Radical Immanence
The Philosophy of Marguerite Young
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Radical Immanence
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Narrated by:
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Virtual Voice
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By:
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Coral Russell
This title uses virtual voice narration
Virtual voice is computer-generated narration for audiobooks.
When the first edition of this book appeared under the title And: The Philosophy of Marguerite Young, it made a single, sustained argument: that Miss MacIntosh, My Darling by Marguerite Young is not a novel that contains philosophical ideas but a philosophical system that chose fiction as its only honest form. That argument has not changed. What has changed is the understanding of how large the system actually is.
The first edition identified five load-bearing pillars.
The plural self. Illusion as primary. Grief as permanent weather. The witness has an ethical stance. Recursive construction
as the only form of integrity the system allows.
Those five pillars are still here, still load-bearing, still as necessary as they were when the book first made the case for them. But since that edition, continued reading, continued thinking, and continued conversation with the thinkers Young anticipated and surpassed have made clear that the structure has more rooms than the original survey found. Five more pillars have become visible.
The second edition is built to hold all ten.
The new title requires explanation, because titles are arguments and this one is a precise one.
Immanence is the philosophical term for what is present within rather than transcendent beyond. It is the opposite of the move that most philosophical and religious systems make when they encounter the difficulty of existence: the move upward, outward, beyond, toward the foundation that does not shift, the ground that holds still, the truth that exists outside the flux and can therefore anchor it. Young refuses that move at every level of her system. There is no transcendent ground in Miss MacIntosh, My Darling by Marguerite Young. There is no outside to which Vera can appeal, no stable
reality beneath Catherine's opium world, no solid Miss MacIntosh underneath the wig.
Everything that exists, exists here, in the immanent world, in the middle of the becoming, in the room with the contradiction.
Radical is the modifier that specifies how far the immanence goes. A moderate immanence might acknowledge that most of what we know is available within experience while leaving open the possibility of some transcendent anchor, some
bedrock that holds even if we cannot fully access it. Young's immanence is not moderate. It goes all the way down. The immanence is the whole of it. What is here is what there is, and what is here is plural, constructed, grief-saturated, and alive in ways that the search for transcendence has always prevented us from fully seeing.
This is not nihilism. The first edition was careful about this and the second edition is equally careful. The refusal of transcendence is not the refusal of meaning. It is the insistence that meaning is made here, in the immanent world, by plural selves building provisional structures with the full knowledge that the structures are provisional. That is a harder and more honest account of meaning than any transcendent guarantee could provide. Young understood this. She built 1,198 pages of demonstration of it.
What the Five New Pillars Are
The first edition ended with a promise implicit in its structure: that Young's system was larger than five pillars, that the recursive quality of the novel meant that each return to it would find more than the previous pass had found. The five new pillars are the result of returning.
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