At the outset of this book, I drew a distinction between the prophet, who claims to experience direct contact with divinity, and his followers, who validate in some way the original revelatory experience of the prophet when they affirm that his teaching, or the written text he presents to the world, is genuinely divine. That distinction is somewhat rough, since the followers of a prophet may also claim to experience direct contact with divinity. But it is fair to say that Euthyphro, for his part, claims to be not merely a follower of prophets but a prophet himself. Not only is his contact with the gods direct and personal, but the revelations he receives are idiosyncratic, even heterodox, in their content. Although he believes in the truth of the traditional stories about the gods, he also claims to have knowledge of secret stories, unknown to the many. And in choosing to prosecute his father for murder, he spurns the traditional and orthodox view of duty in favor of a new, more stringent code. His deviation from orthodoxy is undertaken not only with confidence but with pride. He scorns the many, who lack a direct line to the gods and are likely, as Socrates himself proves likely, to have ridiculous beliefs about justice and the divine law. And on the basis of his unique connection with the divine, he claims to be able to predict the future and tries to influence political decisions in the assembly.

Of course, certain aspects or possibilities of piety are most easily seen in a man like Euthyphro. But if we limit ourselves to the investigation of such an odd character, we risk settling for an understanding of piety that is incomplete. Both forms of the experiential evidence for divinity—the experiences of prophets, and the experiences of the followers of prophets— need to be investigated. As a supplement to what we have learned from Euthyphro, then, it will be helpful to investigate a Socratic conversation with a more typical believer.

A typical believer might experience the presence of the divine especially while reading and contemplating the words of a sacred text.

Reconnecting with Divan Poetry

DIVAN POETRY IS THE TERM used for poetry collections by one author, particularly in the Ottoman and Persian contexts, that are highly symbolic and often conflate the sacred and the profane in expressions of sensuality influenced by Sufi thought. Although Sufi poetry was often sidelined in the wake of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's modernizing and secularizing reforms, divan poetry continues to be central to the literature of Turkey, as it was for the former Ottoman Empire.

It has retained its significance in the writing of Zafer Şenocak (b. 1961, Ankara). He asserts, “Für eine nach Einheit und Reinheit suchende Ästhetik sind die Mischkulturen des Orients, und insbesondere die osmanische Kultur, ein Greul, im besten Fall unverständlich” (The mixed cultures of the Orient, and Ottoman culture especially, are an abomination for an aesthetic that searches for unity and purity; in the best case they are unintelligible). At a time when Muslim elites are ignoring mystical thinkers, the new poems of Übergang: Ausgewälte Gedichte 1980– 2005 (Crossing: Selected Poems 1980–2005, 2006) reconnect with what Şenocak calls the “identitätssprengender Charakter” (identity-exploding character) of Sufi divan poetry that evokes ideas both of faith and of the cosmopolitan without taking them as guiding principles. In this way the polarization of fixed identities and ideologies is avoided, such as the perceived gulf between Germans and their Muslim fellow citizens.

Şenocak has a broad and diverse oeuvre, encompassing poetry (both his own and translations), novels, short stories, and essays. He writes in both German and Turkish, treating topics as diverse as memory, gender, identity, and migration—he himself migrated from Turkey to Germany as a child in 1970. Islam is a recurring theme in most of Şenocak's writing, and his poetry is no exception. The poetry cycle “nâzım hikmet: auf dem schiff zum mars” (1998; nâzım hikmet: on the ship to mars, 2009), from the collection Futuristenepilog (Epilogue of the Futurists, published with the poet and performer Berkan Karpat in 2008), links the Turkish writer Nâzım Hikmet (1902–63) with both communism and Sufism, using imagery from technology and space travel. The poetry collection Übergang also deals with Islamic themes, particularly in relation to mysticism and Turkey's Ottoman heritage, which he conflates with aspects of German culture. As the title of the collection suggests, Şenocak touches upon migratory, cultural, historical, political, generational, and religious transitions and crossings in these poems.

According to the Athenian Stranger in Plato's Laws, the human being is the most god-revering of all creatures (902b4–7; see also Timaeus 41e4–42a3). The gods who are believed to exist differ from place to place, yet belief itself appears to be ubiquitous, or nearly so. But why do human beings believe in gods or in a God? What is the most compelling evidence for the existence of gods or something divine?

