Women in Dark Times

by Jacqueline Rose

  Let feminism, then, be the place in our culture which asks everyone, women and men, to recognise the failure of the present dispensation – its stiff-backed control, its ruthless belief in its own mastery, its doomed attempt to bring the uncertainty of the world to heel. Let feminism be the place where the most painful aspects of our inner world do not have to hide from the light, but are ushered forth as handmaidens to our protest. To return once more to one of this book’s opening epigraphs, the words of Rosa Luxemburg in a letter to her lover, Leo Jogiches, in 1898: ‘Just imagine, it was precisely those bruises on my soul that at the next moment gave me the courage for a new life.’ She had just arrived in Berlin, ‘a complete stranger and all alone’ as she put it, determined to make her mark on politics in the city, only to find herself confronted with its ‘cold power’.16 ‘Cold power’ will do nicely for what the world expects of men, and what women, provided they are not co-opted by its lure, are up against. Just for a moment, she allows herself to think that maybe she should return to the quiet, harmonious and happy life they had shared in Zurich. But she then realises this is a delusion. They neither lived together nor found joy in one another, ‘and in fact there was nothing very happy’.17 Indeed looking back, she feels such a ‘completely bewildering sense of disharmony, something incomprehensible, tormenting and dark’, that she gets shooting pains in her temples and ‘exactly the physical sensation of black-and-blue places, painful bruises on my soul’. She knows that the idyll of their life together, past and future, is a myth (as the rest of their relationship will sadly confirm). Such knowledge, when the mind slips the moorings of its own strongest wish, is almost unbearable. It presents her with something incomprehensible and dark, far from the ‘cold power’ which faced her on arrival in the harsh and indifferent city: ‘completely indifferent to me’.18 It is, then, Luxemburg’s genius not to deny this anguish but to give it the free play of her mind, allowing it to fuel the energies with which she will go on to challenge the world’s inequality and injustice. She is just one of the women we have met on these pages for whom courage does not mean painting over the dark, as if the real predator were our inner life, but embracing that life, looking it full in the face, acknowledging its part in our histories.

  The feminism I am calling for would have the courage of its contradictions. It would assert the rights of women, boldly and brashly, but without turning its own conviction into a false identity or ethic. It would make its demands with a clarity that brooks no argument, but without being seduced by its own rhetoric. The last thing it would do is claim sexuality as prize possession or consumable good. This is a feminism aware that it moves, that it has to move, through the sexual undercurrents of our lives where all certainties come to grief. Otherwise it too will find itself lashing out against the unpredictability of the world, party to its cruelties and false promises. Such a feminism would accept what it is to falter and suffer inwardly, while still laying out – without hesitation – its charge sheet of injustice. This might just, I allow myself to think, be an immense relief for many of both sexes. Not all the women in this book have been feminists by any means. But they have each in their unique way given me a glimpse of what such a feminism might look like as it attempts to build a viable future and enters the next stage of its struggle.

  Notes

  Introduction

  1 Rosa Luxemburg, Herzlichst Ihre Rosa: Ausgewählte Briefe (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1989), ed. Annelies Laschitza and Georg Adler, foreword by Annelies Laschitza, p. 5; see also Colin F. Richmond, ‘The Origins of Merz’, Common Knowledge, 2:3, Winter 1993. My sincere thanks to Colin Richmond for alerting me to this unknown side of Luxemburg.

  2 Rosa Luxemburg to Leo Jogiches, 24 June 1898, The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, ed. Georg Adler, Peter Hudis and Annelies Laschitza (London: Verso, 2011) (hereafter Letters), p. 68.

  3 Luxemburg to Jogiches, 19 April 1899, Comrade and Lover: Rosa Luxemburg’s Letters to Leo Jogiches, ed. and trans. Elżbieta Ettinger (London: Pluto, 1979), pp. 76–7.

  4 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), p. 473.

  5 Ibid.

  6 Kira Cochrane, ‘How to win your fights, suffragette style’, Guardian, 30 May 2013.

  7 Mary Beard, ‘The Public Voice of Women’, London Review of Books Winter Lecture, British Museum, 14 February 2014, London Review of Books, 36:6, 20 March 2014.

  8 Raya Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, foreword by Adrienne Rich (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), p. 27; see also August Bebel to Bruno Schönlank, 3 November 1898, cited in Peter Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 104.

  9 Jogiches, October 1905, cited in Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 213.

  10 The Rosa Luxemburg Reader (hereafter Reader, references to this volume shall be given where available), ed. Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004), p. 316.

