In Conversation with Professor Marjolein Oele
Marjolein Oele is Professor of Philosophy of the Humanities. The new Chair position she occupies is aimed at bridge building between the Faculty of PTR (Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies) and the Faculty of Arts. Oele’s research intertwines: Ancient Philosophy, Continental Philosophy, and Environmental Philosophy. She is the author of “E-Co-Affectivity: Exploring Pathos at Life’s Material Interfaces” (SUNY, 2020) and co-editor of “Ontologies of Nature: Continental Perspectives and Environmental Reorientations” (Springer, 2017). Her most recent book project thematizes a sense of loss in the relationship to our world, and is entitled “Elemental Loss: Shifting Constellations of Water, Fire, Air and Earth.” Her articles have been published in a wide range of journals, including Ancient Philosophy, Configurations, Environmental Philosophy, Epochê, Radical Philosophy Review, and Research in Phenomenology. She is also teaching the course “Critique of Green Ideology” in the PPS “Ecology and Sustainability” module. I, Laura Schranz, had the pleasure to interview her for Splijtstof .
Laura: Thank you, Prof. Oele! You have a very interesting and niche field of research, at least I for my part have not heard of this way of doing philosophy before meeting you. Could you maybe give me an introduction to it?
Prof. Oele: I have a few research fields that I’m interested in, the broader one being this question of affect and affectivity, how we’re being moved by other people, by the world as such, by other living beings, by our own bodies, our own thoughts, our own emotions. This question of how we come to become ourselves, or how the world comes to be itself in relationship to all those things. I’ve tried to unravel this bigger question with regard to a number of other big themes. One of them is climate change and the ecological crisis, because I think it is the predominant ethical question of our time. So, I have found it very important as a philosopher to use some of the philosophical concepts that I’ve been trained in, for instance through Aristotle or through Heidegger, and make them applicable towards this question. I also philosophize about pregnancy and embodiment as a part of that constellation, insofar as how we come to be.
Laura: In the course you teach to me and other fellow PPS students, you indeed mentioned that you are very interested in incorporating pregnancy into your philosophy. In terms of how we come to be, that seems a very literal form of becoming then, no?
Prof. Oele: Indeed, I have written about the question of embodiment in pregnancy. I’ve explored that by using, for instance, Plato’s Republic; thinking through how we become to be who we are. A big part of my research on pregnancy has been devoted to the placenta, an organ of the in-between which I think of as installing a pregnant city. What happens if we think about pregnancy in terms of the messy material of being, the emergence of community out of a space of the in-between rather than just being informed by individual beings? Beyond the obvious exchange of nutrients and other factors taking place in and through the placenta, when I looked at the placenta, there’s current research investigating the exchange of cells that are from siblings or even (miscarried) previous children. Maternal cells are also being transferred across the placenta. This “microchimerism” as it is called offers access to a community that is much bigger than that contemporaneous community of cells that’s there in the placenta.
The mutual exchange happening is also cross intersected with lots of environmental factors that are seeping through, for instance toxins. Further, the traces of what happens in that community are being transported into the future. For instance, foetal cells will remain even if the pregnancy is interrupted. Microchimerism carries forward into the future in many unpredictable ways, insofar as bodies will retain those communities within them.
Laura: You mentioned that you are interested in this messy material of being. The image of the pregnant city in the placenta very well fits that, do you like to think about the environment in such a way?
Prof. Oele: I do! I also work with soil, which is also very messy. Oftentimes, we romanticise it and talk about Earth and its power, but I like to dig into the dirty, messy stuff of life. There is this new group of philosophers called the “new materialists” that draw attention to this notion of matter. I have found real inspiration in that, especially in combination with my background in medical school. There is this tendency in modern culture to sterilise life, to use sterile concepts, and I think it’s a uniquely challenging thought to dig into the messiness of life, for instance into soil and into organs such as the placenta. So yes, I like to think about these messy interfaces, as I call them, or “e-co-affective interfaces”, as my book has it. And to make them philosophically appealing and interesting and complex.
Laura: That is such an intriguing way of looking at it! You have also mentioned this term of the “pregnant city”. And you write about loss, too, both in the contexts of pregnancy and environmental loss. How does this go together with the community you are describing?
Prof. Oele: Oftentimes we think about pregnancy as a one-way street towards birth, which is very much a misconception. 70% of conceptions, so it’s estimated, do not continue. This is a discourse that’s often forgotten, due to the teleology that exists around pregnancy. To philosophically thematize pregnancy and loss has recently been on the upswing, with a few publications coming out on miscarriage and stillbirth from a philosophical perspective. I find it important to write about this, as it is key to undo the silencing around these topics and use philosophy as a way to transform discourses, and, possibly, aid those suffering from such losses.
Another topic that I feel very dear about is to think about questions of loss that don’t just have to do with the loss of a particular being, but with the loss of a certain kind of constellation. There is an intersection here. Both with environmental loss and with pregnancy loss (which I have named the loss of the pregnant city), you lose a certain kind of constellation, a world, and a certain kind of future. I am intrigued by what it means to be confronted with a world that shrinks or transforms, that is never ever going to be the same as what we had expected or hoped for earlier on. Moreover, what does it mean to mourn when you don’t exactly know what it is that you are mourning, since there is no one particular “thing” that you lose?
These are losses that speak to a transformed world, and, at least in my experience, pregnancy loss involves such a transformation of world. I see a connection there to a world of climate change. We may mourn the loss of certain species, but we may be more affected by this larger question of a transformed world where we find less and less hope for places of refuge, of trust, of rebirth, where the world can reconstitute itself.
Laura: That really resonates with me, these different facets of loss that climate change imposes on us. It reminds me of texts I have read on the way environmental grief is experienced differently, depending on your cultural relationship to nature and the world. What you say speaks of a deep relationality between us, each other and the world in all its forms.
Prof. Oele: Right, I am after all a philosopher of affect. As Butler would say it, we are always originally composed of relationality, yes. And so, when we experience loss, we actually lose ourselves, since we’re always relational. This notion of grief gets us into this sense of relationality that underlies us very deeply in a fundamental way, and can thereby make us a bit more aware of how we are connected to each other. If we would see ourselves as much more relational, also in terms of climate change, experiences of loss that we currently may have could possibly afford us a way forward. We become much more aware of the fact that the world as we had imagined it to be isn’t just our own mirror, but that we have always been part of this environmental ecological system. Much of the meaning of who we experience ourselves to be is dependent upon that larger network.
I lived in the United States, California specifically, for a long time. We know how many of the indigenous populations have been uprooted or unsettled, long before climate change, due to the colonial settlers. These indigenous populations have already experienced loss for a long time. If we are now confronted by climate change and mention this loss as sudden, those indigenous populations would say “what event are you talking about now?” When I talked earlier about grief, how it may connect us and make us more sensitive towards the world, in some sense maybe our own climate grief now can also make us more sensitive towards the grief that others around the globe have felt regarding lifestyles and colonialism that we have imposed upon them. Therefore, it may not just make us more empathetic or sympathetic, but make us form alliances.
And of course, I don’t want to say that suffering is a precondition for having a different kind of relationship to the world. But I do think that given the current crisis within which we are, suffering could instil transformation. Not just one-on-one, but also through creating different kinds of affective-sensitive dispositions and transforming political economic policies. In this regard, affective dispositional changes can transform societies.
Laura: I think those are some beautiful words to end with. Thank you very much for the conversation!