Perhaps the strongest evidence for the divine comes in the form of the experiences of believers. The rival prophets of the great religions claim to have experienced, at the least, direct contact with God. That contact justifies their authority to legislate for human beings. And the followers of those prophets also tend to claim, explicitly or implicitly, to have experienced a version of that contact, when they claim some ability to determine which religious teaching, or which religious text, is genuinely divine. While reading a sacred text, for instance, a believer may come to recognize its power in a way that allows him, setting aside any justification on the basis of tradition or ancestral piety, to validate in some way the original revelatory experience of the prophet.

But the authority to legislate on the basis of direct contact with God is disputed—not only by the leaders and members of competing religions and sects, but also by those who deny the legitimacy of any such claims. Partly for this reason, the world of politics is a place of conflict. The Shiite and the Sunni, the Baptist and the atheist disagree. If there were some way to arbitrate disputes over religious experience, some way to determine which religion, if any, has stronger experiential evidence on its side, there might be a way to arbitrate disputes over religious-political authority. A theoretical account of religious experience would surely not be dependable as a tool for the peaceful arbitration of those disputes in practice. But the touchstone provided by that theoretical account might give us some idea of what to aim for, and what to hope for, in any such process of arbitration.

THERE IS AMONG feminist commentators widespread concern about the pornographization of culture and the sexualization of young girls, as we saw in chapter 1. On the one hand, the assertion of female sexuality is important and necessary, as is the avoidance of unhelpful moral panics. On the other, the vulnerability of girls and young women to sexual assault, and the reduction of women to their bodies, require acknowledgment and action. Sex and desire thus raise the matters of agency and volition. They are also obviously linked to the questions of body and beauty: as chapter 3 demonstrates, the prevalence of eating disorders and low self-esteem among young women in the Western world is bound up with normative ideals regarding sexual attractiveness. Sex and desire may also challenge or affirm sisterhood and identification, entailing emulation, rivalry, hostility, or attraction between female subjects. This book's chapters thus form an interlinked investigation into contemporary feminine willfulness. If not necessarily or only oppositional, this willfulness is at the least troublesome and, occasionally, optimistic.

Framing Female Desire

The tension between affirmations of female desire and the requirement to protect and appropriately advise young women raises the matters of will and willfulness. If the thousands of contributors to the Everyday Sexism project are to be believed, young women experience sexualization and harassment routinely. The social will renders them docile. But what happens when the girl or young woman herself desires? Is her desire willful in Ahmed's sense? In Daddy's Girl, Valerie Walkerdine suggests so: “the little girl who is not nurturant, but displays a sexuality too different, active, animal, is one who constantly threatens the possibility of the rational order.” Elsewhere, she points out that the girl as an erotic object challenges the notion of the innocence of the child. Yet Walkerdine also acknowledges the systematic sexualization and scrutiny of girls: “There is an erotically-coded and ubiquitous gaze at the little girl.” Affirming female desire, and especially the sexuality of girls and young women, can serve to legitimize views of girls as appropriate targets, or fair game, so to speak. Natasha Walter points out the vulnerability of girls and the dubious status of the idea of “choice” in this context.

Religion and Spirituality in SAID's Thought

SAID, BORN IN 1947 IN TEHRAN, was twice exiled from his native Iran: in 1965 he fled to escape Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi and after a brief return he fled once again in 1979, this time from Ayatollah Khomeini. A large part of his work recounts the terror of these regimes and the difficulties of the migratory experience; as such it functions as a pedagogical tool for the German audience. His political activism led him to participate in the ‘68er student movement in Germany as the general secretary of the Confederation of Iranian Students’ National Union, and his work continues to be politically engaged. Fearing assassination by the Iranian authorities, he publishes under his first name only (normally written in block capitals) and initially would use only childhood photos on the sleeves of his books in order to avoid being recognized.

SAID's fiction writing is in the form of radio plays, poetry (often about love, in contrast to his other more typically exilic writing), imagined conversations, short stories, and children's literature. He has also published autobiographical essays, studies on literature, diary entries, and transcribed interviews. Wo ich sterbe ist meine Fremde (Where I Die Is My Abroad), which appeared in 1987, is a collection of poems about love and exile, and Der lange Arm der Mullahs: Notizen aus meinem Exil (The Long Arm of the Mullahs: Notes from my Exile), from 1995, is “a hybrid poetic construct consisting of poetry, letters, political commentary, eyewitness reports, imagined conversations with dead friends, censored news items, never-before-published political information and statistical reports, and personal reflections in diary form,” according to Thomas Baginski. In Der lange Arm der Mullahs, SAID writes of the loneliness of a life in exile, the death of friends and fellow activists, and his inability, from Germany, to effect political change in his native Iran. The danger of assassination is real. SAID recounts how, on October 17, 1992, “In Berlin wurden vier iranische Oppositionelle—darunter drei Führer der Demokratischen Partei Kurdistans im Iran—ermordet” (Four Iranian members of the opposition—among them three leaders of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan—were murdered in Berlin).

