Solanas - again

S was kind enough to give me a copy of the introduction of a new edition of The SCUM Manifesto, written by Avital Ronell. Ronell situates Solanas in a Nitzschean tradition. Not only do they have philosophizing with a hammer in common, Solanas is also employing the figure of "reversal of all values" that we are familiar with in Nietzsche's writings. For Solanas, this reversal concerns "male" and "female". Males try to uphold a picture of themselves as strong, independent and intellectual, but in reality males are, Solanas writes, projecting unto females the characteristics that are true of themselves: corporeality, dependence and weakness. But the reversal does not end in a simple standing-on-its-head. If it would come to that, she would be stuck in the same male language & form of life that she is criticizing. Ronell highlight the endless chain of projections that Solanas talks about, and in this endless chain, there is no end ("our gendered identities"), there is just more shit. Ronell writes:

"Here the goal is set not mereley on subversion. Her relation to the enemy will prove more subversive than subversion because the invasion which Solanas envisions involves secret strikes, consistently covert actions - invasions on the order of microbial assault: 'SCUM will always be furtive, sneaky, underhanded (although SCUM murders will always be known as such)'." (Introduction to SCUM Manifesto, Verso books, 2004, p. 28)

Paraphrasing Peter Winch (his excellent essay, "Can We Understand Ourselves"), one could say that the world depicted by Solanas is not a seamless weave, even though what she wants us to see is a form of life that is centred around our attempts to prove that we are something that we are not.

Were the mission of Ronell's introduction to make the manifesto intellectually respectable by comparing Solanas to Big Philosophers like Nietzsche and Derrida, then I'd be suspicious of it. But I think that is not what she is up to (at least not all the time). She takes the text seriously and develops some ways of approaching it. She presents unexpected angles and horizons. I do, however, agree with the New Statesman reviewer that Ronell's appeal to biography, "Solanas' miserable life", gives rise to many questions. What function are the biographical remarks to have? Do we need them for understanding the text?

One of Ronell's interesting remarks is about how the title of the book, SCUM manifesto, has usually been understood as "a society for cutting up men", the "cutting up" being understood to refer to literal violence. She suggests another possibility; "cutting up" also means "montage". If so, the manifesto is a montage, a re-arrangement of the familiar, our common ways of thinking about gender. A montage or collage functions as an injection of new ways of seeing.