Greta Thunberg: Child Saviour or Witch?

We cannot help regarding the phenomenon of Greta with wonder, fear, 
amazement, and respect. For in her the spirit of modern childhood 
is profoundly, almost magically revealed.  

Following a recent post, someone who identifies as a practicing Christian and environmental activist writes quoting scripture in support of Greta Thunberg: And a little child shall lead them [Isaiah 11:6].    

I have to say, I'm always a little troubled by this idea of an infant saviour - even when it turns up in Nietzsche's Zarathustra. And with reference to the case of Miss Thunberg, it's a startling model of redemption she offers; one that denies people hope, deliberately spreads panic, and desires that the entire world suffers, as she herself has suffered, on a daily basis.

Addressing a UN climate conference last year, she virtually placed a curse on all their houses, as if she were less salvator mundi and more some kind of witch. Indeed, seeing how she's enchanted an entire generation and left so many world leaders - including the Pope - spellbound, describing Greta Thunberg as a witch seems entirely justified: she's like a Swedish Joan of Arc.
   

I'm not saying this to denigrate her, or dismiss her message. But I do think we need to exercise caution when dealing with charismatic individuals who claim to possess (or be possessed by) special gifts and who speak with absolute conviction, seeing the world as they do in stark black and white terms.

When Greta presents her arguments within the bounds of science, I don't have a problem. But when she offers us an interpretation of the facts that veers towards apocalyptic vision, then I have my concerns - for her and for all those who share her vision. Their love - for the planet, for humanity - becomes questionable and subtly diabolic, to borrow a phrase from Lawrence, exerting as it does a destructive force. 

Women like Greta - and her mother - who campaign to save the world and save the future, may have kind hearts and the very best of intentions. But, underneath, there's something malevolent; an unconscious desire for revenge on those they blame for the crisis that afflicts them at a personal level. You can almost see it in their eyes. Still, this malevolence is just as necessary as superficial goodness - maybe more so, especially when it comes to exposing the world's own corruption and stupidity. 
  

Like that other witch-child, of whom Hawthorne writes, Greta is a being 'whose elements were perhaps beautiful and brilliant, but all in disorder, or with an order peculiar to themselves'. We say she's neurologically diverse, or has Asperger's, a condition that manifests itself in all kinds of ways; depression, obsessive-compulsive behaviour, selective mutism, etc.

And again, it gives Greta a peculiar look in her eyes that is also Pearl-like: 'a look so intelligent, yet so inexplicable, so perverse, sometimes so malicious' that one almost questions whether she's a human child. Who knows what this brave but tormented sixteen-year-old will be like as a fully grown woman. I wish her well and hope she discovers a little peace and happiness; hope, above all, that she doesn't martyr herself to her own cause.      

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter' (Final Version, 1923), Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003). Quotes taken from Hawthorne's 1850 novel can be found on pp. 93-94.  

Note: The lines underneath the image of Greta Thunberg are paraphrased from Lawrence (writing of Pearl) in the First Version (1918-19) of the above essay, SCAL, p. 252. 

For a sister post to this one on Greta as Pippi Greenstocking, click here. 

On the Militant Virginity of Joan of Arc

A very beautiful digital painting of Joan of Arc 

by Mathie Ustern on deviant-art.com 

Beginning with True Love Waits in 1993 and the Silver Ring Thing in 1995, there have been any number of virginity pledge programmes impacting (for better or for worse) upon the sex lives of millions of young women all over the world. 

Mostly this has been an American phenomenon initiated by conservative Christian organizations and churches in the United States who fetishize a notion of moral purity which, strangely, can be compromised by what a girl may choose to do with her vagina in an extra-marital context.  

Obviously, this is not something I would support.

However, I am interested in the idea of what might be characterized as a militant form of virginity; i.e. one in which it is not female chastity which is the major concern per se, but female autonomy; one in which the girl does not pledge herself to daddy, to God, and a future husband, but rather commits to her own empowerment, demanding full rights over her own body (socially and politically as well sexually); one in which she gets to wield a sword like Joan of Arc, and not simply wear a wedding band.

As Andrea Dworkin points out, for women inspired by her legend, Joan is a hero "luminous with genius and courage, an emblem of possibility and potentiality consistently forbidden, obliterated, or denied by the rigid tyranny of sex-role imperatives or the outright humiliation of second-class citizenship".

And central to this was her virginity; she chose to make war, not love; to be free, not screwed into place.

That is to say, her virginity was not intended to signify her purity, or preciousness as a sexual commodity to be traded. Rather, it was "a self-conscious and militant repudiation of the common lot of the female with its intrinsic low status, which, then as now, appeared to have something to do with being fucked".

Dworkin continues:

"Joan wanted to be virtuous in the old sense, before the Christians got hold of it: virtuous meant brave, valiant. She incarnated virtue in its original meaning: strength or manliness. Her virginity was an essential element of her virility, her autonomy, her rebelliousness and intransigent self-definition. Virginity was freedom from the real meaning of being female; it was not just another style of being female. ... Unlike the feminine virgins who accepted the social subordination while exempting themselves from the sex on which it was premised, Joan rejected the status and the sex as one thing ... She refused to be fucked and she refused civil insignificance: and it was one refusal ... Her virginity was a radical renunciation of a civil worthlessness rooted in real sexual practice."

If I were a thirteen-year-old girl today, I like to think that I would have a poster of Joan of Arc above my bed rather than Miley Cyrus or Justin Bieber and be proud of my virginity - not as something puerile and determined by men who secretly lust to take it, but as something active and indicative of resistance to all forms of phallocratic tyranny.


Note: The lines quoted from Andrea Dworkin can be found in Intercourse, (Basic Books, 2007), on pp. 104-06. 

Thank Heaven for Little Girls

What are little girls made of: sugar and spice and all things nice?

Whilst it's possible that these are their material elements, according to Deleuze and Guattari's reading of Proust, their individuation, be it collective or singular, doesn't proceed via subjectivity, but by pure haecceity. Which means, I think, that they shouldn't be understood as molar forms, or defined by the functions they fulfil. Rather, we should think of girls in terms of their movements and the intensive affects of which they are capable. 

Little girls, in other words, are not just young female human beings that grow up into women (although, obviously, this is true in a banal organic sense); they are something other than this and something more than this. At their best - which is to say at their most phenomenal - they are extraordinary events and so do not belong to any age group or sex.

Joan of Arc, Anne Frank, and here, with us, right now, recovering from her surgery, Malala Yousafzai, are singular beings via whom molecular politics unfolds. For these girls teach us something vital about life understood in terms of immanence, virtue and virtuality. We should be grateful to the heavens that send them our way.