newyorker | This is academics doing their job: engaging with things in great
complexity. Discussions of #MeToo cases in other areas haven’t been up
to this task. We certainly can’t expect it from Hollywood, whose job is
to make stories palatable and simple. Writers, who on the subject of
#MeToo have often practiced either avoidance or positional warfare, have
been able to advance the conversation only so far. But this rare
moment, when a wider audience is briefly interested in what academics
have to say for and about themselves, might give us a chance for
complicating the conversation. They can bring us back to some
under-deliberated questions. In the #MeToo revolution, does the focus on
identifying bad actors distract us from breaking down the structures
that enable them? What is justice in terms of #MeToo, if not merely
public disgrace and professional exile for the perpetrators? And how can
justice be achieved?
As it happens, many of the scholars
apparently most invested in the Ronell case have spent their
professional lives studying power. That may give us a chance to finally
acknowledge that there are power imbalances in all relationships, and
that both parties in two-person interactions exercise some sort of
power. The philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who is firmly convinced of Ronell’s
innocence, argues that it was Reitman who was using Ronell.
This sort of assertion is perhaps easier to make because the accuser
is, in this case, a man, but also because Žižek has made a career of
making shocking arguments.
What Žižek’s take does not acknowledge,
however, is that even when it seems that everyone has behaved badly, it
doesn’t mean that everyone has behaved equally badly, or is
equally responsible for the bad relationships that have been created.
This is where Duggan’s question, about the boundaries in the
relationships between graduate students and their advisers, becomes
crucial. The same blog on which Žižek’s post appeared, Theory
Illuminati, posted a video
of Jeremy Fernando, now a fellow at the European Graduate School (where
Ronell is a professor), delivering a talk called “On Walking With My
Teacher.” In the video, from 2015, Fernando, seated in front of a large
projected photograph of him and Ronell, says, among other things, “My
dear teacher Avital always reminded me that movement of thought and our
bodies are potentially entwined.” For nearly forty minutes, he talks
about love as a precondition for teaching and learning and bodies as the
location of both knowledge and love. The talk is, clearly, full of
love.
Ronell employs the psychoanalytic term “transference” to
describe intense relationships with her students. She is not the first
feminist postructuralist scholar to have done so, nor is she the first
to get in trouble for it—or to take it too far. Twenty-six years ago,
two graduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee filed
sexual-harassment complaints against the scholar Jane Gallop, who was
eventually found to have violated a rule against consensual amorous
relationships, though the university found no evidence to support other
claims . (A contemporary account of the case, by Margaret Talbot, is eerily relevant.)
A different take on Ronell’s pedagogy came in an anonymous quote that circulated on Facebook.
(I don’t know the name of the author, who declined to communicate with
me, citing, through an intermediary, the fear of retaliation.)
We don’t need a conversation about sexual harassment by AR, we should instead talk about what AR and many of her generation call ‘pedagogy’ and what is still excused as ‘genius.’ When people talk about sexual harassment it’s within the logic of the symbolic order – penetration, body parts – I doubt you will find much of this here. But AR is all about manipulation and psychic violence. . . . AR pulls students and young faculty in by flattery, then breaks their self-esteem, goes on to humiliate them in front of others, until the only way to tell yourself and others that you have not been debased, that you have not been used by a pathological narcissist as a private slave, is that you are just so incredibly close, and that Avi is just so incredibly fragile and lonely and needs you 24/7 to do groceries, to fold her laundry, to bring her to acupuncture, to pick her up from acupuncture, to drive her to JFK, to talk to her at night, etc. . . . All I am saying is: the AR-case is not about a single case of sexual harassment, it’s about systematic manipulation, bullying, intimidation, pitting students against each other, creating rivalry between them. . . . I agree the concept of “Avital Ronell” is a great one: I too would love to be friends with a smart, hilarious, queer, Jewish, feminist, anarchist theorist!
Duggan
calls for looking at harassment as an issue that is neither limited to
sex nor rooted in “bad apple” individuals—rather, it is a function of
power structures. Closed Title IX investigations are not a good way to
address harassment, she suggests. “Perhaps we should begin to think
about a restorative justice process that would center in departments, be
transparent, hold faculty responsible, and assess the question of
boundaries in local context?” she writes. “Perhaps impose
confidentiality as the exception, not the rule—to be invoked when a need
is demonstrated.”
