Interview with Noga Arikha (2022-2023 Writer in Residence)
An Interview with Noga Arikha
By David A. Griffith
Affiliated Faculty, Health, Humanities, and Society
Noga Arikha was the 2022-23 Storozinski Writer-in-Residence at the John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values at Notre Dame. She is a philosopher and historian of ideas. She works as a science humanist, fostering dialogues between neuroscientists, psychologists, clinicians, social scientists, humanists and artists in order to bring to a general audience accessible accounts that analyze the origins of our deepest concerns about our embodied, feeling and thinking selves. Always concerned with the relation between mind and body, she initially focused for her PhD on life sciences in early modern Europe, but her interests and writings encompass a broad range of periods, cultures and disciplines.
Her latest book, The Ceiling Outside: The Science and Experience of the Disrupted Mind, is an exploration of brain, self, dementia and medicine based on the stories of neuropsychiatric patients, published by Basic Books (UK and US) in Spring 2022.
She has just completed a biography of anthropologist Franz Boas for the “Jewish Lives” series of Yale University Press, due out in 2025.
Her critically acclaimed first book, Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours, published in the U.S. by Ecco (HarperCollins) and in Italy by Bompiani, was a New York Times Review Editor’s Choice for July 2007 and one of the Washington Post Best Nonfiction Books for 2007. Her second book, a biography of Lucien Bonaparte co-authored with Marcello Simonetta, was Napoleon and the Rebel: A Story of Brotherhood, Passion, and Power, published in the US/UK by Palgrave Macmillan and in Italy by Bompiani.
She is a Visiting Fellow at the School of Transnational Governance at the European University Institute in Florence. She is also an Associate Fellow of the Warburg Institute (London), an Honorary Fellow of the Center for the Politics of Feelings, and a Research Associate at the Institut Jean Nicod of the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris).
I sat down with Noga in January of 2024 and asked if she would reflect on her residency at Notre Dame.
Dave Grifith: Good morning, Noga, it's a pleasure to talk with you about your most recent book, The Ceiling Outside, and the work you did during your residency at Notre Dame in 2023.
First off, I’m wondering what drew you, or what draws you, to the work of the Reilly Center? For those who aren’t familiar with its mission, the Reilly Center offers graduate and undergraduate programs focusing on fostering scholarly conversation at the intersections between the humanities, social sciences, and medicine. Could you speak to how your work fits within or speaks to that kind of mission?
Noga Arikha: Well, first of all, I have to say I had a wonderful, stimulating two weeks there. I felt spoiled. I was impressed with the students. And the interactions were all stimulating.
It was a chance to actually dig into this work I find so urgently important, of working across the disciplines. I call myself a “science humanist,” in that I try to translate the research that is going on in the sciences, especially the mind sciences, into human or humanistic language.
What interests me about neuroscience and experimental psychology – research that often tends to remain within its own academic ambit – is that it can help us understand what we are made of. Any area of research, in fact, becomes more fertile if it's planted in another terrain, but within academia, indeed within most circles, this is hardly ever done. But it needs to happen, and the Reilly Center fostered precisely these kinds of conversations. And specifically within academic circles, I think we need to think about how to transfer these kinds of interdisciplinary exchanges into the ‘real world,’ - I tried to do that in my latest book, The Ceiling Outside.
I’m now beginning to do this interdisciplinary work here [in Italy] with the political world. I want to start transferring a lot of the insights we have about emotions, and about the embodiment of self, into the terrain of political activism, which I'm getting involved with here in Florence at the European University Institute. People who are working in politics usually have no training in psychology or the sciences of mind, even though they urgently need to understand human nature, and how central emotions are to everything we are.
DG: You mentioned when you were in residence at Notre Dame that your most recent book The Ceiling Outside was a bit of a departure for you in terms of genre or mode. You had been writing primarily as a scholar–not to say that this book isn't scholarly, but it also brings your own personal experience to bear as well which is not always the case of course with a scholarly monograph–so could you speak a little bit to to your experience writing The Ceiling Outside and your experience bringing that book to scholarly audiences and also to the public.
NA: Well, I stopped writing academically very shortly after my PhD. I’ve never wanted to write for a small audience because, precisely, it’s important to try to have an impact beyond academic spheres, and also to foster interdisciplinarity in a real way.
So, [The Ceiling Outside] is and isn’t a departure. The book did start off based on clinical examinations of patients of neuropsychiatry that I was able to witness for a year and a half, at a French hospital–[the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris]. I wanted to look at the neurological, neuropsychiatric events up close. I was given entry into a very intimate setting, and then I chose a few patients whose stories were most relevant to my concerns. I tried to understand their predicaments through the cutting-edge science that is developing rapidly within the neurosciences and psychology about the embodied sense of self.