Vilna: Two Portraits of the City

It was one o’clock in the morning on Friday, July 5, 1913, when the chief of police of Vilna, Lt. Col. Fedor Deminskii stepped out of the city police headquarters on Blagoveshchenskaia Street (now Dominikonų gatvė). He strolled one block along the street, and turned right to Ignat’evskii Lane (Stiklių gatvė today). Over the next three hours, accompanied by his aides, he walked through the streets of downtown to the railroad station and back, meticulously registering any violations of official regulations and public order. Overall, he noticed fifteen wrongdoings. Just across the street from his office, the main entrance to a building was not locked for the night, nor were two other buildings along the way. The janitor (dvornik) of another building was found asleep (resolution: a fine of 2 rubles or arrest for one day); his colleague a few blocks away did not have a whistle (resolution: a fine of 1 ruble or arrest). In the American hotel, one of the rooms was occupied by a carpenter, who also worked there (resolution: to prohibit this in the future). Prostitutes were discovered at a refreshment shop that sells drinks, and its courtyard was found to be unsanitary (resolution: to write up a police report), while in the Gentry Club there was a wedding with orchestra (“I do not have information about this event. Why was it not reported to me?”).

For a bustling city of two hundred thousand inhabitants, in the early twentieth century, these transgressions strike one as incredibly innocent, and the fact that they deserved the attention of the city chief of police is puzzling. In the wake of the 1905 Revolution and in the context of modernization of all branches of government service, the figure of the Polizeimeister personally inspecting the city at night on a weekly basis seems a ghost of the good old days of direct patriarchal authority, unmediated by bureaucratic machinery and legal procedures. Chiefs of police in other urban centers of the Russian Empire could also personally intervene in the everyday lives of inhabitants of their cities, but they did not walk the streets at night on a weekly basis, and their resolutions did not have the effect of direct patriarchal rule.

“NIEMAND REDET HEUTE MEHR von Sexismus” (No one talks about sexism these days), Bascha Mika claims. In both Anglo-American and German contexts, there is a widespread perception that feminism has “gone too far,” and that it is no longer necessary. We are living in a time of “emergent retrosexism,” as Alison Phipps puts it. Sociobiological explanations are increasingly proffered in an attempt to naturalize a state of affairs in which issues of power, violence, and money are still very much at play. These observations accord with Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff's description of a contemporary postfeminist sensibility, which involves an emphasis on self-surveillance and self-transformation, a resurgence of ideas concerning natural sexual difference, and a consumerist, commodifying mentality. In line with work by Angela McRobbie, Scharff explains that in a postfeminist climate, feminism is “both taken into account and, simultaneously, repudiated.”

Yet “in spite of it all,” there has been in both German and Anglo- American contexts a boom in nonfiction “feminist” writing, where this descriptor is up for discussion. As we will see, the logic underpinning these texts often relies on neoliberalist individualism and leaves out the messiness of embodied, relational experience that fiction can better evoke. But such writing nonetheless helps clarify the status and concerns of feminism today, as well as the mainstream or normative logic that it attempts to counter. It thereby provides further insights into the “willful” workings of the literary texts under discussion in the four chapters that follow. It also flags up the ongoing feminist activity that both emerges from and counters neoliberalism, in the face of its own impossibility. In Sara Ahmed's 2017 formulation, “Feminism needs to be everywhere because feminism is not everywhere.”

Contexts

On the matter of contextualizing feminist debates, Scharff notes: “The story of feminism is told differently in Germany than in the UK and, in fact, also encompasses the existence of two German states [East and West Germany] until 1989.” As an example of such differing narratives and histories: a significant trigger for the emergence of the “new” feminism in Germany was the public debate on demographic changes, and especially the low birth rate, which in some cases involved blaming feminism and individual women. In the United States and the United Kingdom, such demographic debates have not been so prominent, and the triggers are more multiple and scattered.

