All of Me for a Piece of You, Part 5
Lecture & Workshop with Jan Verwoert

Try saying of yourself “I am funny, I am caring, I am wise”. Unless it’s a disarming joke (because everyone knows you are none of these things) you can’t claim certain qualities, by yourself, for yourself. At least not credibly so. Certain qualities only reveal themselves over time, as relations between people unfold. I mean sympathetic qualities like humor, love & care, just like antipathies, annoyances & jealousies. Qualities disclosed within relations can’t be claimed as values by one party alone. They are in the air, between people, need mediation and moderation, with good timing, to be invoked, acted upon or exorcised, in ways all parties may trust.

The crux of relational qualities and values, however, doesn’t just lie in the fact that they can never unilaterally be named & claimed. Notoriously, none of these qualities have one ethical value only, but many implications instead. The ability to be a good listener may make you a great care-giver. But it could equally make you an expert manipulator. As a listener showing high sensitivity to details, you may easily get others to reveal sensitive details that you can later use against them. Cats are such elegant killing machines because they hear every little thing. Maybe real ethics start when we neither name & claim relational values by ourselves for ourselves, nor frame relational qualities in unambiguous terms. Because nothing is good that couldn’t also be bad.

Care is a crucial case in point. Cruelty may be its flip side. By cruelty I here mean the power of one party to impose conditions on another party that make their life impossible, while making them go on living like this. It may be the cruelty of the care giver to put the care receiver in a situation of dependency from which the receiver cannot escape, because it materially & mentally sustains them. Or it may be the cruelty of the receiver holding the giver hostage, appealing for their care out of need, while repelling it out of pride, arresting the giver in a catch 22 scenario, where everything is urgent but nothing possible. The final cruel irony of care may be that, even and especially when intentions are good, the evils of mutual dependency may be painfully hard to circumvent.

From working as a nurse, I remember our nurse locker room talk was insanely profane. In many discussions on care in the arts today, I miss that taste of profanity which, in my experience, would render it credible. How to cultivate the art of profanely cursing the cruelties of care, while wholeheartedly dedicating yourself to practices of giving and receiving it? Instead of doing the naming, claiming and framing values, what about expressing the ambiguous relational qualities and powers at play in care, in a practical language of prayers and curses?

The lecture on 6 February at 19:00 will be followed by a workshop session on 7 February at 11:00. During the workshop, the ideas presented in the talk, as well as excerpts from the manuscript of a forthcoming book will be discussed in greater depth through communal peer-review discussions.