For Pleshette

For Pleshette Kas Saghafi philoSOPHIA, Volume 7, Number 1, Winter 2017, pp. 133-136 (Article) Published by State University of New York Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/phi.2017.0010 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/660564 Access provided by University Libraries of the University of Memphis (10 Jun 2017 06:34 GMT) For Pleshette Kas Saghafi P. P. That’s what I called her. P. That’s what I said day and night. I called her name. And I have been calling her name ever since. I am here before you today to say a few words in Pleshette’s honor. For me, it is indecent to talk about her rather than to speak to her. However, if I did have to speak about her, as much as it would pain me to do so in her absence, I would want to say a few words about her name (her first name and last name). Her name, its spelling, its pronunciation, its composition and its etymology, its violation of orthographic rules (the capital D, the small e and the capital A with no space between them) was always a topic of conversation and queries wherever she went. She and her family pronounced her name this way: Pleshette DeArmitt. Her first name was given to her by her father, a great admirer of the actress Suzanne Pleshette. Her father, whose apparently French Huguenot ancestors had somehow made their way to central Pennsylvania, the second oldest state of the United States, believed that he was giving his daughter a French name, whereas it turns out that Suzanne Pleshette had an Eastern European Jewish background and the name was to have been a variation of a name in Hebrew. This past year my fateful travels led me to her home state of Pennsylvania, allowing me to discover information that Pleshette never had and was always in search of. 133 P. The P that she wanted in the spelling of our child Seraphine’s name rather than an f. The very name that I saw for the first time in the byline of an article in Le Monde during the year that the two of us were in Paris on a fellowship. An article written by Sérafine (avec an f), believe it or not, Bedarrida. I swear. I have the cutout of the article somewhere. P. The letter that our daughter’s middle name begins with. Pari. A name Pleshette chose. A Persian word meaning “fairy” adopted into the English language but spelled and pronounced differently. Pari sounds like the French pronunciation of the city her mother loved. It is also the word that the philosopher Pascal made famous: pari de Pascal, or Pascal’s wager, the wager that it’s worthwhile to believe even in the absence of proof, the wager that without hesitation one has to make, the wager that as a forty-year-old woman, despite what the doctors suggested, P made to have a child. P for “like two peas in a pod.” That’s how people described us. We were so incredibly close that more than half of my being has been lost. P is for “Plush,” “Pippy,” “Poopskaya,” and numerous other P-names that I called her over the years. I used to joke that they belonged to an open chain of “nonsynonymous substitutions.” When I summoned enough strength to speak at her memorial service right after she so unexpectedly, so suddenly, left me, I foreswore making any personal statements in front of my colleagues, some of whom were present. I didn’t say a word about how long I had been with her, about having known her for twentyeight years, about being married to her for twenty-five years, about having attended the same universities with her as an undergraduate and a graduate student, about having held three consecutive academic positions at the same institutions with her. This was because I was continuing to keep private what a conservative academy worried about—the fusion of identities of academic couples, especially when starting out. It was only much later in our life together that we took the plunge to partake in collaborative work, something we had always wanted to do. This was what we had been doing, in a way, all along, but especially toward the end, working on a book project and meeting daily to translate an almightily daunting text. P for “path,” the very unpopular path that we decided to take as a young couple, a decision that we mutually made, to say no to, and leave, our families, and to pursue what must have seemed like a crazy plan. 134  philoSophia P for Pittsburgh. That’s where she was from. But you never wanted to mention that. She hated Pittsburgh with all her might. P for “pond,” the other side of the pond, where judgment has been passed on our relationship after P’s departure, using the stupid language of “being enmeshed,” “insufficiently independent,” and “too intertwined.” Apparently, we are okay with theoretically dismantling the subject, but culturally and socially we still hold on to the autonomous, independent, self-sufficient ipse. P. How to say something about P, the love of my life, my best friend? How to say it anywhere but especially in a country and within a culture where baring one’s soul is viewed with suspicion, where outward expressions and public displays of emotion are not only uncommon but the sole preserve of Americans? I have a very delicate tightrope to walk, somewhere between discreetly saying enough about her yet not saying too much. At an event like this, it would be wise to briefly tell heart-warming stories, reminisce about charming personality traits, and recount anecdotes adopting a light-hearted approach. I am not able to do that. To be absolutely selfcontained would be to betray my relationship with and love for Pleshette. So, at the risk of appearing too emotional or demonstrative, too Persian even, the Persian who compared to the brave Greek man was accused by the Greeks of being effeminate (and as we know, it was the feminine that bore the pathos of mourning—this issue, of course, is not too irrelevant to this week’s topic of “Difference and Gender”), I have not been able to pretend to be stoic and sober about an occurrence that will have wounded me forever —after all, that’s what trauma is. I will try to spare you clichés and platitudes, and I will certainly not do what is often done about women—to extol their virtues as a mother. Even though Pleshette was a great mother, totally devoted to our daughter, to the daughter she always wanted, she was also a great academic (thinker, writer, teacher, administrator, mentor) who wholeheartedly believed that to be a good mother to her daughter she also had to be a role model for her, showing her the difficulty of the balance between life and work. She was effervescence and exuberance itself; she was vibrant, full of good humor and practical wisdom. She combined incisive psychological insight with a mind as sharp as a laser. She could never bring herself to respect the law of the father, and could be at times irreverent, but she always had a lightness about her. Her concern was always for the other. I never ceased to marvel For Pleshette  135 with amazement how she put everyone at ease by her natural warmth, often by placing her hand on their shoulder. How to say something to P, my love? P—I never got to say goodbye to you, to hold you, to kiss you, to touch your porcelain skin. You were brutally taken away from me. . . . P, whose light illuminated, guided, and gave direction to my life, was from elsewhere. Pleshette was a meteor. Like a kind of rainbow that appears in the air, a meteor that becomes luminous upon entry into the earth’s atmosphere, but only very briefly, and whose life, like life itself, will have been too short.1 We got to see only a glimmer of what P was capable of. As she told me not too long ago, she could sense that she was getting better and better in her work and wanted to write and write and write. I always knew her potential and made a point of telling her how smart she was. If only her life had been easier. She had hardly started. —University of Memphis Note 1. These remarks were presented preceding Ewa Ziarek’s keynote paper on the first day of the 2016 London Graduate School Summer Academy on June 27. I am very grateful to the organizers of the Summer Academy, professors Tina Chanter and Simon Morgan Wortham, for inaugurating this Pleshette DeArmitt Memorial Lecture. The allusions to phrases or notions from Derrida’s work may be familiar to some. I plan to write a book entitled Meteor, dedicated to Pleshette. 136  philoSophia