ChapterOneWhyAsianAmericanSexualPoliticsIn2000,t.docx

Chapter One
Why Asian American Sexual Politics?
In 2000, two white men and a white woman
in Spokane, Washington, specifically targeted
Japanese women in an elaborately planned scheme
to kidnap, rape, sodomize, and torture them
and to videotape the whole ordeal. According to
police reports, the rapists had a sexual
fantasy about and fixation with young Japanese
women. The threeassailants believed that the
Japanese women were submissive.[1] In just one month,
the predators abducted five Japanese
exchange students, ranging in age from eighteen to
twenty. Motivated by their sexual biases
about Asian women, all threeused both their bodies
and objects to repeatedly rape—vaginally,
anally, and orally—two of the young women
for over seven hours.[2] One of the attackers
immediately confessed to searching only for Japanese
women to torture and rape;eventually,
all pled guilty and were convicted.[3]
In 2004, American Idol, the most watched TV series
in the Nielsen ratings and the only
program to have been number one for seven
consecutive seasons,[4] premiered the season
with
an episode that showcased twenty-one-year-old
William Hung singing a rendition of Ricky
Martin’s “She Bangs.” The episode was a collection of
the most “talentless” of those who

auditioned, and it was if Hung was crowned
the “king.” His inability to carrya tune, dance
to
the beat, or exude any sex appeal made the
video go viral on the Internet, and viewers
were
laughing at him, not with him. He was a perfect fit
for the unflattering racial stereotypeof the
asexual, nerdy Asian American man. Across the
blogosphere, race scholars and Asian
American men were bemoaning the perpetuation of
the racist stereotyping and yet another
instance where Asian American men are emasculated
in American media.
These two examples demonstrate the racial
stereotyping of Asians and Asian Americans.
The perpetrators in Spokane, Washington, used racist
stereotypes to pick their targets. While
both being racially “othered,” Asian and Asian
American women have been constructed as
sexually exotic docile bodies while men have
been racially “castrated.” These constructions
created a complicated racialized Asian American
sexual politics affected by racist-gendered
constructions but also “home-culture”expectations. The
vignettes and analysis shared in this
book are an attempt to look at the nuanced way
that constructions can operate in the lives of
someAsian Americans.
Feminist scholars argue that women's sexuality is
socially shaped in ways that sustain men's
social and political dominance. I extend this
feminist scholarship and argue that Asian
American sexuality is socially shaped in ways that

maintain social and political dominance for
whites, particularly white men. I want to set
this stagewith the assertions made by Patricia
Hill Collins in her seminal work, Black Sexual
Politics.[5] Collins defines sexual politics as
Chou, Rosalind S.. Asian American Sexual Politics : The
Construction of Race, Gender, and Sexuality, Rowman &
Littlefield Publishers, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/washington/detail.action?d
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“a set of ideasand social practices shaped by
gender, race, and sexuality that frame all men
and women’s treatment of one another, as well as
how individual men and women are
perceived and treated by others.”[6] Collins

brilliantly asserts that the oppression of African
Americans extends beyond race. Controlling and
enforcing the gender and sexuality of African
Americans maintains white supremacy. Similarly,
Asian Americans have their own unique
sexual politics as they face gendered and sexualized
racial stereotyping and discrimination.
However, thereis also dissimilarity.
Collins notes the hypersexualization of African
American men and women within the
outwardly appearing “sexually repressive” nature of
the United States.[7] She extends her
analysis to otherpeople of color, but the
sexualization of Asian Americans is
somewhat
different. Asian Americans come from nations
with different sexual mores than the United
States, and their experiences cannot be explained in
the same fashion. Within those nations of
origin, thereare differences in gender oppression
and homophobia that should be taken into
account when understanding Asian American
femininity, masculinity, and sexuality. In later
chapters, thesedifferences in nationhood and origin
are explored to help explain the unique
experiences of Asian Americans.
In my narrative analysis, it is apparent that the
maintenance of white supremacy through
controlling images and stereotypes of Asian
Americans as gendered and sexualized bodies
is a
sobering reality for my respondents. While all
people go through a gendered and sexualized
process in this society, the intersecting racial

identity for people of colorintroduces racial
domination into the mix. The additional struggle with
defining one’s own racial identity is
difficult enough as a man, woman, gay, straight,
bisexual, or trans person. There are societal
forces constantlyimposing identity on us all based
on gender, sexuality, class, race, age,
ability, religion, and so on. However, consideration of
power and domination must constantly
be centralized in the analysis to get a clear
picture of how oppression is operating. Asian
Americans, while perhaps seen as “nearly
white,”[8]are not free from gendered, racialized
treatment. This racialized and gendered process is not
static. The sexual stereotyping of people
of Asian descent has mutated throughout
American history, changing based on the needs
and
interests of whites. Interview respondents share in
greatdetail the present-day gendered and
racialized process they face as Asian Americans.
Structural factors based on race, class, gender,
and sexuality have an effect on the lives of
Asian Americans. I would be naïve if I
believed my own attraction to others was solely
based
on internal “animal instinct.” However, research in
the life sciences and psychology factor in a
biological basisfor sexual desires. Pheromones,[9]
ovulation patterns,[10] symmetry of facial
features,[11] and chest-waist-hip ratios[12] have been
determined as legitimate scientific
indicators of what is attractive and beautiful. However,
thesefactors are socially constructed
categories of significance.[13] Historically, science

has been used to justify social systems of
inequality and oppression.[14] While examining
sex, sexuality, gender, and race, it would be
unwise to believe that biases fail to exist in
thesestudies. Numerous studies have indicated that
racial stereotyping can affect perceptions of
others and the self, the most influential and
famous
case being the Kenneth Clark study used during
Brown v. Board of Education.[15]
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The terms sex and sexuality have become intertwined
with our cultural understanding of
gender. Race is not so intimately wed to a
layman’s understanding of sex, sexuality, and gender.
However, race is central to how sex, sexuality, and
gender can be understood in the lives of
Asian Americans. While functioning in both
similar and different ways for Asian American
men and women, gender and sexuality act as
fundamental mechanisms in maintaining white
supremacy and white hegemonic ideals. Racial
stereotypes crawl into bed with people of all
races. White hegemonic ideologiesof masculinity
and femininity determine who gets to have
sex with whom and the characteristics of those
sexual and romantic partners. The selection and
vetting process of potential sexual or romantic
partners is not happeningoutside of our social
world. We do not make choices of attraction in
a vacuum. Whether we are conscious or not,
ideasof masculinity, femininity, and race influence
our decisions for potential partners. Our
world shapes our “wants” and “choices” of whom
we sleepwith or take home to introduce to
our families. Hegemonic ideology becomes our
commonsense notions. When we believe we
find someone attractive, thereis a socializing element
that comes into play.
This research is a call to scholars, educators,policy
makers, journalists, and any person
concerned with issues of race, gender, and sexuality to
pay attention to Asian Americans. Their
experiences speak more broadly to issues of
racism, sexism, and homophobia in the United
States, and we can learna greatdeal about the

tangled web of social structures through this
narrative analysis. Our identities are so complexly
intertwined, and the numerous social norms
and hegemonic common-sense programming pulls
individuals in a number of directions.
This
book is an attempt to begin to capture and
decipher the complexity. Through the words of
respondents, hopefully we can learnhow to talk about
how someone is sexualized and
gendered while being simultaneously racialized.
These identities do not always become salient at
the same time or with equal force. The
complexity of intersecting identities is how their
salience shifts and alters from situation to
situation. Larger social structures and hierarchies
remain omnipresent, but thereare instances
when stereotyping may seem“positive” or “negative.”
Whether the difference in stereotyping
awards an individual with actual structural power is
contestable and may remain to be seen.
This book is an effort to begin to ask these
questions and start to define and discuss the
sexual
politics of Asian Americans.
WHY ASIAN AMERICAN SEXUAL POLITICS?
Why should we study Asian American sexual
politics? By evaluating constructions of Asian
American gender and sexuality, it informs us on
how racism, specifically white supremacy,
works in the United States. The externally
imposed meanings placed upon Asian and Asian
American bodies unveil the new racism in this

supposed postracial United States.
One thingI recognize and acknowledge is that many
of us do not like to be told whom we
should and should not love. Love and relationships,
whether in fairy tales or Hollywood
blockbusters, is not romantic if thought of as a
calculated political move, but all love is shaped
by sociohistorical factors.[16] Whether a relationship
is intra- or interracial, same or opposite
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sex, thereare negotiations and choices to be made,
conscious and unconscious. This book
gives us a look into the lives of sixty Asian
Americans and how they negotiate their racialized
gender, sexuality, and relationships.
The goal of this book is to not only share the
experiences of my respondents but continue
the
dialogue that otherscholars have already begun about
the intersection of race, ethnicity, gender,
and sexuality. Social forces shape our lives.
Ideas are normalized about our identities
that may
influence our thoughts, feelings, and actions. I am
not writing this book to tell people whom
they should and should not find attractive. Most
important, I hope my readers begin to
recognize the role of power and privilege and to
see white hegemonic masculinity[17] in its
various forms and the way it shapes how we
see the world. As a result of normalized
hegemonic ideology, we can fail to deconstruct
our world, motivations, preferences, and
“choices.” My Asian American respondents see
the world through “frames.” They can be
“multiframers” who possess ideology from a “white
racial frame” and simultaneously draw
from “counter-frames” that are in conflict with each
other.[18] Individuals make sense of their
world through theseframes and are either shaped
by white social structure or at odds with
oppressive powers.
METHODOLOGY: STANDPOINT EPISTEMOLOGY,
EXTENDED CASE METHOD, AND

