“Across nations and cultures, entire words and ideas are missing or deprived of the weight they deserve. The presence of absence is just as powerful as the spread of misinformation or false news. What we fail to see, name, or acknowledge shapes reality just as much as what we repeat.” —Rasha Barrage, "Google Says I’m the First Iraqi Female Philosopher - Really?"

I have been thinking a lot about this lately. I had always wondered how it was even possible to erase the traces that women must have left throughout History, Philosophy, Politics, the Arts…. I knew that we, in the West, produce both knowledge and ignorance, but still, it seems so monstrous and overwhelming a task to erase most of the traces, especially the ones that are scratches made with sharpened nails across the canvas of Being.

Women are mostly known by the gouges, gaps, and holes we have left. Aspasia was Socrates’ teacher, and we know very little about her. Diotima’s very existence has been denied. We only know Hypatia’s name because of how she died: She was brutally murdered by a mob of Christian zealots, reportedly followers of Cyril, the Patriarch of Alexandria. They dragged her from her chariot, took her to a church, stripped her, and killed her using sharp tiles or oyster shells before dismembering her body.

Sappho… well, don’t even get me started about Sappho.1

How is it even possible?

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Even as an undergraduate studying Philosophy at the University of Oregon, I began to feel the absences, learned to feel for the holes. Orphaned research and ghosts. First, you realize that for all that has already been written, a lot of it saying the same things, surprisingly little has been written about the really interesting things — the things that interest you. So you begin to mold your interests to fit what is already there — as an undergraduate, you can’t write about the research that doesn’t exist, except perhaps to say that it doesn’t exist.

Studying Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, I fixated on the irrational, which includes the emotions. But as my Aristotle adjunct professor put it, laying it down like he was himself Aristotle, there is nothing rational that you can say about the irrational. Ergo, not philosophically proper. And that was that, as far as he was concerned. I kept at it though, and I got ahold of Words of Power by Andrea Nye2 and Man of Reason by Genevieve Lloyd.3 (“Got ahold of” is too abstract: these books were lent to me by the wife of a philosophy professor, from her personal library, thank you, ever so grateful.)

But you know what else happened? I learned to talk about what interested me in terms of akrasia, which means weakness of the will, the weakness part being the emotions. Philosophy is a discipline, and part of what you learn is how to frame things “properly.” So off I went to read a bunch of really quite boring texts about why we do things that we know (rationally) are against our best interests.

Look, it is not an uninteresting question — an interesting version might be why and how some of the working class and working poor are convinced to vote against their own economic interests, for example — but the very narrow framing of it in terms of logic and analytic thinking was nothing short of a neutering. So many words by so many men to just not deal. But it was I who was being disciplined, clearly.

I began writing one paper to turn in, and one paper for me.

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In writing the paper that was for me, I got pretty darn good at research. You have to learn to dig pretty deep, sometimes with your fingernails, feeling for those holes. Did you know that you can make Philosophy bleed?

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I began to see the pattern: brilliant thought written by philosophers with women’s names, written some years ago, written in other languages. Sometimes all you have is a quote in someone else’s essay, an essay whose author you probably cannot trust. You hunt it down, you know how to use interlibrary loan. You work at the reference desk of the university library. In dead time, you chase down your ghosts. Some fraction are found, evidence you point to and say “See, see, see!”

These women philosophers, they managed to publish one essay, or be mentioned in another person’s essay, and then they disappear. Spectral presences, present as absences, haunting the History of Philosophy. Only those empaths who have certain affinities will know that the absented are always there.

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Between the first and the second wave of feminism stands two world wars. A lot of the work of the first wave was lost to the second wave, who had to re-invent, recover through their scholarship, and recenter women’s ways of knowing. Women of the first wave had letters and journals, but the second wave made academic journals and women’s studies departments, films and banks, dance companies and art collectives. They had so much energy and did so much, it’s hard to fathom. So how will it be erased?

I think we are beginning to see how it happens. We are living through the erasure of culture, which is akin to being operated on while awake.

It is violence. Document the erasure, focus on what you can keep at hand, physical copies. Write down your stories.

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Sandra Harding passed away last week, on March 5th. She once said (and did) something incredibly kind for me. I remember her for her generosity of spirit, and for her contributions to feminist standpoint theory in feminist epistemologies. A lot of the work of that generation (Sandra Harding, Donna Haraway, Maria Lugones, Loraine Code, et. al.) has been absorbed into the bloodstream of philosophy. Everyone knows ignorance is socially produced, and that science is a human endeavor, now. It’s common sense, yes?

I wonder if her work and that of her generation of feminist philosophers will survive, if it will still be read on the other side of whatever it is that we are now passing through.

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And this brings me to Rasha Barrage’s piece on being the first Iraqi female philosopher, according to Google. Barrage writes:

“This is known as the* Illusory Truth Effect - *“the tendency for any statement that is repeated frequently - whether it is factually true or not, whether it is even plausible or not - to acquire the ring of truth”.4 Put simply: if you keep seeing something, you start believing it.

The opposite then, must also be true; if you keep not seeing something, then its absence is true. If repeated visibility creates truth, then repeated invisibility creates falsehood. I’m calling it the Illusory False Effect.”

You have to be able to not see a thing in order to feel it’s absence, which also means that at some level you must at least know of it. You can know of it, and not know the thing itself, through its effects.

Its invisibility is not a falsehood, but the opposite, it is the truth that lies buried beneath our feet. And this is where the hiccup in the analogy, or the misstep in the logic, occurs. What lays buried is not the opposite of truth, it is the ground for both true and false.

The truth of Philosophy is with the woman who lies buried at the foot of his property / propriety.

We know that women were part of the History of Philosophy, and yet very little of their work has survived. Their absence is felt as invisibility, but this does not mean that it is false that women took part in philosophy throughout its history. In fact, it makes it more poignant the fact of their erasure. That invisibility is a cloak, and the shape of her absence is full of knowing truth.

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“So I’ll leave you with this: What is missing from your life, your neighborhood, your society? What is absent from the news? Where is the opposite argument, the opposite idea, the opposite emotion?

Absence shapes our future. But by noticing it, we can start to rewrite it - one missing word at a time.”

Yes! Look for what is not there. Learn to feel for the holes. Become attuned with the spirits. Develop your intuitions. What is is grounded in what is* not*. What is not is comprised of all that is past and all that is yet to come.

For me, personally, the community that I wish for is not, not yet, and the time lost is profound.

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I’m now one of those women philosophers who published then disappeared from the academic discipline of Philosophy. But I am fortunate that we live in the times we do, where I have this platform — where you’re reading me now. The fact that more people have read my work here than in any of my academic essays is just desserts. So if any budding philosophers read my work in some academic journal and wonder where I went, maybe they will be able to find me in the future. Depending on how things go in the next few years.

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