This book has told a story of plebeian society in four cities of the Russian Empire during the interrevolutionary period of 1906–16. The story has had to be reconstructed mostly from the actions and gestures of the members of plebeian society, who expressed themselves more accurately in social practices than in written or even spoken words. To their educated contemporaries, who perceived reality through textual representations, as well as to modern historians looking for textual primary sources, those people in many ways seem analogous to deaf nonspeakers. Like the protagonist of the 1852 novella Mumu by the Russian classic writer Ivan Turgenev, the deaf and nonspeaking serf Gerasim, members of late imperial urban plebeian society could not communicate their experiences and formulate their attitudes even to each other in the same way as participants in the elite public sphere. Of course, they were not completely aphasiac: as we have seen in the previous pages, they were capable of emulating popular tropes and applying them rationally, or could themselves become objects of discursive manipulations. Still, this was not their preferred form of communication or one that they really trusted. It was not theirs almost by definition because it was developed and sustained by a different social stratum: the patricians of the middle class, the primary agents of the public sphere. Even the notion of “them” as a group is the hypothesis of a modern historian as an outside observer of their shared social practices and way of life because these people themselves did not produce self-descriptive narratives of their unity or assume a common name.

It is amazing that members of a socially diverse plebeian society, living lives “beneath any discourse” (Foucault), succeeded in integrating innumerable pockets of local knowledge and particularist experience into a common social sphere that revealed certain structural similarities in Kazan, Odessa, Nizhny Novgorod, and Vilna. This became possible because the common plebeian social sphere was coordinated and communicated through the medium of a specific common language of social practices. One of the main social practices that helped to integrate individual experiences and distinctive pockets of local knowledge into a single social sphere can be called the middle ground.

THIS BOOK EXPLORES the depiction of girls and young women in contemporary Anglo-American and German literary texts. It focuses on how the novels in question portray the process of “becoming woman,” and on the role of will and willfulness in this becoming. “Becoming woman” is an allusion to Simone de Beauvoir's famous 1949 pronouncement “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” This assertion, perhaps the defining statement of second-wave and subsequent feminisms, highlights the constructed status of gender. Gender is not a given; rather, it is a cultural construct. I am interested in what kind of becomings are possible in the context of neoliberalism and postfeminism. How do people become what they are? How do they fail to become what they might? What is at stake, politically and ethically, in such becomings or failures to become? I identify four sets of concerns that are integral to the notion of becoming: agency and volition; body and beauty; sisterhood and identification; and sex and desire. These clusters of concerns are all crucial to feminist thought, and urgent for anyone interested in understanding subject formation—especially, but not only, gendered subject formation—in the contemporary context.

The literary texts I examine, all published during the last twenty years in German or English, tease out the complex processes by which female subjects become women in the context of a globalized, neoliberal world. The introduction delineates the theoretical and cultural context for this study and justifies the comparatist approach it adopts. It examines the notion of becoming in gender and feminist theory, putting forward a conception of this process as affective, bodily, and relational. It also argues for negativity, failure, and anger as crucial to conceptualizations of femininity. It then turns to Sara Ahmed's productive notion of willfulness, as developed in Willful Subjects. Willful Girls tests out Ahmed's concept and expands its implications for understandings of literature and of the contemporary context more broadly. The book demonstrates that femininity is a site of identification and disidentification, of interpellation and resistance, of desire and disgust. It thereby crystallizes and develops ongoing feminist debates concerning agency, embodiment, relationality, and sexuality.

Art and affect are crucial to this project. Art—which, as Elizabeth Grosz suggests, connects us to our animal lineage—involves bodiliness and eroticism.

If we seek to understand the experiential evidence for divinity, the connection between piety and morality, and the way in which Socratic dialectics, as adumbrated in the Apology, might shed light on those topics, the dialogue that seems most promising as a focal point is Plato's Euthyphro. There are several reasons to turn first to the Euthyphro.

First, the Euthyphro is connected with the Apology, by its dramatic situation and by its frequent references to the case against Socrates. At the opening of the Euthyphro, Socrates has come to meet his indictment by Meletus on a charge of impiety and corruption of the young. Not only does Socrates describe the case against himself; he describes at length his accuser, Meletus, who appears as a character in the Apology. If we want a fuller portrait of the dialectical refutations that are obliquely described in the Apology, these connections between the two dialogues may indicate that the Euthyphro is a good place to look. More importantly, the Euthyphro presents the interrogation and refutation of a would-be prophet, who, in the course of that refutation, becomes angry at Socrates, whom he initially admired. At the end of the dialogue, angry and confused, Euthyphro hurries away on “other business.” If we accept the suggestion of Leibowitz (2010, 74; cf. 87–88), prophets were among those whom Socrates examined dialectically, refuting their claims to be wise. Perhaps, then, an analysis of the Euthyphro can help us to flesh out the skeletal portrait of dialectics— as a way of considering the question of the god to be most important—that is provided in the Apology.