NARRATIVE ANALYSIS
There are threekey elements to my methodological
approach for this project: standpoint
epistemology, extended case method, and narrative
analysis. Among my sixty interview
participants, thirty-two self-identify as women, twenty-
seven as men, and one as “female-
bodied gender queer.” Ethnically, the respondents
self-identify as Taiwanese, Chinese, Indian,
Filipino, Korean, Malaysian, Vietnamese, Hmong,
Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Japanese, Thai, and
multiracial Americans. The umbrella term “Asian
American” is used to describe the
participants.[19] The age range is eighteen to
seventy-one years of age. The respondents
come
from varying geographic regions around the
country.[20] The sample is overly educated,
with
90 percent of the respondents having bachelor
degrees.[21]
I begin my research with standpoint
epistemology, where the voice of the
“marginal” is the
starting point. Specific to feminist theory, the
focus lies on power differentials that exist in
gender relations; I am extending the feminist theory
to include racial marginalization. Harding
asserts, “The activities of those at the bottom of
such social hierarchies can provide starting
points for thought—for everyone’s research and
scholarship—from which humans’ relations
with each otherand the natural world can become
visible.”[22] My research addresses

intersecting identities placed in overlapping
hierarchies, so it will be a delicate task to
describe how they operate separately and in combination.
Power has been centered in
scholarship from the top of hierarchy, so standpoint
epistemology creates knowledge from a
different perspective. The research is situated where
one stands in a marginal position and
investigates how a person “comes to know.”
However, a person in a more powerful
position in
a hierarchy can also contribute, as long as
standpoint position is acknowledged. The goal is
to
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provide a look from the “bottom up.”[23]
Standpoint epistemology acknowledges situatedness
instead of labeling itselfas an objective
pointof view” because the whole notion of
“objectivity” is interrogated. Feminist scholars
assert that history and knowledge labeled as
“objective” produced by academicshas largely
been “phallocentric.”[24] Harding contends:
Thus the standpoint claims that all knowledge
attempts are socially situated and that someof
theseobjective social
locations are better than others as starting points
for knowledge projects [that]challenge someof
the most fundamental
assumptions of the scientific world view and the
Western thought that takessciences as its model
of how to produce
knowledge.[25]
Sandra Harding asserts, “one can see thesesexist
and or androcentric practices in the
discipline.”[26] Much of the knowledge that
has been produced has come from the standpoint
of privileged white men. The situatedness of
standpoint epistemology can elaborate on the
experiences and contributions made by women.[27]
The standpoint approach works to
“eliminate dominant group interests and values of
successfully colonized minorities.”[28] My
research is an exercise in elaborating on the

situated experiences of Asian American men
and
women and offers perspectives that may counter
the historically white, androcentric dominant
view.
Qualitative methods are used to make meaning of
social phenomenon at the micro level and
highlight the relationship of theseinteractions to
the macro level.[29] While quantitative
methods illuminate shifts or movementof group
trends, such as Asian American intermarriage
rates, qualitative methods can help to explain
the phenomenon.In this research, I rely on the
use
of the extended case method (ECM)because it
elucidates the link between the micro and macro
by placing “everyday life in its extralocal and
historical contexts.”[30] In this case, extended
case method informs us how external forces shape
the lives of Asian American men and
women.[31]
Narrative analysis takesas its starting pointthe belief
that, as human beings, we understand
our experiences and ourselves by telling stories.
These can be as specific as accounts of
particular events, or as broad as an entire
life story. Meaning-making involves storytelling
as
interview participants attempt to make sense of
their experiences. My task during narrative
analysis is to understand those stories,
examining not only their content but also their
structure.
Analyzingcontent is fundamental to any mode of

qualitative research; what narrative analysis
offers is a chance to expand our
understanding of informants by examining
how they tell us
what they want us to know. Narrative structure is
both holistic (the form the storytakes) and
particular (the language used to tell it). Narrative
analysis, then, addresses both the content and
the form of interview data. Although individuals are
sharing thesenarratives, otherelements of
social life affect their experiences. Their
storytelling will incorporate larger ideologiesof
placement in social structure, media discourse, and
cultural values.
THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES ON RACE,
GENDER ANDSEXUALITY
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First and foremost, I treat race, sexuality, and gender as
sociohistorical constructions. Omi
and Winant explain that "Racial categories and the
meaning of race are given concrete
expression by the specific social relations and
historical context in which they are embedded.
Racial meanings have varied tremendously over time
and between societies."[32] I define
gender as a “social status, a legal designation,
and a personal identity” and “through social
processes of gendering, gender divisions and their
accompanying norms and role expectations
are built into the major social institutions of
society.”[33] While I use the terms “men,”
“women,” “boys,” and “girls” I want to clarify
that I find problems with the terminology. The
terms are constructed as a binary and restrict
gender to just two categories. Because of
the
restrictiveboundaries to this language, please note
that my usage of gender pronouns are
understood as constructed categories that are
problematic. There are male-bodied and female-
bodied respondents that may have different gender
presentations then what present language
may allow. When a respondent self-identified as
somethingelse outside of this binary gender
paradigm, such as butch, boi, or trans, it is
stated, and the pronoun they prefer is used.

Second, I define sexuality as “lustful desire,
emotional involvement, and fantasy, as enacted
in a variety of long- and short-term
intimate relationships.[34] I do find the terms
homosexual
and heterosexual problematic because the origin of
the terms arises from the earlydiscipline
of sexology that created a legal and medical
discourse that stigmatized any sexual practices
that deviated from monogamous heterosexual
relationships.[35] Jeffrey Weeks asserts that
through the use of medical terminology
differentiating homosexuality from heterosexuality,
stigma has been attached to same-sex loving
sexualities.[36] The mere act of labeling
homosexuality as a practice creates a discourse of
deviant behavior that strays from the
“norm,” heterosexuality. Similarly, laws construct a
discourse surrounding sexual acts,
dividing them into acceptable and unacceptable
categories.
Systemic Racism, the White Racial Frame, and
Counter-Frames
I use a systemic racism approach to view racial
oppression as a foundational and persisting
underpinning of U.S. society. From the beginning,
powerful whites have designed and
maintained the country’s economic,political, and social
institutions to benefit,
disproportionately and substantially, their own racial
group. For centuries, unjust
impoverishment of Americans of colorhas been
linked to unjust enrichment of whites,

thereby
creating a central racial hierarchy and status
continuum in which whites are generally
the
dominant and privileged group.[37]
Since the earliest period of colonization,
European Americans have sustained this
hierarchical system of unjust material enrichment
and unjust material impoverishment with
legal institutions and a strong white racial
framing of this society. Whites have combined
within this pervasive white frame many racist
stereotypes (the cognitive aspect), racist
concepts (the deeper cognitive aspect), racist images
(the visual aspect), racialized emotions
(feelings), and inclinations to take discriminatory
action.[38] This white racial frame is
old,
enduring, and oriented to assessing and relating to
Americans of colorin everyday situations.
Operating with this racial frame firmly in mind,
the dominant white group has used its power
to
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place new non-European groups, such as Asian
immigrants and their children, somewhere in
the racial hierarchy that whites firmly control—
that is, on a white-to-black continuum of status
and privilege with whites at the highly privileged
end, blacks at the unprivileged end, and
otherracial groups typically placed by whites
somewhere in between.[39] This white racist
framing is centuries old and continues to rationalize
racism that has been systemic in this
society.
Understanding framing is essential to understanding
how racism persists today and is
disguised in institutions and color-blind discourse.
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva asserts that
whiteness is normalized by “white habitus.”[40]
“White habitus” is defined as a “racialized
uninterrupted socialization process that conditions
and creates whites’ racial tastes,
perceptions, feelings, and emotions and their views on
racial matters.”[41] The socialization

process of whites that shapes their racial tastes,
perceptions, and feelings can also have the
same affect on people of color. Feagin’s
definition of framing allows for the inclusion of
people of colorin the adoption of theseracist
ideologies. Scholarship in gender and
sexuality
would use terms like “hegemonic masculinity” to
discuss the powerful ideology of domination
and how the ideasbecome normalized. In terms of
race, “white habitus” can exist outside of
white spaces and the meanings can be adopted by
people of colorand, in this case, Asian
Americans.
In opposition to the white racist framing
and hegemonic framing of masculinity are
three
types of counter-frames: (1) a white-crafted
“liberty and justice” frame; (2) the anti-
oppression
counter-frames of Americans of color; and (3)
the home-culture frames that Americans of
color
have drawn on in developing their counter-
frames.[42] Asian Americans, collectively, have
very few counter-frames from which to view alternative
constructions of Asian American
masculinity, femininity, or sexuality. The externally
imposed identity of “Asian American”
represents many different cultures which would
provide a splintered or quilted “home-culture”
frame with someoverlap but a greatdeal of
diversity of meanings and practices. Additionally,
with more than half of Asians in the United States
being newer immigrants, thereare

complications in identifying racist structure and
oppression, which serves as another
obstacle
for developing strong anti-oppressioncounter-frames.
Whether the scholars choose to use “white racial
framing,” “white habitus,” or racial
“hegemony” to explain the persistence of racist
thoughts, feelings, and practices, white
supremacist ideology persists and comes in various
forms embedded in institutions and in the
psyches of whites and people of coloralike.
Racist ideology is passed along
subconsciously
through “colorblind discourse” in the era of
the “newracism.”[43] Asian Americans in
this
study have been socialized in a society where
whiteness is normalized.
Asian American Masculinity and Femininity
While the racial demographics of the United
States have shifted and continue to shift over
time,
they are not necessarily “naturally” occurring
changes. The law has played a central role in
the
“racial morphology” of the country.[44] Asians in
the United States comprise just over 4
percent of the population. This is by white
supremacist design. Legislation, both racist
and

