female thinkers and at the same time provides its readers with a sense that the questions those thinkers are asking are not so different from those we all ponder from time to time. I wanted to celebrate the contribution made by women in the intellectual sphere at the same time as considering their ideas thoroughly, by applying them to my set of circumstances. Women like Laura Kipnis and Nancy Holmstrom (to name just two) have thought deeply about such questions as: why do relationships seem like work; what alternatives are there for the way we organise our labour? Their endeavours deserve our serious attention.
The book you hold in your hand has far more of my own story in it than I intended at the start, and, for this reason, it has not been easy to write. The writing has required some deeply reflective thinking of my own, much of which I share with you. I have tried to recreate events, locales and occasional conversations from my memories of them. Sometimes I have changed names and identi-fying details to protect privacy. The eight women I have chosen to profile in the book – both intellectuals and activists – all play themselves, of course, and I generally quote from transcriptions of our conversations, recorded over a three-year period (2014–2016). These women are indeed alive and well, and their thinking speaks to the particular cultural moment we find ourselves in right now. I thank them for their extraordinary work, and also for their support for this project. I urge you to consider their ideas with some depth, to apply their thinking to your (our) own circumstances and to move towards your own mode of answering back, in whatever form that may take.
The woman I observed earlier at the other end of the long room has moved on, and I watch as another takes her place. Younger, the new visitor sports short spiky hair, a dark floral print on her dress, boots. She puts down her heavy backpack and takes off her headphones. She looks at the menu a moment, then glances towards the window. I wonder what she is thinking, and further, where her thinking might take her next.
Contents
Foreword
Introduction
CHAPTER 1 Love
CHAPTER 2 Play
CHAPTER 3 Work
CHAPTER 4 Fear
CHAPTER 5 Wonder
CHAPTER 6 Friendship
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Introduction
CHAPTER 1 Love
CHAPTER 2 Play
CHAPTER 3 Work
CHAPTER 4 Fear
CHAPTER 5 Wonder
CHAPTER 6 Friendship
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Related Titles
Reversing the Gaze
What If the Other Were You?
By Geneviève Makaping; Translated by Giovanna Bellesia Contuzzi and Victoria Offredi Poletto; Edited by Simone Brioni