  11 Joseph Goebbels, Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler (Munich: Verlag, Frz. Eher Nachf., 1932), pp. 15–16, cited in Elżbieta Ettinger, Rosa Luxemburg – A Life (London: Pandora, 1995), p. 231.

  12 For an excellent overview of critical commentaries on Salomon’s work, see Reading Charlotte Salomon, ed. Michael P. Steinberg and Monica Bohm-Duchen (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006).

  13 Charlotte Salomon, Life? or Theatre?, trans. Leila Vennewitz (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1998), p. 62 (I have used the page numbers of this edition, which are numbered 41–824). For the complete set of gouaches and versos see http://www.jhm.nl/collection/themes/charlotte-salomon/leben-oder-theater. References to items in this collection not included in the published text will be given as JHM (Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam) with the number of the gouache.

  14 Ibid.

  15 Reader, p. 313.

  16 Salomon, Life? or Theatre?, p. 753; see also Darcy Buerkle, Nothing Happened: Charlotte Salomon and An Archive of Suicide, Michigan Studies in Comparative Jewish Studies (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2013).

  17 Cited in Mary Lowenthal Felstiner, To Paint Her Life: Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 219.

  18 Ibid., p. 276.

  19 Alfred Wolfsohn, ‘Die Brücke’, cited in Felstiner, To Paint Her Life, p. 60.

  20 Lizzy Davies, ‘First SlutWalk, now feminist summer school’, Guardian, 15 August 2011.

  21 Felstiner, To Paint Her Life, p. 208.

  22 Margaret Atwood, ‘Romney gets short end of the stick’, Guardian, 10 November 2012.

  23 Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (London: Pimlico, 2007), p. 231.

  24 Laura Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity (London: British Film Institute, 1996), pp. 47–8.

  25 Ibid., p. 49.

  26 Judt, Postwar, p. 221.

  27 Richard Meryman, ‘A Last Long Talk with a Lonely Girl’, Life, 17 August 1962 – this is Meryman’s account of the Life interview published 3 August 1962 (all other references to this interview: ‘Fame May Go By’, in Wagenknecht).

  28 Gloria Steinem, Marilyn (London: Penguin, 1987), p. 79.

  29 Norman Rosten, Marilyn – A Very Personal Story (London: Millington, 1974), pp. 67–9.

  30 Marilyn Monroe, Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Marilyn Monroe (hereafter Fragments), ed. Stanley Buchthal and Bernard Comment (London: HarperCollins, 2010), p. 223.

  31 Steinem, Marilyn, p. 99.

  32 Marilyn Monroe to Lester Markel, 29 March 1960, cited in Lois Banner, MM: Personal, from the private archive of Marilyn Monroe (New York: Abrams, 2012), p. 182, emphasis original.

  33 Rosa Luxemburg, ‘The Russian Revolution’, in The Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism? (Michigan: Ann Arbor, 1961), p. 62; see also Reader, p. 302.

  34 Lawrence Schiller, ‘A Splash of Marilyn’, Vanity Fair, No. 622, June 2012, p. 102.

  35 Ibid.

  36 Eve Arnold, Marilyn Monroe – An Appreciation (London: Ham
ish Hamilton, 1987), p. 137.

  37 Ibid., p. 25.

  38 Ibid., p. 28.

  39 Ibid.

  40 Rosa Luxemburg, ‘Organisational Questions of Russian Social Democracy’, 1904, Marxism in Russia, ed. Neil Harding, with translations by Richard Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 302; see also Reader, p. 256.

  41 Fragments, p. 101.

  42 Banner, MM – Personal, p. 59.

  43 Luxemburg to Luise Kautsky, Letters, p. 177.

  44 Judt, Postwar, p. 9.

  45 Fragments, p. 79.

  46 Angela Carter, Angela Carter’s Book of Wayward Girls and Wicked Women (London: Virago, 1986, 2010), p. viii.

  47 Luxemburg to Kostya Zetkin, Letters, p. 240.

  48 Ibid.

  49 Christopher Bollas, ‘The Trauma of Incest’, Forces of Destiny: Psychoanalysis and Human Idiom (London: Free Association, 1989).

  50 Salomon, Life? or Theatre?, p. 803.

  51 See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer – Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

  52 Felstiner, To Paint Her Life, p. 118.

  53 Ibid.

  54 Louis Aragon, in Adam Rutkowski, ‘Le camp d’internement de Gurs’, Le Monde Juif, 101, January–March 1981, cited in Felstiner, To Paint Her Life, p. 119.