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sexist in nature, has played a significant
role in the lives of Asian Americans. These
laws have
shaped their racial and gendered experiences. These
imposed gendered meanings faced by
Asian Americans have operated to support white
supremacy, the white racial frame, and
hegemonic masculinity. Asian American men and
women share someof the same racialized
experiences; however, the racialized experiences can
manifest differently for people based on
gender, class, and sexuality. Asian American women
have consistently been constructed as

sexually available to white men. Asian American
men have seen a different shift in gender
stereotyping that is unlike othermen of colorin
the United States because they, exclusively,
have gone through an emasculating, castrating process.[45]
Who Moved My Manhood? The Evolution of Asian
American Masculinity
DanaTakagi argues, “As Asian Americans, we do
not thinkin advance about whether or not to
present ourselves as ‘Asian American,’ rather
that is an identification that is worn by us,
whether we like it or not, and which is easily
read off of us by others.”[46] Asian
Americans
have specific racial stereotypes imposed upon them by
others, but that identity does not stand
alone. Race intersects gender and sexuality in a
particular way. Racial stereotypes can and do
change over time,but the meaning remains the same—
people of colorare inferior to whites.
Antiblack stereotypes remain from the slavery era,
but in our “colorblind” society, these
stereotypes are coded or rephrased to seemless
overtly racist.[47] However, this relatively
constant stereotyping of African Americans as
aggressive, dangerous, and oversexed varies
greatly from the ideological transition of Asian
American manhood. Historian Ronald Takaki
describes the stereotyping of earlymale Chinese
immigrants that was very similar to past and
current constructions of African American men:
The language used to describe the Chinese had been
employed before: Racial qualities that had been

assigned to
blacks became Chinese characteristics. Calling for
Chinese exclusion,the editor of the San
Francisco Alta claimed
the Chinese had most of the vicesof the African:
“Every reason that exists against the
toleration of free blacks in
Illinois may be argued against that of the
Chinese here.” Heathen, morally inferior, savage
and childlike, the Chinese
were also viewed as lustful and sensual.[48]
…
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including
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Karl Marx
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Additional Titles on Social and Political Philosophy
in Prometheus's Great Books in Philosophy Series
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The Social Contract
Niccolo Machiavelli
The Prince
Karl Marx
The Poverty of Philosophy
Mary Wollstonecraft
A Vindication of the Rights of Men
Mary Wollstonecraft
A Vindication of the Rights of Women
See the back of this volume for a complete list of titles in
Prometheus's Great Books in Philosophy and Great Minds
series.

KARL MARX was born in Trier, Prussia, on May 5, 1818, to an
intel-
lectual Jewish family. At seventeen he enrolled at the
University of
Bonn and a year later transferred to the University of Berlin,
where
he became interested in the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel. In
1841,
Marx obtained his doctorate in philosophy, having presented a
thesis
on post-Aristotelian Greek philosophy.
As a young graduate deeply involved with the radical Hegelian
movement, Marx found it difficult to secure a teaching post in
the
autocratic environment of Prussian society. In 1842 he became
editor of the Cologne newspaper Rheinische Zeitung, but his
probing
economic critiques prompted the government to close the
publica-
tion, whereupon Marx left for France.
While in Paris, Marx quickly became involved with emigre
German workers and French socialists, and soon he was
persuaded
to the communist point of view. His first expression of these
views
occurred in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,
which remained unpublished until 1930. It was during this brief
ini-
tial stay in France that Marx became associated with Friedrich
Engels.
For his radical political activities, Marx was expelled from

Paris
toward the end of 1844. He moved, with Engels, to Brussels,
where
he was to remain for the next three years, except for occasional
short
trips to England. Here Marx wrote the manuscript for The
German
Ideology (1845, co-authored by Friedrich Engels) and the
polemic
The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) against idealistic socialism.
Marx
later joined the Communist League, a German workers group,
for
which he and Engels were to become the primary
spokespersons. In
1847 Marx and Engels were asked to write a manifesto for the
league conference in London. This resulted in the creation of
the
Communist Manifesto, one of the most influential popular
political
documents ever written. Its publication coincided with a wave
of
revolutions in Europe in 1848.
Marx returned to Paris in 1848 but soon after left for Germany,
where in Cologne he founded the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, a
radical
newspaper that attacked Prussian rule. As revolutionary fervor
waned, the government suppressed his paper and Marx fled to
Eng-
land in 1849. For the next thirty-four years Marx remained in
Eng-
land absorbed in his work.
During this period Marx wrote voluminously, although many of
his works were published only after his death: The Class

Struggles
in France (1848); The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
vn
(1848); Grundrisse, or Outlines (1857-58; published in Moscow
in
1941 and in the West in the 1950s); Theories of Surplus Value
(1860); Capital (vol. 1,1867; vols. 2 and 3 in 1885 and 1894);
and
The Civil War in France (1871). Karl Marx died in London on
March 13,1883.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION TO THE
CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY
Karl Marx 1
THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Volume I: Critique of Modern German Philosophy
According to Its Representatives Feuerbach,
B. Bauer and Stirner 27
Volume II: Critique of German Socialism
According to Its Various Prophets 479
THESES ON FEUERBACH
Karl Marx 569

IX
Karl Marx
INTRODUCTION TO THE
CRITIQUE OF
POLITICAL ECONOMY
1. PRODUCTION IN GENERAL
The subject of our discussion is first of all material production
by
individuals as determined by society, naturally constitutes the
starting point. The individual and isolated hunter or fisher who
forms the starting point with Smith and Ricardo, belongs to the
insipid illusions of the eighteenth century. They are
Robinsonades
which do not by any means represent, as students of the history
of
civilization imagine, a reaction against over-refinement and a
return
to a misunderstood natural life. They are no more based on such
a
naturalism than is Rosseau's "contrat social," which makes
naturally
independent individuals come in contact and have mutual inter-
course by contract. They are the fiction and only the aesthetic
fiction
of the small and great Robinsonades. They are, moreover, the
antic-

ipation of "bourgeois society," which had been in course of
devel-
opment since the sixteenth century and made gigantic strides
towards maturity in the eighteenth. In this society of free
competi-
tion the individual appears free from the bonds of nature, etc.,
which
in former epochs of history made him a part of a definite,
limited
human conglomeration. To the prophets of the eighteenth
century,
on whose shoulders Smith and Ricardo are still standing, this
eigh-
teenth-century individual, constituting the joint product of the
disso-
lution of the feudal form of society and of the new forces of
pro-
duction which had developed since the sixteenth century,
appears as
an ideal whose existence belongs to the past; not as a result of
his-
tory, but as its starting point.
1
2 KARL MARX
Since that individual appeared to be in conformity with nature
and [corresponded] to their conception of human nature, [he was
regarded] not as a product of history, but of nature. This
illusion has
been characteristic of every new epoch in the past. Steuart, who,
as
an aristocrat, stood more firmly on historical ground, contrary

to the
spirit of the eighteenth century, escaped this simplicity of view.
The
further back we go into history, the more the individual and,
there-
fore, the producing individual seems to depend on and
constitute a
part of a larger whole: at first it is, quite naturally, the family
and the
clan, which is but an enlarged family; later on, it is the
community
growing up in its different forms out of the clash and the
amalga-
mation of clans. It is but in the eighteenth century, in
"bourgeois
society," that the different forms of social union confront the
indi-
vidual as a mere means to his private ends, as an outward
necessity.
But the period in which this view of the isolated individual
becomes
prevalent, is the very one in which the interrelations of society
(gen-
eral from this point of view) have reached the highest state of
devel-
opment. Man is in the most literal sense of the word
azoonpolitikon,
not only a social animal, but an animal which can develop into
an
individual only in society. Production by isolated individuals
outside
of society—something which might happen as an exception to a
civ-
ilized man who by accident got into the wilderness and already
dynamically possessed within himself the forces of society— is
as

great an absurdity as the idea of the development of language
without individuals living together and talking to one another.
We
need not dwell on this any longer. It would not be necessary to
touch
upon this point at all, were not the vagary which had its
justification
and sense with the people of the eighteenth century transplanted
In
all earnest into the field of political economy by Bastiat, Carey,
Proudhon and others. Proudhon and others naturally find it very
pleasant, when they do not know the historical origin of a
certain
economic phenomenon, to give it a quasi historico-philosophical
explanation by going into mythology. Adam or Prometheus bit
upon
the scheme cut and dried, whereupon it was adopted, etc.
Nothing is
more tediously dry than the dreaming locus communis.
Whenever we speak, therefore, of production, we always have
in mind production at a certain stage of social development, or
pro-
duction by social individuals. Hence, it might seem that in order
to
speak of production at all, we must either trace the historical
process
of development through its Various phases, or declare at the
outset
that we are dealing with a certain historical period, as, e.g.,
with
modern capitalistic production which, as a matter of fact,
constitutes
the subject proper of this work. But all stages of production
have
certain landmarks in common, common purposes. Production in

