Writing Tables – Situating the Philosopher
Today I started preparing the class on phenomenology I will be co-teaching the next six weeks. My colleague and I prepared the study program earlier, of course, and made the choice of texts, but now I am close-reading the text for the first session – which is tomorrow. A lovely text, although it bewilders me sometimes – or, wait – that is not a failing, but actually a positive point, that it bewilders!
The bewilderment follows from the space-in-between the text takes, explicitly: in between ‘methods’ or ‘approaches’ or ‘styles. Sara Ahmeds Queer Phenomenology is, in her own words, letting such things as queer theory and phenomenology ‘encounter’. Not dialogue with, not conflict, not fuse, not found each other – just ‘encounter’. I see other approaches encounter in her text also. A critical approach, where she brings in the experiences of migrants to dislocate the familiarity of phenomenological ideas of home. But also a deconstructive approach – and this intrigues me most – where she moves ‘the gaze’ (one can lend this word from Foucault here) from the table ‘around which’ Husserl and Heidegger weave their phenomenological reflections, to the table which we have to think to understand where the grand old men were coming from.
When reading her quotation of Heidegger, I am immediately plunged in the bourgeois world I know so well – as the ideal of home-making of my parents:
“What is there in the room there at home is the table (not ‘a’ table among many other tables in other rooms and houses) at which one sits in order to write, have a meal, sew, or play. Everyone sees this right away, e.g. during a visit: it is a writing table, a dining table, a sewing table – such is the primary way in which it is being encountered in itself.” (Ahmed, 45)
Nineteenth century bourgeois idealism, in which the wife sews at the sewing table, the guests gather around the dining table, or perhaps even the card table, and the philosopher secludes himself before and after the social events his wife prepares at the writing table in his study. So many tables! My parents, who had very little money when they married, were striving, while I grew up, to expand the number and diversity of their tables, and to replace the poor, second hand, ones by inherited antiques or newly bought design ones.
As a student, reading myself into women’s literature, I learned that ‘a room of one’s own’, or even a table of one’s own, the prerogative of the modern European intellectual or writer, were only rarely available to women. One of the best Dutch female writers of the early twentieth century, Carry van Bruggen, wrote her novels at the kitchen table. And Ahmed writes about her own writing table from that non-self-evidency when describing moving into a new house:
“There, that will be my desk. Or it could just be the writing table. It is here that I will gather my thoughts. […] On the tables, different objects gather. Making a space feel like home, or becoming at home in a space, is for me about being at my table.” (Ahmed, 11)
Is it a coincidence that just yesterday, talking to someone who has known me all the years that I have been writing and publishing, I memorized the tables where my (Dutch) books were written? The first one, my dissertation on Spinoza, was written on an early Atari computer, on a small white desk I had bought after moving into an appartment for the first time. The second, the book on nature in ethics, my most voluminous one, was written on a Windows computer, at the same desk, in the study corner of the small house where I lived next – with my back to the kids’ toys strewn around the room, as well as to the kitchen in the back. The third book, the small one on truth in religion and science, was written at my parent’s old, discarded, forty years old ‘design’ table, in the attic of the somewhat larger house that came after. I worked on a laptop from then on, to save space – a thing still not very available. The fourth book, the philosophy of spirituality study book, was written in yet another house, a smaller one – at the same old table that was now the dining table, sewing table, and writing table – actually the only table. The fifth book, the one on spirits in modernity, I memorized, was written in the smallest room in the next house, almost feeling I had to apologize for occupying a room of my own, and the desk was now one I had purchased in the thrift shop for 15 euros – as the large old table of my parents was promoted to dining table once more…
And now, recently, I have moved my books and papers, to a spacious room I call my study, adorned even with the American desk of my grandfather, the desk that was the materialization of my father’s authority when I was young. The desk with the many drawers, even secret ones. The desk underneath which I hid as a toddler, feeling safe in the dark confined space between the colorful American wood. The most beourgois 
writing space I have ever used… The first time I sat at it to work, I had the strange sensation to have changed places with my father – being the adult with the authority to speak now. But since I have it, I have not (yet) written a book. Is it a coincidence? Or is it because inhabiting this ‘male’ space as a woman, and not just sitting in a corner where I am not noticed, somehow eats my endurance in writing away? It might be just the adjustment, in which case my next book, the first one in English, will be written next year at my grandfather’s American desk. Or, if it doesn’t work, I will pick up my laptop and sit somewhere, at the dining table, or the attic, I don’t mind. As long as the writing keeps on flowing…
Quotations are from Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology. Orientations, Objects, Others, of 2006. Durham & London: Duke University Press.
angelaroothaan 