Thoughts on the human condition

This past autumn has felt more uncomfortable than usual to be a woman looking at men looking at women. From Hillary Clinton’s ‘overheating’ episode (‘Does she have Parkinson’s? Is she wearing a catheter?!’) to Donald Trump’s assessment of female limbs as if they were building materials, election season finished with the male members of our new first family peering over the voting booth to check on their wives.

Siri Hustvedt has long been interested in how the way we look at the world
privileges certain political, gendered, artistic and scientific agendas, while excluding others. These dynamics are at play between a reader and a writer, a doctor and a patient, a neuroscientist and the brain she studies. A writer of novels and non-fiction (on topics from sculpture to cybernetics), Hustvedt also lectures in psychiatry and speaks eloquently about her own medically
unexplained neurological ‘shakes’. Rather a ‘perpetual outsider’ than an interdisciplinary scholar, she likes to ‘spot what the experts often fail to question’. Hustvedt’s work wonders what happens — rhetorically and physiologically — when we change our minds.

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Samuel Gregg

The welcome fall of Klaus Schwab

This most recent book of essays is divided in three, a structure more willed than required: art criticism (Picasso, Koons, Mapplethorpe, Sontag, Bourgeois); a history of mind science; and thoughts on ‘the human condition’. What unites the volume is the central role of emotion in the practice of science as well as art, and critique of its reputation as a female ‘impurity’ that stains objectivity. She wants the library to be more like a laboratory (attending to the neural activity of creation and reception), and the laboratory more like a library (invested in language and aesthetics).

Hustvedt’s opponents share a lineage from Descartes, who pitched the thinking mind against the sensing body, to Pinker at Harvard and Dawkins at Oxford.