Introduction to the Critique of Political Philosophy 3
general is an abstraction, but it is a rational abstraction, in so
far as
it singles out and fixes the common features, thereby saving us
rep-
etition. Yet these general or common features discovered by
com-
parison constitute something very complex, whose constituent
ele-
ments have different destinations. Some of these elements
belong to
all epochs, others are common to a few. Some of them are
common
to the most modern as well as to the most ancient epochs. No
pro-
duction is conceivable without them; but while even the most
com-
pletely developed languages have laws and conditions in
common
with the least developed ones, what is characteristic of their
devel-
opment are the points of departure from the general and
common.
The conditions which generally govern production must be
differ-
entiated in order that the essential points of difference be not
lost
sight of in view of the general uniformity which is due to the
fact
that the subject, mankind, and the object, nature, remain the
same.
The failure to remember this one fact is the source of all the

wisdom
of modern economists who are trying to prove the eternal nature
and
harmony of existing social conditions. Thus they say, e.g., that
no
production is possible without some instrument of production,
let
that instrument be only the hand; that none is possible without
past
accumulated labor, even if that labor consist of mere skill which
has
been accumulated and concentrated in the hand of the savage by
repeated exercise. Capital is, among other things, also an
instrument
of production, also past impersonal labor. Hence capital is a
uni-
versal, eternal natural phenomenon; which is true if we
disregard the
specific properties which turn an "instrument of production" and
"stored-up labor" into capital. The entire history of production
appears to a man like Carey, e.g., as a malicious perversion on
the
part of governments.
If there is no production in general, there is also no general pro-
duction. Production is always some special branch of production
or
an aggregate, as, e.g., agriculture, stock raising, manufactures,
etc.
But political economy is not technology. The connection
between
the general destinations of production at a given stage of social
development and the particular forms of production, is to be
devel-
oped elsewhere (later on).

Finally, production is not only of a special kind. It is always a
certain body politic, a social personality that is engaged on a
larger
or smaller aggregate of branches of production. The connection
between the real process and its scientific presentation also falls
out-
side of the scope of this treatise. [We must thus distinguish
between]
production in general, special branches of production and
produc-
tion as a whole.
It is the fashion with economists to open their works with a gen-
4 KARL MARX
eral introduction, which is entitled "production" (see, e.g., John
Stuart Mill) and deals with the general "requisites of
production."
This general introductory part treats or is supposed to treat:
1. Of the conditions without which production is impossible,
i.e., of the most essential conditions of production. As a matter
of
fact, however, it dwindles down, as we shall see, to a few very
simple definitions, which flatten out into shallow tautologies;
2. Of conditions which further production more or less, as, e.g.,
Adam Smith's [discussion of] a progressive and stagnant state of
society.
In ordeT to give scientific value to what serves with him as a
mere summary, it would be necessary to study the degree of

produc-
tivity by periods in the development of individual nations; such
a
study falls outside of the scope of the present subject, and in so
far as
it does belong here is to be brought out in connection with the
dis-
cussion of competition, accumulation, etc. The commonly
accepted
view of the matter gives a general answer to the effect that an
indus-
trial nation is at the height of its production at the moment
when it
reaches its historical climax in all respects. Or, that certain
races, cli-
mates, natural conditions, such as distance from the sea,
fertility of
the soil, etc., are more favorable to production than others. That
again
comes down to the tautology that the facility of creating wealth
depends on the extent to which its elements are present both
subjec-
tively and objectively. As a matter of fact a nation is at its
industrial
height so long as its main object is not gain, but the process of
gaining. In that respect the Yankees stand above the English.
But all that is not what the economists are really after in the
gen-
eral introductory part. Their object is rather to represent
production
in contradistinction to distribution—see Mill, e.g.—as subject
to
eternal laws independent of history, and then to substitute
bourgeois
relations, in an underhand way, as immutable natural laws of

society
in abstracto. This is the more or less conscious aim of the entire
pro-
ceeding. On the contrary, when it comes to distribution,
mankind is
supposed to have indulged in all sorts of arbitrary action. Quite
apart
from the fact that they violently break the ties which bind
produc-
tion and distribution together, so much must be clear from the
outset:
that, no matter bow greatly the systems of distribution may vary
at
different stages of society, it should be possible here, as in the
case
of production, to discover the common features and to confound
and
eliminate all historical differences in formulating general
human
laws. E.g., the slave, the serf, the wage-worker—all receive a
quan-
tity of food, which enables them to exist as slave, serf, and
wage-
worker. The conqueror, the official, the landlord, the monk, or
the
levite, who respectively live on tribute, taxes, rent, alms, and
the
tithe,—all receive [a part] of the social product which is
determined
by laws different from those which determine the part received
by

the slave, etc. The two main points which all economists place
under
this head, are: first, property; second, the protection of the
latter by
the administration of justice, police, etc. The objections to these
two
points can be stated very briefly.
1. All production is appropriation of nature by the individual
within and through a definite form of society. In that sense it is
a tau-
tology to say that property (appropriation) is a condition of
produc-
tion. But it becomes ridiculous, when from that one jumps at
once to
a definite form of property, e.g., private property (which
implies,
besides, as a prerequisite the existence of an opposite form, viz.
absence of property). History points rather to common property
(e.g., among the Hindoos, Slavs, ancient Celts, etc.) as the
primitive
form, which still plays an important part at a much later period
as
communal property. The question as to whether wealth grows
more
rapidly under this or that form of property, is not even raised
here as
yet. But that there can be no such a thing as production, nor,
conse-
quently, society, where property does not exist in any form, is a
tau-
tology. Appropriation which does not appropriate is a
contradictio in
subjecto.
2. Protection of property, etc. Reduced to their real meaning,

these commonplaces express more than what their preachers
know,
namely, that every form of production creates its own legal
relations,
forms of government, etc. The crudity and the shortcomings of
the
conception lie in the tendency to see but an accidental reflective
con-
nection in what constitutes an organic union. The bourgeois
econo-
mists have a vague notion that it is better to carry on production
under the modem police, than it was, e.g., under club-law. They
forget that club law is also law, and that the right of the
stronger con-
tinues to exist in other forms even under their "government of
law."
When the social conditions corresponding to a certain stage of
production are in a state of formation or disappearance,
disturbances
of production naturally arise, although differing in extent and
effect.
To sum up: all the stages of production have certain
destinations in
common, which we generalize in thought; but the so-called
general
conditions of all production are nothing but abstract
conceptions which
do not go to make up any real stage in the history of production.
2. THE GENERAL RELATION OF PRODUCTION TO
DISTRIBUTION, EXCHANGE, AND CONSUMPTION
Before going into a further analysis of production, it is
necessary to

look at the various divisions which economists put side by side
with
6 KARL MARX
it. The most shallow conception is as follows: By production,
the
members of society appropriate (produce and shape) the
products of
nature to human wants; distribution determines the proportion
in
which the individual participates in this production; exchange
brings
him the particular products into which he wishes to turn the
quantity
secured by him through distribution; finally, through
consumption
the products become objects of use and enjoyment, of individual
appropriation. Production yields goods adopted to our needs;
distri-
bution distributes them according to social laws; exchange
distrib-
utes further what has already been distributed, according to
indi-
vidual wants; finally, in consumption the product drops out of
the
social movement, becoming the direct object of the individual
want
which it serves and satisfies in use. Production thus appears as
the
starting point; consumption as the final end; and distribution
and
exchange as the middle; the latter has a double aspect,
distribution

being defined as a process carried on by society, while
exchange, as
one proceeding from the individual. In production the person is
embodied in things, in [consumption] things are embodied in
per-
sons; in distribution, society assumes the part of go-between of
pro-
duction and consumption in the form of generally prevailing
rules;
in exchange this is accomplished by the accidental make-up of
the
individual.
Distribution determines what proportion (quantity) of the prod-
ucts the individual is to receive; exchange determines the
products
in which the individual desires to receive his share allotted to
him by
distribution.
Production, distribution, exchange, and consumption thus form
a perfect connection, production standing for the general,
distribu-
tion and exchange for the special, and consumption for the indi-
vidual, in which all are joined together. To be sure this is a
connec-
tion, but it does not go very deep. Production is determined
[according to the economists] by universal natural laws, while
dis-
tribution depends on social chance: distribution can, therefore,
have
a more or less stimulating effect on production: exchange lies
between the two as a formal (?) social movement, and the final
act
of consumption which is considered not only as a final purpose,
but

also as a final aim, falls, properly, outside of the scope of
economics,
except in so far as it reacts on the starting point and causes the
entire
process to begin all over again.
The opponents of the economists—whether economists them-
selves or not—who reproach them with tearing apart, like
barbar-
ians, what is an organic whole, either stand on common ground
with
them or are below them. Nothing is more common than the
charge
that the economists have been considering production as an end
in
itself, too much to the exclusion of everything else. The same
has
been said with regard to distribution. This accusation is itself
based
on the economic conception that distribution exists side by side
with
production as a self-contained, independent sphere. Or [they are
accused] that the various factors are not treated by them in their
con-
nection as a whole. As though it were the text books that
impress this
separation upon life and not life upon the text books; and the
subject
at issue were a dialectic balancing of conceptions and not an
analysis
of real conditions.

a. Production is at the same time also consumption. Twofold
consumption, subjective and objective. The individual who
develops
his faculties in production, is also expending them, consuming
them
in the act of production, just as procreation is in its way a
consump-
tion of vital powers. In the second place, production is
consumption
of means of production which are used and used up and partly
(as
e.g., in burning) reduced to their natural elements. The same is
true
of the consumption of raw materials which do not remain in
their
natural form and state, being greatly absorbed in the process.
The act
of production is, therefore, in all its aspects an act of
consumption as
well. But this is admitted by economists. Production as directly
identical with consumption, consumption as directly coincident
with
production, they call productive consumption. This identity of
pro-
duction and consumption finds its expression in Spinoza's
proposi-
tion, Determinatio est negatio. But this definition of productive
con-
sumption is resorted to just for the purpose of distinguishing
between consumption as identical with production and
consumption
proper, which is defined as its destructive counterpart. Let us
then
consider consumption proper.