Second, the subject of the Euthyphro is piety. It is the only Platonic dialogue devoted solely and explicitly to that theme. Socrates attempts, with the help of Euthyphro, to answer the question “What is the pious [to hosion]?” That question may be roughly rephrased as “What does divinity allocate to or demand of human beings?” But what precisely is the significance, to Socrates, of that question? Why does he pursue the answer to it with such fervor, and why does he require the participation of Euthyphro to make that pursuit possible or fruitful?

THE TEXTS I HAVE EXAMINED in this study reveal a spectrum of feminine becomings. Failure, refusal, disgust, and bile feature strikingly in these willful literary responses to postfeminism and neoliberalism. In the course of writing this book, I came across Kate Zambreno's 2011 novel Green Girl. This text holds an emblematic status as far as my project is concerned, and demands a special emphasis. Green Girl engages with the concerns of this book in important and instructive ways, offering an important case study in terms of contemporary literary constructions of and engagements with femininity. The novel's aesthetic illustrates strikingly the ways in which literature itself can provoke becoming, as my introduction suggests. This conclusion therefore discusses Zambreno's novel under the headings agency and voluntarism, body and beauty, sisterhood and identification, and sex and desire, also reiterating and crystallizing the concerns of previous chapters. It argues that the green girl, and the related figure of the trainwreck, are provocative and useful figurations. Finally, it turns to the questions of feminist art, criticism, and activism today, in light of Ahmed's theorization of willfulness as “a style of politics.”

Green Girl: Agency and Voluntarism

Green Girl concerns Ruth, a young American in London who is adrift and as-yet unfixed. The novel self-consciously thematizes the creation of its protagonist. The narrator is a mother-author: “I am trying to push her [Ruth] out in the world” (GG, 3). This self-reflexiveness involves a postmodern emphasis on the constructedness of text. It also highlights the struggle for self-definition in which the protagonist—an archetypal neoliberal girl—is engaged. Ruth's job in a department store, where she sells a celebrity-endorsed perfume wittily called Desire, points up the commercialism and consumerism of the age, and the power of celebrity and branding (see GG, 184–86). Affect, here, is to be packaged and sold: “Would you like to sample Desire?” (GG, 7). The text archly quotes and subverts sales patter. It also exposes and mocks the neoliberalist makeover paradigm (GG, 45–48, 89). Ruth, who is in “her last gasp of girlhood” (GG, 3), is undergoing “becoming” in this context. The process is anxious and faltering. The novel explicitly foregrounds becoming, then, and like texts such as Baum's and Hegemann's, it suggests how arduous and precarious a process that is (GG, 81, 229). Ruth's status and identity are uncertain.

A focus on social practices helps to make sense out of the seemingly chaotic social interactions of low-class urbanites, so it seems logical to inquire whether those practices formed a social space (if not a social order) of their own. In our attempt to understand the motivation and rationality of people who left a trace in written records mainly by their seemingly unjustified outbursts of rage, petty theft, or ethnic slurs, we have looked into social practices as a factor that structured plebeian society and mediated the communication of meanings within it. Judging “every man according to his works,” we have thus far skipped the elusive problem of human nature: how certain values and world views affected the formation of social practices of the middle ground, patriarchality, and violence, and how the integrating potential of these practices, in turn, resulted in the change in basic social attitudes. In essence, this is a question of the relationship between social dynamics and structures, and how rapid social transformation creates a social space in its own right—something that the usual transitological approach treats as a marginal phenomenon between the real states of the old regime and the normative future endpoint of transition. The old regime of the Russian Empire was well attuned to handle the challenges of modernity and human diversity, but only before the advance of mass society. “The imperial rights regime” granted a certain degree of legal recognition to self-evident “natural” social collectivities, but there was nothing self-evident about the emerging plebeian mass society, with external and internal boundaries unstable and negotiated through self-organization. In many ways, this new social milieu reproduced the logic of the imperial situation and was a product of it, but its formal institutionalization would have required very different political and legal arrangements. The imperial rights regime made the emergence of Russian mass society possible, but it could not legalize it formally.

To people living in a society in flux, this was the only and ultimate reality, much more significant than anything they had left in the past or could anticipate in the future.