Toward an Ethics of Failure

In this blog post, I return to a key concept in my work that I first articulated in the conclusion to my first book Treatments. Through an analysis of illness narratives and the cultural work they do, I emphasized the possibility of articulating an ethics of failure, or the condition of “being at a loss yet exploring various routes,” in the words of philosopher Gillian Rose in her illness narrative Love’s Work (1995).

My interest in failure and its ethical implications emerged out of my interdisciplinary training in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS). In its 50+ years of existence, WGSS has frequently been accused, both from within and from without, of failing. Instead of coming to the defense of gender studies by chronicling its many successes, I want to consider what happens when we “hang on to failure” as not an end point but a beginning of thought and action. I formulate this concept in Treatments by reading Gillian Rose along with her sister Jacqueline, from whose feminist psychoanalytic work I take the term. My reading of the Rose sisters’ together is also a gesture to the importance of our sisters, some we choose and some we don’t, in the development of our thought. I hope you won’t mind me sounding like an unreconstructed 1970s feminist in arguing that sisterhood is indeed powerful, which is perhaps why we so often fail to enact it.

I end my book Treatments with a chapter entitled “Toward an Ethics of Failure” in which I juxtapose treatments of Rose’s Love’s Work, which is a philosophical reflection on her experience of ovarian cancer, and Atul Gawande’s collection of essays entitled Complications (2002), which explores medical practice as characterized by fallibility, imprecision, and uncertainty. I argue that both texts, but from different positions in the doctor-patient binary, seek new routes or new idioms across the gap between doctor and patient.

Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work

[Penguin Modern Classics cover of Gillian Rose’s philosophical illness narrative, Love’s Work. The cover is a painting by Danish artist Carl Holsøe, The Artist’s House at Lyngby, showing a late 19th, early 20th century interior of a middle class house. An empty armchair and small table sit next to a window with white curtains and flowers on the window sill. The sun streams in, creating a reflection of the window frame on the floor and chair. This is a weird choice of an image for Rose’s work, if you ask me!!]

Many critiques of modern medicine, especially feminist ones, have noted the ways in which the patient is objectified and silenced within the isolating spaces and hierarchical relationships created by the clinical encounter. As I discussed in Treatments, in Love’s Work, Rose experiences conventional medicine as a “carnival of communication” when two consulting surgeons—Dr. Wong, the gynecologist, and Dr. Bates, the bowel specialist—report vastly different prognoses after a second operation on her bowel. Dr. Wong, on the one hand, reports that Rose’s cancer has spread considerably, and that her prognosis is “guarded” (99). Dr. Bates, on the other, assures Rose that she is “‘living in symbiosis with the disease,’” and should “‘[g]o away and continue to do so’” (100). Their “utterly discrepant opinions,” while perhaps not averse in themselves, are made so by the fact that what Rose’s consultants are most concerned with is not her well-being, but whose position is taken as authoritative in relation to Rose’s disease. Dr. Wong refuses to talk to his colleague, because, as he tells Rose, “‘I will not change my position. This is my cancer’” (101). Rose, in a panic, must plead, cajole, beg, flatter, and inveigle Dr. Wong to talk to Dr. Bates (101). In this absurd scenario, Rose’s body becomes the ground upon which power disputes are fought. There is no person with cancer in this scenario, there is only a cancer, either Dr. Wong’s or Dr. Bates’s, depending on who is speaking and, in speaking, has the power either to cure or condemn it (103).

            Rose eventually realizes that she is “already in a realm beyond medicine,” and that she and medicine “do not have enough command of each other’s language for the exchange to be fruitful” (102). Rose discovers that she and medicine are mute to each other, signaling for me a case of what Lyotard has called a différend between two parties, which “takes place when the ‘regulation’ of the conflict that opposes them is done in the idiom of one of the parties while the wrong suffered by the other is not signified in that idiom” (1988, 9). This scene reveals two différends in medicine, which I discuss at greater length in my conclusion to Treatments: error and suffering. Because Dr. Wong and Dr. Bates disagree on her prognosis, at least one of them must be mistaken, but they have no way to overcome the incommensurability that arises if one or both is wrong. Both doctors are also unable to speak of Rose’s suffering; they can only speak of their capacity to properly diagnose her disease. And yet, through the practice of writing (and reading) her memoir, this incompatibility between idioms becomes an opportunity for what Lyotard calls a “philosophical politics” to “bear witness to différends by finding idioms for them” (Lyotard, 1988, xiii and 13). This philosophical politics emerges not from the success of heroic medicine to cure Rose’s cancer, but from her realization that her illness is in a realm beyond medicine, and that to speak of it requires a new idiom. She must turn away from medicine and the false hope of control it might give her, and turn toward what she calls in another context, a new prayer and a new polity—new idioms of thought and action.

I contend that what Rose articulates in Love’s Work is an ethics of failure, and I take the term from Gillian Rose’s sister, Jacqueline Rose. In a lecture entitled “Why War?,” Jacqueline Rose discusses the problem of war in general, and a dispute within the British Psycho-Analytical Society in 1943-44 between Melanie Klein and her supporters and critics. Jacqueline Rose asserts, following British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, that “[k]nowledge will be possible only if we are willing to suspend the final purpose and ends of knowledge in advance” (1993, 36-37). If we are to avoid going to war, Rose writes, we must, “[h]ang on to failure” (37). Knowledge itself requires a certain suspension of belief in the possibility of total knowledge.

            In an interview, Jacqueline Rose discusses the importance of undoing a “rhetoric of certainty” as key to her conception of the feminist project. According to Rose, such a feminist project puts into play “difficult forms of compatibilities,” between, on the one hand, the political demand to end forms of oppression, and, on the other, “to articulate problems of psychosexuality, the way subjects, and especially women, find themselves positioned within language, within sexuality, and within culture at the most fundamental level of their subjective and unconscious organization.” Rose insists that these seemingly disparate projects must be brought together, even as she acknowledges the difficulty in doing so, calling the necessary intellectual and political struggle “not exactly utopian but more a bid for the future” (232). Along with Gillian Rose’s concept of “being at a loss yet exploring various routes,” I take Jacqueline Rose’s attempt to articulate political demand together with radical self-questioning as models for how to do good, or, at least, in Gillian Rose’s formulation, good enough intellectual, pedagogical, and political work. For me, they are also models for doing good enough Gender Studies.

            In 2005, at a memorial on the tenth anniversary of Gillian Rose’s death, Jacqueline Rose returned to some of her sister’s final work on Judaism and the Holocaust. In an analysis that bears on the politics of the present moment, Jacqueline reads her sister’s work as obliging “us to enter the reality of political and historical life, with no false innocence.” By proposing an ethics of failure, I do not mean to romanticize failure. Rather, I aim to de-romanticize our sentimental claims to innocence. For as one sister learns from the writings of another: “We are always implicated in power, and we are never pure” (2007: 228).