Consumption is directly also production, just as in nature the
consumption of the elements and of chemical matter constitutes
pro-
duction of plants. It is clear, that in nutrition, e.g., which is but
one
form of consumption, man produces his own body; but it is
equally
true of every kind of consumption, which goes to produce the
human
being in one way or another. [It is] consumptive production.
But, say
the economists, this production which is identical with
consumption,
is a second production resulting from the destruction of the
product
of the first. In the first, the producer transforms himself into
things;
in the second, things are transformed into human beings. Conse-
quently, this consumptive production—although constituting a
direct unity of production and consumption—differs essentially
from production proper. The direct unity in which production
coin-
cides with consumption and consumption with production, does
not
interfere with their direct duality.
Production is thus at the same time consumption, and consump-
8 KARL MARX
tion is al the same time production. Each is directly its own
coun-
terpart. But at the same time an intermediary movement goes on
between the two. Production furthers consumption by creating

mate-
rial for the latter which otherwise would lack its object. But
con-
sumption in its turn furthers production, by providing for the
prod-
ucts the individual for whom they are products. The product
receives
its last finishing touches in consumption. A railroad on which
no one
rides, which is, consequently not used up, not consumed, is but
a
potential railroad, and not a real one. Without production, no
con-
sumption; but, on the other hand, without consumption, no
produc-
tion; since production would then be without a purpose.
Consump-
tion produces production in two ways.
In the first place, in that the product first becomes a real
product
in consumption; e.g., a garment becomes a real garment only
through the act of being worn; a dwelling which is not
inhabited, is
really no dwelling; consequently, a product as distinguished
from a
mere natural object, proves to be such, first becomes a product
in
consumption. Consumption gives the product the finishing touch
by
annihilating it, since a product is the [result] of production not
only
as the material embodiment of activity, but also as a mere
object for
the active subject.

In the second place, consumption produces production by cre-
ating the necessity for new production, i.e., by providing the
ideal,
inward, impelling cause which constitutes the prerequisite of
pro-
duction. Consumption furnishes the impulse for production as
well
as its object, which plays in production the part of its guiding
aim. It
is clear that while production furnishes the material object of
con-
sumption, consumption provides the ideal object of production,
as
its image, its want, its impulse and its purpose. It furnishes the
object
of production in its subjective form. No wants, no production.
But
consumption reproduces the want.
In its turn, production
First, furnishes consumption with its material, its object. Con-
sumption without an object is no consumption, hence production
works in this direction by producing consumption.
Second. But it is not only the object that production provides
for
consumption. It gives consumption its definite outline, its
character,
its finish. Just as consumption gives the product its finishing
touch
as a product, production puts the finishing touch on
consumption.
For the object is not simply an object in general, but a definite
object, which is consumed in a certain definite manner
prescribed in

its turn by production. Hunger is hunger; but the hunger that is
sat-
isfied with cooked meat eaten with fork and knife is a different
kind
of hunger from the one that devours raw meat with the aid of
hands,
nails, and teeth. Not only the object of consumption, but also
the
manner of consumption is produced by production; that is to
say,
consumption is created by production not only objectively, but
also
subjectively. Production thus creates the consumers.
Third. Production not only supplies the want with material, but
supplies the material with a want. When consumption emerges
from
its first stage of natural cmdeness and directness—and its
continua-
tion in that state would in itself be the result of a production
still
remaining in a state of natural crudeness—it is itself furthered
by its
object as a moving spring. The want of it which consumption
expe-
riences is created by its appreciation of the product. The object
of
art, as well as any other product, creates an artistic and beauty-
enjoying public. Production thus produces not only an object for
the
individual, but also an individual for the object.

Production thus produces consumption: first, by furnishing the
latter with material; second, by determining the manner of con-
sumption; third, by creating in consumers a want for its
products as
objects of consumption. It thus produces the object, the manner,
and
the moving spring of consumption. In the same manner,
consump-
tion [creates] the disposition of the producer by setting (?) him
up as
an aim and by stimulating wants. The identity of consumption
and
production thus appears to …
Pascal: Passages on Key Themes (a selection by no means
complete). By fragment number, with page numbers in
parentheses where necessary. Especially striking passages
bolded. (Pensées, Krailsheimer, 1995)
1. The greatness and wretchedness of man: 48 (absurd god,
ridiculous hero), 122, 149, 215 (Christianity knows man), 352,
354, 398, 401, 427 (131-`132), 430, 434, 442, 443, 449 (142),
470, 477, 613
2. Human nature: 200 (thinking reed), 24, 44 (12, last two
paragraphs), 45, 75, 78, 101, 119, 125-126 (habit, custom), 129,
131 (33-36, man’s dual nature, original sin), 148, 210, 397, 419,
421, 519, 595, 597, 605, 616-617, 620, 621, 627, 630, 638-639,
641, 661, 678 (angel nor beast), 681, 695 (original sin), 806,
821
3. Other evidences of the duality (the dual, paradoxical, even
contradictory nature) of man: 26 (greatness founded on
weakness),118, 210-211 (system of charity based on
concupiscence), 410, 519 (mechanisms in the head touching
opposites), 619, 629, 632, 633, 640 (joy at failure), 674, 688
(what is the self?)
4. The disproportion of man (man between the infinites,

relativity of the human condition): 21, 41, 68 (the
groundlessness of my being), 194, 198, 199 (59-65), 201, 418
(121), 400, 427 (130), 697, 699, 723
5. The corruption of nature: 201, 463, 471 (nature points at
every turn to a God who has been lost), 660
6. The relativity of justice, customary morality, social order: 35
(contingency of choice of vocation), 51, 60 (16-17), 66, 81, 85,
86, 90, 103, 211, 634, 645, 711
7. Diversion, Boredom, Death: 36, 132-133, 136 (37-41), 386,
414, 428 (133-134), 622, 640 (pleased at failure), 773
8. The heart (and also instinct and intuition) versus reason: 423-
424, 112, 128, 406, 511-512 (esprit de geométrie et esprit de
finesse), 513, 646
9. The hidden God, Christ the mediator, man’s relation to God:
189, 190, 192, 239, 281-284, 351, 378, 416-417, 427 (131),
449 (deism versus the Christian God), 468, 607, 776
10. Faith, revelation, reason, and its limits: 167, 170, 172-177,
182, 183, 188, 617, 12,687 (study of man), 690, 808, 809
SEQ CHAPTER h r 1Thoughts on Pascal
Notes on the Pensées (Kraisheimer, 1995)
Citations by paragraph number
unless otherwise indicated
Men are so inevitably mad that not to be mad would be to give a
mad twist to madness. (411)
Pascal’s Problem
1.
The aim of the Pensées is an edifying “proof” of Christianity,
edifying because it leads to faith—yet the problem of the
Pensées is whether this is even possible, or if so, how. The very
terms of Pascal’s fideistic concept of faith—not just that
religion rests on faith and revelation alone, but that even reason
rests on faith or revelation—seem to call this possibility into

question. There is no convergence of reason and faith as in the
classical Thomistic model.
2.
The basic impotence of reason is reflected in the seemingly
irresolvable quarrel between the skeptics (or Pyrrhonists) and
the dogmatists—those for whom reason destroys every certainty
and those who reason from supposedly self-evident first
principles. Man cannot live without first principles yet reason
deprives him of any certainty about them. It is as if man’s
reason functioned to humiliate him by constant demonstrations
of its own powerlessness. Yet reason is at the same time his
dignity and self-esteem.
3.
Pascal tries to absorb the truth of each without succumbing to
either. So, too, did Descartes, but Pascal rejects any rational or
(philosophically) dogmatic solution to this problem.
4.
The “philosophical” argument that might lead to faith is not the
rational proofs of the existence of God (as in Aquinas or
Descartes) but an analysis of the human condition–not theology
(or cosmology) but anthropology. Christianity is “worthy of
reverence because it really understands human nature.” (12; cf.
215, 687) The rationality of Christianity is that it knows man,
from inside out, so to say. And that means in part that it knows
the irrational. There is reason in Christianity, but it is reason of
the heart.
General Thesis
5.
The thesis of the book, in a nutshell, is man’s misery without
God, man’s happiness with God. (6)
6.
Its aim is to lead man to faith, or at least help make him
susceptible of it, partly by showing the human condition for
what it is, and partly by showing the aptness of Scripture–how

it all fits (prophecy, miracles, the Hebrews, the Pagans, etc.).
Thus he seeks to bring the two sides closer together, the human
and the revealed truth of God, without actually closing the gap
completely.
7.
There are two lines of argument in the Pensées, both rational,
but differently based: one is the argument from reason proper,
one might say—an analysis of the human condition and nature
independent of Scripture, showing man’s misery without a
redeemer; the other is an argument from Scripture, a
demonstration from Scriptural proofs and evidences that that
redeemer is Christ. This argument is rational, too, though its
basis is Scripture; it aims to show that Scripture “makes sense”
as the answer to the human condition; that it “fits.” Christ the
Redeemer is the logical solution to the anthropological impasse
of man’s fallen nature. The outline of the image of the
Redeemer is inversely perceptible, so to say, in the fallenness of
man. “Thus without Scripture, whose sole object is Christ, we
can know nothing, and can see nothing but obscurity and
confusion in the nature of God, and in nature itself.” (417)
8.
The first argument has an apodictic or a priori feel to it, as if it
were a necessary and inevitable conclusion from the human
condition. The second argument from Scripture is probabilistic,
a likely story, a good bet. (Hence the famous Wager.) It is
impossible to close the gap between these two lines, though
they approach each other asymptotically. Pascal wants to bring
them close enough to spark, so to say.
Man’s Wretchedness
9.
Man’s basic condition is fallenness, the corruption of his
original nature.
10.
Hence the characterizations of man as a “dethroned king,” an