  55 Hanna Schram and Barbara Vormeier, Vivre à Gurs. Un camp de concentration français (Paris: Maspero, 1979), and Yolla Niclas-Sachs, ‘Looking Back from New Horizons’, (New York: Leo Baeck Institute Archive, June 1941), cited in Felstiner, To Paint Her Life, p. 120.

  56 Judt, Postwar, p. 9.

  57 Cited in Fadia Faqir, ‘Intrafamily femicide in defence of honour: the case of Jordan’, Third World Quarterly, 22, 1, 2001, p. 76.

  58 Ayse Onal, Honour Killing: Stories of Men Who Killed (London: Saqi, 2008), p. 122.

  59 Unni Wikan, In Honor of Fadime: Murder and Shame, trans. Anna Paterson (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2008), p. 230.

  60 Rana Husseini, Murder in the Name of Honour: The True Story of One Woman’s Fight Against an Unbelievable Crime (Oxford: Oneworld, 2009), p. 160.

  61 Esther Shalev-Gerz, Les portraits des histoires: Aubervilliers (Aubervilliers: Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux arts, 2000), pp. 30, 40.

  62 Yael Bartana, Mary Koszmary (Nightmares), first of film trilogy . . . And Europe Will Be Stunned, opening address by Sławomir Sierakowski.

  63 Thérèse Oulton, Territory (London: Marlborough Fine Arts Publications, 2010) (p. 5 – pages unnumbered).

  64 Reader, pp. 45, 56, 67.

  65 Ettinger citing Luxemburg, ‘The First Years 1893–1897’, Ettinger, ed., Comrade and Lover, pp. 1–2.

  66 Rosa Luxemburg, J’étais, je suis, je serai! Correspondance 1914–1919, ed. Georges Haupt (Paris: Maspero, 1977), p. 306, cited in Ettinger, Rosa Luxemburg, p. xiii.

  67 Alan Levy, ‘A Good Long Look at Myself’, Redbook Magazine, August 1962, in Edward Wagenknecht, Marilyn Monroe – A Composite View (London: Chilton, 1969), p. 25.

  I: THE STARS

  1. Woman on the Verge of Revolution: Rosa Luxemburg

  1 Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 37.

  2 Clara Zetkin, ‘Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht’, Leipziger Volkszeitung, 3 February 1919, in Clara Zetkin, Selected Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner, with a foreword by Angela Y. Davis (New York: New World, 1984), p. 150.

  3 Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, 1938 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 313.

  4 Ibid., p. 273.

  5 Ahdaf Soueif, Cairo, My City, Our Revolution (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 7.

  6 Ben Quinn, ‘Facebook campaign hero sparks TV support’, Guardian, 8 February 2011.

  7 Luxemburg to Jogiches, 17 May 1898, Letters, p. 41.

  8 Wendell Steavenson, ‘Letter from Cairo: Two Revolutions – What has Egypt’s transition meant for its women?’, The New Yorker, 12 November 2012.

  9 Ibid.

  10 Patrick Cockburn, ‘Hazards of Revolution’, London Review of Books, 36:1, January 2014.

  11 Marwan Bishara, author of The Invisible Arab: The Promise and Peril of the Arab Revolution (New York: Nation, 2012), in discussion, Middle East Institute, Columbia University, 16 February 2012.

  12 Luxemburg to Luise Kautsky, 24 November 1917, Letters, p. 452.

  13 Luxemburg, ‘The Russian Revolution’, p. 69; see also Reader, p. 305.

  14 Ettinger, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 28.

  15 Ibid., p. 80.

  16 Hannah Arendt, ‘Rosa Luxemburg: 1871–1919’, Men in Dark Times (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970; Pelican edition, 1973), p. 50.

  17 Rosa Luxemburg, ‘The Crisis in German Social Democracy (The Junius Pamphlet)’ (New York: Socialist Publications, 1919), p. 127; see also Reader, p. 340.

  18 Cited in Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 323.

  19 Ibid., p. 518.

  20 Luxemburg to Jogiches, 1 November 1905, Letters, p. 216.

  21 Luxemburg to Luise and Karl Kautsky, 13 March 1906, Letters, p. 230.

  22 Luxemburg to Emanuel and Mathilde Wurm, 18 July 1906, cited in Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 246.

  23 Luxemburg to Luise and Karl Kautsky, 13 March 1906, Letters, p. 230.

  24 Luxemburg to Mathilde Wurm, 28 December 1916, Letters, p. 363.

  25 Ibid., emphasis original.

  26 Ibid.

  27 Zetkin, Selected Writings, p. 156.

  28 Luxemburg to Adolf Warski, end November or beginning December 1918, Letters, p. 484.

  29 Ettinger, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 226.

  30 Rosa Luxemburg, Letters from Prison to Sophie Liebknecht (Berlin: Schoenberg, 1921), trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (London: Socialist Book Centre, 1946).

