~ 12 Conclusion ~
Anne-Josèphe was written by our own contemporary age, for our age. She was written by our self-important masculinity, our moral regulation of women (even by women), our dysfunctional gender relations, our comment sections, our masses fooled by fine words, our mental health, and our academia, which also subjects itself to ignorance through the specialization of Division of Labor. We must doubt Smith’s civilizing necessity since we know now that it is likely a necessity, a usefulness, for another subject’s project. It is their project that might be at one’s own expense. It’s probably not objective necessity.
Woolf argued that Shakespeare’s hypothetical sister, his equal in genius, would have been reduced to her mere facticity, to her womanhood, while observing her brother’s subjectivity conquer the world of literature[1]. For Kierkegaard, subjectivity is genius because it is freedom world-historically justified[2]. Lastly, for Sartre, subjectivity is not the object-I but a consciousness transcending from it, so subjectivity does not have to be egoistic or selfish by nature[3]. But it can’t be altruistic by force either. Altruism must be a matter of free choice, of subjectivity. And yet the social apparatus is already in place for men today to kill the subjectivity in others to affirm only their own – veiled in doublespeak as their individual rights to chatter or invoke their own tear-jerking manipulation at the expense of women. It’s easy. If emotionality is occasionally subjectivity expressing its aim to shape or value the objective world for itself, attack the emotionality of others.
I can’t speak for man’s entrepreneurial individualism someday amounting to authentically free, manly, action-taking in our present, sensible age. Compared to the age of revolution, this age is essentially passionless. Or, where men are in passion, it is in expressing how much they have such a crisis of meaning or victimhood because of feminist criticism of systematic inequality, non-consensual behaviour, and exploitation. Men’s indolence today is a pretext only to accomplish nothing in their naturalistic manhood. So it goes with Warren Farrell’s The Myth Of Male Power as an attempt at victimized one-upmanship against women (to the level of meta- or crypto-victimhood), but only so as to still favor, value, and empower men and men’s professions over women[4]. Never mind that men also enforce their power – and abuse – over men….
Kierkegaard said of the present age, “Its condition is like that of the stay-abed in the morning who has big dreams, then torpor, followed by a witty or ingenious inspiration to excuse staying in bed”[5]. So it is with many individualist and libertarian men across the political spectrum. They overlook the fact that Locke himself understood that absolute freedom can really only be one’s own in a solipsistic, pre-modern state of nature, as if one is the only human being on Earth. As soon as the other’s freedom, say, woman’s freedom, is factored in, sociality begins. This is why incessant controversy, anti-pc, or offensiveness culture for the sake of one’s absolute freedom is degrading community. It appears illiberal to refrain from offensiveness at times, but this illiberal refrain is ultimately a matter of the liberality of others: the freedom of every individual in a community, not just oneself.
To transcend the will to persecute, men today should seek more pride and value in what they do rather than, in resentment, devalue women’s work in gender studies, women studies, the humanities, or in academia in general, as women prevail in them with their own ideas and as academic demographics tilt leftward. Again, our ascetic priests sermonize against resentment altogether too resentfully. If ressentiment implies envy and the inability or lack of motivation to creatively transcend this envy, then, as Scheler explained, the ressentiment man can only devalue what they secretly desire. So it is with Hicks, Peterson, Shapiro, Haidt/Lukienoff, Thomas Sowell, Gilder, Saad, and the right-wing as they erode liberal education, the liberal arts, and liberal Enlightenment by their own actions and as a matter of supreme unreasonableness and not reading enough.
To not be a mere fossil of the past, Anne-Josèphe tries to be more comprehensive than the incredible Danton (1983) and Marat/Sade(1967) films. That entails Anne-Josèphe’s own freedom to break its own correctly assigned role under the Division of Labour as mere art, mere politics, or mere history. It transcends these into other fields, then returns. Art also fails to be entirely escapist for me. Art still imitates life, which imitates art, as a life cycle. It imitates life by being the product of the artist who made it in their particular situation in regards to the psychological, social, financial, and political. Considering liberal Enlightenment’s own art was politicized through its theatre as Popkin noted, so too is this work shamelessly politicized. I don’t mean to make art self-important here. Rather, it does have importance, as subjectivity does. Escapism and transcendence are not the same either. Transcendence is the mind’s acknowledgement of the problem, first, followed by its active solving through decision and action. Sartre’s “Bad Faith” concept on the other hand demonstrates that escapism postpones the choice[6]. It puts our transcendence in chains.
This play feels to me like a lot of our last 230 years of social problems and haven’t we all been having a good time? We can choose to accept this representation as ourselves or transcend it toward more equality and fraternity with each other, not where each are in misery but where we raise each other up. That is to say, we can be actually free! But this project depends on others now, too, and not only myself.
[1] Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One’s Own.
[2] Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony.
[3] Sartre, Transcendence of the Ego.
[4] In spite of his sickly-sweet aesthetics, Farrell could be the Monsieur Tallien of “male feminism”-turned-meninist: a wishy-washy adventurer archetype forsaking past principles for present indulgences. All is explained in Pamela Warrick’s LA Times article, A New Role for Men: Victim: Former feminist Warren Farrell says he’s sick and tired of guys getting bashed. ‘Male power,’ he proclaims is just a myth.
[5] Kierkegaard, Two Ages, 69.
[6] Sartre, Being and Nothingness.