“absurd god,” or a “ridiculous hero” (48): his condition is that
of having once occupied a position of greatness but of having
also lost it, with enough of a recollection of his original
condition to be made miserable by it (430, 477).
11.
Man’s misery is thus proof of his greatness, and his greatness is
his misery. Man’s sense of greatness is inextricably entangled
with his humiliation, and vice versa. Each aspect, his misery or
his greatness, leads to the other.
12.
He remembers his greatness through his misery, and his
greatness only intensifies his misery.
13.
This dialectical quality, this “dual nature” pervades human
existence and can be discerned in every human phenomenon, an
inner tension and paradox. (131) “Man’s dualism is so obvious
that some people have thought we had two souls: Because a
simple being seemed to them incapable of such great and sudden
variations, from boundless presumption to appalling dejection.”
(629)
14.
It is as if man were once whole and integral, but lost his
original unity and disintegrated into elements and drives that
henceforth conflict with each other (thus, for example, the war
of reason and the senses, reason and the passions, etc. 410).
Elements that ought to be ordered and integrated instead find
themselves at odds. “Man’s nature must have undergone a
strange reversal.” (427, p. 131)
15.
Thus in every particular phenomenon of human existence,
Pascal uses this original paradox to discern a dialectical
tension: in knowledge and science, ethics and politics, human
psychology, and so forth. “There are certain mechanisms in our
head so arranged that we cannot touch one [side of the scales]
without touching its opposite.” (519)
16.

Man is a reed in nature, at the mercy of incomprehensible
forces, but a thinking reed (200)–that is, his being (as with
Descartes) is his self-awareness, his consciousness of himself.
“Man is obviously made for thinking; therein lies all his dignity
and merit.” (620) He is wretched because he knows he is
wretched, but his knowledge of his wretchedness is also his
greatness.
17.
Wretchedness appears in his alienation from nature, his
lostness, terror, disproportion, and disorientation in the face of
the incomprehensible, vertiginous infinites of space and time.
He no longer knows his place, where he belongs. “Man does
not know the place he should occupy.” (400) “Man between the
infinites.” “The disproportionality of man.” (199)
18.
Likewise, he has nearly lost his original nature, so that only a
vestige remains. He no longer knows himself or his true good—
self-alienation. He know longer knows what he is because he
has ceased to be what he was. “Custom is our nature.” (419) He
no longer knows his true good, and anything may become his
true good. “Since [man’s] true nature has been lost, anything
can become his nature; similarly, true good being lost, anything
can become his true good.” (397) Desire has lost its attachment
to its true objects and now simply settles on whatever objects
its imagination can invest with value. His nature is now the
lack of a nature, or the relativity of his nature, its reduction to
custom or habit. “Nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit
is a second nature.” (126) “How many natures lie in human
nature!” (129)
19.
And he is alienated from God, unable any longer to believe. He
has a natural aversion to religion, especially to Christianity.
“Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it might be
true.” (12) Fallen man is allergic to the truth. “Too much truth
bewilders us.” (199, p. 63)
Arguments from Man’s Relation to Nature

20.
Pascal uses the “de-divinization” of nature by modern science
(compare with the pagan divinization of nature as a well-
ordered whole exhibiting divine purpose or reason) to lend
rational support–albeit of a negative sort–for faith. Nature
exhibits divine power but it does so by concealing divine
purpose; it affords us no sense of measure or order in terms of
which we can orient ourselves.
21.
The modern doctrine of nature supplies a rationale for faith
because it presents a God made utterly remote by his absence in
nature and thus underscores the wretchedness of man. That is,
modern science (mathematical physics, mechanics, “the
machine”) with its conceptions of infinity (the infinitely large
and the infinitely small, etc.) evinces the Deus absconditus, the
hidden God, by presenting a universe devoid of divinity. God is
intimated by his absence, by the need for God. “Nature points
everywhere to a God who has been lost, both within man and
without, and to a corrupt nature.” (471) “Nature has nothing to
offer me that does not give rise to doubt and anxiety.” (429)
God is present in nature, but He is present (paradoxically) as
the absent (or hidden) God. We find in nature not so much
evidences as haunting intimations.
22.
Man’s relation to nature is one of disproportion,
incommensurability, disorientation. “The disproportion of
man.” (199, pp. 59-65) He has no way of finding his place by
reference to nature (unlike the classical cosmos), which
however is the only thing he naturally seems to know. “What is
a man in the infinite?” (p. 60) “Equally incapable of seeing the
nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he
is engulfed.” (61) Compared with the vastness of nature, he is
nothing; compared with the infinitesimal of nature, he seems
infinite. He is in the middle between extremes, which, however,
he cannot grasp. “Two infinites.” (41, 723) He cannot find any

proper mean between extremes, any stability between beast and
god, angel and animal.
23.
The Cartesian plan of establishing a firm foundation on which
to build a science that can comprehend nature and encompass it
in the mind is groundless and deluded. What science teaches
rather is that nature eludes our grasp. Modern science is a
Tower of Babel. “We burn with desire to find a firm footing, an
ultimate, lasting base on which to build a tower rising up to
infinity, but our whole foundation cracks and the earth opens up
into the depths of the abyss.” (199, p. 63)
24.
Cartesian philosophy attempts to rise from the singular “I” to
the universal “I,” a pure self-consciousness which would give
us direct access to universal and necessary truths. To the
contrary, our experience of “self-consciousness” reveals to us
the utter contingency and groundlessness of our being. “When I
consider the brief span of my life absorbed in the eternity which
comes before and after . . . the small space I occupy and which I
see swallowed up in the immensity of spaces of which I know
nothing and which know nothing of me, I take fright and am
amazed to see myself here rather than there; there is no reason
for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who
put me here? By whose command and act were this time and
place allotted to me?” (68) “Why have limits been set on my
knowledge, my height, my life, making it a hundred rather than
a thousand years? For what reason did nature make it so, and
choose this rather than that mean from the whole of infinity,
when there is no more reason to choose one rather than another,
as none is more attractive than another?” (194)
25.
Descartes and Pascal both start from the thinking self, the
reflective ego, in its felt sense of alienation from nature (the
nature of modern science). But they proceed in opposite
directions—Descartes, towards a universally valid and
unshakable foundation disclosed in and to reason, Pascal

towards the singular self (cf. Augustine) in its groundlessness,
its inconceivability to itself.
Arguments from Human Nature and Society
26.
The human condition is not a natural unity of contrasting
elements or a true whole (the natural unity has been lost) but an
oscillation between them, a dialectical instability. The human
condition is thus manic-depressive or bipolar, so to say:
alternating between self-exaltation and self-abasement, pride
and despair, without any ability to find a natural mean between
the extremes, or a proper integration of dignity and humility.
27.
Philosophical schools generally base themselves on one side of
this oscillation or another: for example, man as a kind of god,
or man as an animal.
28.
The human condition is one of relativity and fluctuation; there
is no stabilizing natural order; its real “foundation” is custom
and tradition, in which arbitrariness and violence have been
sanctified and rendered lawful by time immemorial. “Custom is
our nature.” (419)
29.
The same lack of rational or natural foundation is evinced with
respect to society. Pascal shows that justice and order rest upon
weakness, concupiscence, and vanity, not on reason or nature in
the classical teleological sense. Or better, he shows in society
too the irrational foundations of reason, the chaotic origins of
order, the unjust origins of justice. “Three degrees of latitude
upset the whole of jurisprudence and one meridian determines
what is true.” (60, p. 16) “The truth about usurpation must not
be made apparent; it came about originally without reason and
has become reasonable. We must see that it is regarded as
authentic and eternal, and its origins must be hidden if we do
not want it soon to end. ” (p. 17) “As men could not make might