  31 Luxemburg, ‘The Russian Revolution’, p. 25; see also Reader, p. 281.

  32 Ettinger, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 196.

  33 Luxemburg, ‘The Russian Revolution’, p. 30; see also Reader, p. 284.

  34 Rosa Luxemburg, The Mass Strike, 1906, introduction by Tony Cliff (London: Bookmarks, 1986), p. 54; see also Reader, p. 198.

  35 Luxemburg, ‘Organisational Questions of Russian Social Democracy’, p. 302; see also Reader, p. 256.

  36 Luxemburg, ‘The Russian Revolution’, p. 71; see also Reader, p. 306.

  37 Ibid.

  38 Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 90.

  39 Luxemburg, ‘The Russian Revolution’, p. 58; see also Reader, pp. 299–300.

  40 Luxemburg, ‘The Russian Revolution’, p. 77; see also Reader, p. 308.

  41 Ettinger, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 148; Luxemburg to Franz Mehring, 10 February 1913, Letters, p. 324.

  42 Luxemburg, ‘The Russian Revolution’, p. 62; see also Reader, p. 302.

  43 Luxemburg, ‘The Russian Revolution’, p. 60; see also Reader, p. 301.

  44 Ibid.

  45 Luxemburg to Hans Diefenbach, 29 June 1917, Letters, p. 425.

  46 Luxemburg, Mass Strike, p. 15.

  47 Luxemburg, ‘The Russian Revolution’, p. 71; see also Reader, p.307.

  48 Luxemburg, ‘The Russian Revolution’, p. 71; see also Reader, p. 306.

  49 Luxemburg, Mass Strike, p. 33; see also Reader, p. 181.

  50 Luxemburg, ‘A Tactical Question’, 1902; see also Reader, p. 235.

  51 For example, ‘Thereupon there began a spontaneous general shaking of and tugging at these chains’, Luxemburg, Mass Strike, p. 33; ‘The element of spontaneity, as we have seen, plays a great part in all Russian mass strikes without exception’, Luxemburg, Mass Strike, p. 54; see also Reader, p. 198.

  52 Tony Cliff, Rosa Luxemburg, 1959 (London: Bookmarks, 1983), p. 45.

  53 Rich is writing about the study of Luxemburg by the modern Russian feminist thinker Raya Dunayevskaya, who made the first case for Luxemburg as socialist feminist for today. Adrienne Rich, ‘Raya Dunayevskaya’s Marx’, Arts of the Possible (New York: Norton, 2001), p. 85.

  54 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 455.

  55 Luxemburg, ‘The Russian Revolution’, p. 70; see also Reader
, p. 306.

  56 Max Rodenbeck, ‘Volcano of rage’, New York Review of Books, 24 March 2011.

  57 Michael Parsons, ‘Psychoanalysis and Faith’, unpublished paper presented at the Delphi International Psychoanalytic Symposium, October 2008.

  58 Luxemburg, ‘Organisational Questions of Russian Social Democracy’, Marxism in Russia, p. 309; see also Reader, p. 265.

  59 Rosa Luxemburg, ‘Theory and Practice’, 1910, trans. David Wolff (London: News and Letters, 1980), Part 2, ‘Die Theorie und die Praxis’, 1910; see also Reader, p. 221.

  60 Luxemburg to Aleksandr N. Potresov, 7 August 1904, Letters, p. 171 (emphasis original).

  61 Luxemburg, ‘Organisational Questions of Russian Social Democracy’, Marxism in Russia, p. 309; see also Reader, p. 265.

  62 Jacques Lacan, Les non dupes errent, Seminar 21, 1973–4 (unpublished).

  63 Luxemburg to Luise Kautsky, 26 January 1917, Letters, p. 369.

  64 Ibid.

  65 Rosa Luxemburg, ‘The Historical Conditions of Accumulation’, The Accumulation of Capital, 1910 (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 324, 356 (Luxemburg is citing Marx); see also Reader, pp. 45, 67.

  66 Luxemburg, ‘The Historical Conditions of Accumulation’, The Accumulation of Capital, p. 350; Reader, p. 64. In Philosophia – The Thought of Rosa Luxemburg, Simone Weil and Hannah Arendt (London: Routledge, 1994), Andrea Nye argues that this work challenged not just Marxist theories of capital accumulation but ‘the foundations of economic science’, p. 34.