obey right, they have made right obey might. As they could
not fortify justify they have justified force, so that might and
right live together and peace reigns, the sovereign good.” (81)
30.
Thus, for example, human concupiscence gives rise to the most
remarkable systems of justice and charity. (118, 210-211) Might
gives rise to right. (51, 60)
31.
Human power is in fact powerlessness, yet man’s very
powerlessness gives rise to a powerful order, made all the more
so for being based on human weakness. “The greatest and most
important thing in the world is founded on weakness.” (26)
32.
Man’s greatness and humiliation are constantly mingled in
every dimension of his being. This combination of opposites is
the key to decipher every manifestation of human nature.
Arguments from Revelation
33.
On the other hand, human self-knowledge is paralyzed without
the aid of revelation. Specifically, the “dogma” or revealed
truth of original sin is required for man to make sense of his
condition. “What could be more contrary to the rules of our
miserable justice than the eternal damnation of a child,
incapable of will, for an act of which he seems to have so little
part that it was actually committed 6000 years before he
existed? Certainly nothing jolts us more rudely than this
doctrine [of original sin], and yet but for this mystery, the most
incomprehensible of all, we should remain incomprehensible to
ourselves.” (131, p. 36) And then of course also the revelation
of Christ. “Not only do we know God through Jesus Christ, but
we only know ourselves through Jesus Christ.” (417)
34.
The two key elements of Christianity are the depravity of man
(or the corruption of nature) and the possibility of redemption

in Jesus Christ.
35.
Christ is above all the mediator, who bridges the gap between
the hidden God and man. The only hope for man lies in God’s
becoming man so as to lead man to God.
36.
There has only been one real religion since the beginning of the
world acknowledged by all man, according to Pascal. Thus
Christ makes sense of history. A rational argument for
Christianity is that is provides a framework to make sense of all
other religions, schools (e.g., skeptics and dogmatists), and
doctrines. “All contradictions are reconciled in Christ.”
37.
Borrowing a Kierkegaardian distinction, one might say that
Pascal’s Christianity is reflective, not immediate: he shows that
Christianity both explains and resolves the contradictions in the
human condition philosophically. He shows that Christianity is
anthropologically true, that Christianity knows the human heart.
38.
By the same token, one might say that Pascal’s defense of
Christianity is “literary”: Scripture presents a mythical
narrative, a story which can make sense of our condition if we
place ourselves in it—if we accept the place allotted to us in the
story—if, that is, we take the story for real (though sacred)
history.
39.
Pascal’s defense of Christianity is generally regarded as perhaps
the most powerful of a non-theologian of all times, to be placed
alongside Augustine's Confessions, for example, or anything
Kierkegaard wrote. What gives it its power is precisely its non-
theological, but rather anthropological, approach, as an analysis
of the human condition. He tries to show that without Christ
the mediator human existence is hopelessly contradictory and

miserable, with Christ, though, it is made whole. Of course,
this argument cannot actually produce conviction, but only
incline and dispose. And it achieves its effect by making us
more miserable, at least in the short term; he gives new meaning
to the proposition of the Greek tragedians, to know is to suffer.
In his case, this has a Socratic dimension to it: self-knowledge
is suffering.
Pascalian Elaborations
Reason and the Heart
40.
Pascal uses a reasoned analysis of the human condition to
demonstrate the irrationality of (fallen) human nature, the
unnerving relativity and contingency of human existence,
including the irreducible arbitrariness of human life (35, e.g.,
the choice of a vocation), of human customs, and of human
justice and order.
41.
Pascal uses reason to demonstrate the limits of reason; uses
reason to demonstrate the necessity of reason’s going beyond
reason. “There is nothing so consistent with reason as this
denial of reason.” (182)
42.
He uses reason to humble if not humiliate reason–to show its
radical powerlessness in terms of ultimates. The most radical
limit of reason is that it rests on that which is beyond its ken. It
cannot demonstrate its basic principles, like the axioms that
Descartes sought to prove through clarity and distinctness. The
very truths that make reason itself possible (those of logic and
mathematics, for example) must be known non-rationally, by the
heart or by instinct. It cannot know or establish its own
foundations. “Instinct, Reason. We have an incapability for
proving anything which no amount of dogmatism can overcome.
We have an idea of truth which no amount of skepticism can
overcome.” (406)

43.
“The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.”
(423)
44.
The heart is not something other than knowledge compared with
reason, but (in part) another kind of knowledge which disputes
the sovereignty of reason in its own domain (which is that of
knowledge).
45.
More precisely, the heart is partly a matter of knowledge and
partly a matter of belief; both are evidently rooted in instinct.
That is, I know certain things are true instinctively, such as that
I am awake or that “either A or not-A, there is no third.” If I
believe in the true and living God, it is because He inclines my
heart thus with His grace. But I also have a capacity to believe
things that may be imaginary–thus by instinct I can believe
what is false too. Self-deception is also an “instinct.”
46.
Certain things are known by the heart but the heart is not
infallibly true. Thus the heart, too, evinces the fallenness of
man, nor can it do without reason.
47.
Faith is a matter of the heart (inclined by grace to believe) not
reason, but reason can still dispose the heart towards the
possibility of or desire for faith. “It is the heart that perceives
God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by
the heart, not by the reason.” (424)
Death, Desire, and Self-Deception
48.
The ultimate, fundamental stumbling-block in human existence
is mortality, the certainty of death and the uncertainty of what it

means (eternal nothingness? eternal wretchedness?). (133, 434)
49.
The question of death is thus the central problem of existence,
whether it is denied and evaded (itself a kind of proof) or
confronted in the search for God and faith.
50.
According to Pascal, man has a limited capacity for truth,
especially for self-knowledge. He cannot bear the truth for very
long, for example the misery of human mortality, and must hide
it from himself. Man is by nature a self-deceiving animal. Self-
deception is the natural condition of fallen man.
51.
Hence the need for diversion, the seductions of vanity, the
allure of games, of gambling, romance, the hunt, etc.
52.
Man is essentially a creature of the imagination, in the thrall of
desire or concupiscence (“Cleopatra’s nose”). Much of his
world is essentially a phantasm. Most of his existence is
expended in inventing ways to evade the reality of existence.
53.
We are diverted only to the degree we desire, and we desire
only so long as we can. Desire is the capacity to be absorbed in
objects of the imagination, like Cleopatra’s nose. Desire is thus
essentially a game, just as games satisfy desire, because the
point of desire is not to satisfy itself definitively but to prolong
itself, that is, to delay and postpone the termination of desire.
The problem of desire is to keep on desiring. “We prefer the
hunt to the capture.” (136, p. 38)
54.
Man desires in order to avoid the truth of existence—which is
the vanity of desire. Desire is a strategy by which human beings
postpone or delay any encounter with their mortality.
55.

Desire thus aims at its own temporization. It is in love with the
image, the imagination, as such. The real object of desire is not
the object of desire as such, but desire itself; desire seeks to
possess not so much its stipulated object as the desire for it.
The object of desire is like the goal post in a game; it serves as
a pretext or condition for game, but in itself is insignificant.
What is important in a game is not the moment the ball goes
through the hoop but everything leading up to that point. But
without that point being set up, there would be no game. “Only
the contest appeals to us, not the victory.” (773)
56.
But since termination is inevitable nonetheless, it must be
constantly on the lookout for new objects, new games.
57.
The mortal threat that hangs over all desire is the failure of
belief, the loss of the capacity, the confidence for desire–
boredom. Boredom is most terrifying when it threatens to reveal
the absurdity of desire and thus to make it impossible to desire,
impossible to lose oneself in the imagination. Boredom is the
despair of desire, its paralysis. Desire is always engaged in a
running battle against its own mortality.
58.
Desire is thus above all a desire for desire; its greatest fear is
not being able to desire. The inability to desire—as opposed to
the emancipation from concupiscence by Christ—would be a
mortal depression.
Write a one page essay (300 words) explaining what "ideology"
is according to Marx in The German Ideology, and what his
main argument about it is in the same book.
Write a short essay (one page double-spaced or 300 words) on
Pascal: Pick what strikes you as one of his most meaningful,

distinctively Pascalian, and paradoxical thoughts--selection is
up to you.
Such as for example his claim in a discussion of habit and
nature that "I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a
first habit, just as habit is a second nature." (# 126, p. 32).
[You may write on this is you want.]
I don't insist that it has to be so expressly paradoxical as this
but that might make it easier for you if you think you can
explain the paradox. But it should be a passage that raises a
problem, a dilemma or conundrum in the nature of man, Pascal's
general theme.
Pascal is full of such paradoxes, not surprisingly since for him
man is a contradiction, a bundle of connected opposites
reflecting his greatness and wretchedness.
1/6/2020 Sexuality | Keywords for African American Studies
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studies/essay/sexuality/ 1/6
Keywords for African American Studies
Keywords for African American Studies
SEXUALITY
BOOK KEYWORDS FOR AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES
BY MARLON M. BAILEY, L. H. STALLINGS
“Sexuality,” the word and concept, emerges out of discourses
that have produced both problematic and useful
ways to understand black sexuality in all its complexities,
contradictions, and expansiveness. In its most
common understanding, sexuality is the quality of being sexual

or possessing sex; it is understood as what one
does in terms of sex acts and practices and who one is, often
(inadequately) defined as heterosexual,
homosexual, or bisexual (Burgett 2007). Sexuality can be best
understood, conceptually, as a category that
entails desire, pleasure, practice, and more that interact with
each other in complicated and often
contradictory ways. Sexuality has also been used to denote sex
assignment or male- versus- female differences,
largely on the basis of genital and secondary sex characteristics
and reproductive functions. It is a concept that
has been applicable to the social organization and formation of
human and nonhumans alike.
In a December 2012 essay in the Chronicle Review of the
Chronicle of Higher Education, titled “Who’s Afraid
of Black Sexuality?,” the writer Stacey Patton suggests that for
a long time, scholars, including black scholars,
have avoided mentioning the word “sex,” let alone discussing it
openly. Patton goes on to say that black sex
was particularly fraught because it invoked too many taboos:
stereotypes and caricatures of “black Hottentots”
with freakish feminine proportions; asexual mammies or
lascivious Jezebels; and hypersexual black men
lusting after white women. This has been compounded by the
painful history of slavery, rape, and lynching
and the panoply of ways in which black bodies have been
subjected to and victimized by brutal forms of sexual
violence and abuse by both state and nonstate actors in the U.S.
Further, Patton explains in her essay that,
conversely, in recent years, some black scholars from a number
of disciplines have begun to “break the silence”
and conspicuously engage issues around sexuality confronting
black communities. This engagement is not just
focused on the violence, oppression, and trauma; rather, these
scholars examine and highlight eroticism,

sexual desire, pleasure, and practice, including nonnormative
sexual subjects and community formations. A
summit on doctoral programs held at Northwestern University in
2012, titled “A Beautiful Struggle:
Transformative Black Studies in Shifting Political Landscapes,”
inspired Patton’s essay. This event sparked a
spirited discussion about sexuality studies that marks a pivotal
turn in the contemporary discourse on
sexuality in the field of African American studies and black
communities.
The etymology of “sexuality” is derived from the postclassical
Latin sexualitas. But the etymology reveals
nothing of the history of sexuality, which appears to be just as
discursively homogeneous as its linguistic
foundations. As documented by the French theorist Michel
Foucault’s (1978) three- volume treatise on the
history of sexuality, sexuality has been constructed by various
institutions over the past two centuries: medical
and scientific, judicial, religious, military, and economic. One
of the most fecund aspects of Foucault’s work is
his contention that sexuality is produced out of discourse
whereby sexual acts become associated with actual
human beings. Hence, the “sodomite” becoming the
“homosexual” is a modern phenomenon (Foucault
1978). But, while Foucault also highlights the double impetus of
power and pleasure embedded in Western
constructs of sexuality, the genealogies he relies on are derived
from Western regimes of knowledge. For black
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people, however, the formation of sexuality does not rest solely
on a foundation of Greco/Roman/European
histories of sexuality, the “objectivity” of the sciences, or
Christian dogma. African Americans may have
assimilated into such histories, but when resistance to a
universal experience of sexuality has been waged,
black people relied on the culture, language, and representations
produced in their own communities to
correct the gaps and errors produced by a history of sexuality.
According to the ever- changing B.E.D. (Black
English Dictionary), there are multiple terms that connote
sexuality, all of them heterogeneous and requiring
more context rather than a linear symmetrical history.
In addition, research on sexuality has compelled African
American studies to redefine and expand its premise
as an intellectual field foundationally situated as a linear,
unilateral project based on the biological and
sociological constructs of race and racialization. In many ways,
African American studies remains somewhat

ambivalent about sexuality, specifically because the discourses
surrounding it cannot be separated from
colonial and imperialist legacies. And although African
Americans live at the intersections of race, class, and
sexuality, ironically, scholarship on black sexuality in African
American studies has developed on two
contentious and disparate terrains that intend to define, control,
and represent discourses on black sexuality
in the field and in black culture and politics. Drawing from
black feminist and queer theories, some sexuality
scholars examine the historical forms of racialized sexual
oppression of black people and how black sexual
minorities are oppressed within and excluded from black
sociocultural institutions. Yet this productive
scholarship on sexuality has been suppressed and marginalized
in African American studies due, in part, to an
overcompensatory response to racist/white- supremacist
renderings of black people as sexually deviant. Too
often, on this side of the epistemological struggle, an
essentialist, race- based, cisgendered, and heterosexist
discourse of black sexuality dominates.
However, with the black political scientist Cathy J. Cohen’s
(2004) notion of “deviance as resistance,” it
seems that the most generative scholarship on black sexuality
that is also critical and contextual has been
produced by and from studies of minoritized communities and
cultures: those black sexual dissidents who are
oppressed within or excluded from black communities. Through
their ongoing contestation, the work of these
mostly black queer scholars constitutes Foucault’s notion of an
“insurrection of subjugated knowledges”
(1980, 81) in African American studies that uncovers deviant
sexual practices and advances an expansive
approach to studying black sexuality within its already- situated
contexts of race, gender, and class. It is this

movement in black sexuality studies— in academic, cultural,
and sociopolitical realms— that is most productive
and promising toward understanding and capturing the meaning
and role of sex and sexuality in the lives of
everyday black people.
Historically, from the very beginning of Western Manifest
Destiny, sexuality determined one’s moral
foundation, while morality determined one’s humanity. Thus,
any analysis of sexuality in African American
studies must begin with a discussion of freedom and liberation.
For better or worse, sexuality in African
American studies has consistently been used to determine the
depth and nature of black ontologies. It is, like
race, a measure of how one’s humanity is defined. Concepts of
self- determination within the Black Power
movement might be heralded as the significant intervention for
rethinking black sexuality, moving away from
white theories of hypersexual pathology, trauma, and abuse.
Robert Staples’s (1971) and Alvin Poussaint’s
(Phil Donahue Show 1980) early social science work was quite
simply about challenging these pathologies.
For example, the pioneering sociologist Staples once asked a
significant question about sexuality and black
America in a 1974 issue of Ebony magazine, one that still
haunts black people across the globe today: Has the
sexual revolution bypassed blacks? Staples may have been
comparing the lack of a visible civil rights
movement centered on sexuality or sexual identity to white
America’s historical sexual revolution, but the
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studies/works_cited/staples-robert/
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truth is more complicated since sexuality, including the study of
it, entails a revolution, rebellion, and
decolonization that would be illegible in white histories of
sexuality and sexual revolution. Since black people
across the globe continue to live under white supremacy,
African Americans’ sexual revolution is an ongoing
process that does not begin or end with the 1960s. However,
what does happen in the late 1960s is a stream of
thought that invokes debate about eroticism and sexuality in
discourses other than science, medicine, and
history.
Unlike any other keyword, “sexuality” demands both rational
and affective modalities to circumvent the
imperatives imposed by Western empire. The poet and
playwright Ntozake Shange asks, “So how do we speak
of our desires for each other to each other in a language where
our relationships to our bodies and desires lack
dignity as well as nuance?” (1992, xx). Shange’s question
eloquently sums up sexuality, its conflicts, its
possibilities, and its origins in African American studies. It also
implicates art and culture as important to
evolving discourses on black sexuality.
In African American communities, the genealogy of sexuality
has been theorized and engaged through the

critical/rational as well as the imaginative and affective. This
has meant that the most generative sites for
understanding sexuality have come from black feminist theories
and African American literary traditions. In
each of these sites, the topics of slavery, colonialism, and
imperialism have been deliberately taken up as
essential to sexuality, and they have done so in a manner that
sexology and Eurocentric theories of sexuality
have not commented on.
As the remnants of chattel slavery, scientific racism, and
eugenics continued to impact African American life,
sexuality continued to be an issue, especially in novels by
nineteenth- century black women writers, such as
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper in Iola Leroy, or, Shadows
Uplifted ([1892] 1988), Pauline Hopkins in
Contending Forces ([1899] 1969), and Harriet Jacobs in
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl ([1861] 1988).
By fictionalizing sexual topics such as chaste and virginal
womanhood, rape, miscegenation, and passing,
these texts, alongside conduct manuals written by black
ministers and preachers, captured the unaired
tensions surrounding the sexual trauma of black women during
chattel slavery and white anxiety about black
masculinity and hypersexuality in freedom. Male writers such as
W. E. B. Du Bois (1920) contributed other
theories, resulting in an early archive of black culture and
history linking sexual inquiries with a moral agenda
to rescue black women’s virtue from the clutches of white men
and black men’s masculinity from white
ideologies of deviance.
Later, Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible Man ([1947] 1995), John A. Williams’s
The Man Who Cried I Am (1967), Toni Morrison’s The Bluest
Eye ([1970] 2007), and Gayl Jones’s

Corregidora ([1975] 1986) and Eva’s Man ([1976] 1987)
provided daring perspectives on race and gender,
observing sexuality as a distinct category that could shift
critical conversations about race and black humanity.
James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room ([1956] 2001) and Another
Country ([1962] 1993) eventually broached
questions of sexual identity to move beyond concerns about
proper heterosexuality and productive black
families. The 1970s ushered in a new era of critical inquiries
and excavation of black sexuality in which critics
read not only for race but for gender and sexuality as well. It is
no coincidence that the recovery of out- of- print
nineteenth- century slave narratives and novels coincided with
the Black Women Writers Renaissance and the
women’s representations of sexuality in their work. Likewise,
the social and political discourse of an
emasculating matriarch, fueled, in part, by the Moynihan Report
(1965), bolstered more work on black
sexuality from Robert Staples, who authored The Black Woman
in America: Sex, Marriage, Family (1973).
This book, as well as others, built on the critical tradition left
by Du Bois’s early questions that linked black
studies/works_cited/shange-ntozake-se/
studies/works_cited/harper-frances-ellen-watkins/
studies/works_cited/hopkins-pauline-e/
studies/works_cited/jacobs-harriet-a/
studies/works_cited/du-bois-w-se-6/
studies/works_cited/ellison-ralph/

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