And then, while I was writing, I realized my own mother was developing dementia, so [the book] ended up being a memoir. So, in a sense, yes, that was new. I never thought I would be able to write in the first person, but, in the end, it worked. It's a very satisfying way of writing, I have to say.
DG: Could you say more about that sense of satisfaction? That's an emotion we don't always associate with our work as writers. I mean, when we get recognized or honored for our writing that is very satisfying, but could you speak on this specific quality of this sense of satisfaction for you?
NA: Well, I think writing about one's own experience is a great way to transcend the self. By going deep into the self you transcend it; you universalize experience, and that's satisfying because, in a way, it reframes you in a much more humble way.
DG: I think that was one of the things that was so useful for me as a teacher bringing you into my classroom. It was an amazing experience for those students, many of whom are thinking of studying medicine, going into laboratory science, or working in the business side of healthcare. For them to be able to hear that you can transcend the self through writing about yourself is an experience they probably haven’t had as writers yet, or didn’t know that that was possible. So I just want to thank you again for bringing that perspective to them.
I wonder if you could reflect on the ways your work as an investigator, as a scholar, as a teacher–however you would describe the work that you're doing now–has shifted now that you are working with political scientists and working squarely within the political realm?
NA: Yes, well, now I’ve joined the European University Institute here in Florence and joined one of its departments, the School of Transnational Governance, which a year ago launched a big project called the Democratic Odyssey, to create a permanent citizens’ assembly in the European Union.
As a result I’m now frequenting policy leaders, executives, EU policy people– rather a different world from that to which I’ve been used to, of people in the arts, sciences and humanities, of writers and journalists. These are people who are actually trying to change things on the ground, from the bottom up, and I find that really interesting, and also quite humbling.
And I realize that people like us, who are primarily bookish, who've been trying to think through ideas in a theoretical way, shouldn't take for granted that the work we're doing could, can, and should have some kind of impact in the world of political affairs because it is in such disarray–we need to start doing something about it.
Now I’m trying to raise funds to create a whole program that is going to be associated with the Democratic Odyssey, and that I'm calling “Emotions in Democracy” (EID) to start cutting- edge research: What is the feeling, embodied self in political terms? And how does that research help us understand how the feeling animals that we are function and interact politically? The centrality of emotions to our nature, indeed the mind sciences generally, are not part of the training in politics or policy. And yet such a synergy is clearly necessary. It's an ambitious project, which would feed into EU institutions.
DG: Could you tell me more about the book you just finished on Franz Boas?
NA: Yes - and it’s relevant politically, actually. I was commissioned to write a life of Franz Boas for the “Jewish Lives” series of Yale University Press. I'm not an anthropologist, but I realized that as soon as we study ourselves we are engaging in a kind of anthropology, just by dint of taking a step away.
I have been slowly working on this on and off, for the past few years, and finally, with the deadline approaching, I crammed like a student over the past two months.
Franz Boas was an extremely important and likable figure. He emigrated from Germany to America in the 1880s. He was a secular Jew who created the first chair of Anthropology in America at Columbia University. He's the one who built very solid arguments against biological racialism, which was being applied to America but then also to Nazi Germany. He became a major activist, especially from the First World War onwards. His fieldwork was with the First Nations of the Pacific Northwest, in British Columbia. He and his colleagues did crucial work to preserve their cultures, cataloguing the languages, myths, stories and artifacts.
His pupils were very well-known anthropologists–Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Edward Sapir, Alfred Kroeber - and he was connected with the anthropologists of the time throughout Europe. So he's a massive figure. As it happens, he was also a very likable man, and an ethical person. He really acted on his own beliefs, as a dedicated activist against racism, and against eugenics, which was exported to Germany from America–we shouldn't forget that.
DG: What drew you to the Franz Boas project?
NA: I wasn't drawn to it, insofar as it was a commission I was offered - and I said Yes, only with a vague idea of who Boas was. But now I realize that there's a continuity between psychology and anthropology. Anthropology can be a sort of comparative psychology, and it's a way of also looking at the interplay between universal biological givens and specific cultural conditioning: the question I find most compelling now is how far down does top down go? That question is connected to what anthropologists call the psychic unity of mankind: How do you have diversity and unity at the same time?
And that's a question that is being debated now in all sorts of ways by cognitive psychologists, as well as anthropology.
DG: What do you feel your book is bringing to the conversation around Boas that perhaps other books have not?
NA: Well, it is a kind of synthesis of what has already been written. The series is for the general public, so this book brings together what we know already [about Boas] and shows how important his activism is, and also how strong and relevant his ideas and arguments are today. If people know him at all, they may have a general sense of who he is, and that he was important, but few people know why. Some claim that he was mostly important as a teacher, given the renown of his students - but I actually quoted a lot from his texts, and from some of the diaries, as well as from some of his (enormous) correspondence. I also focus on the ideas he brings from Germany, from the Enlightenment, and how these get translated into an American context.
DG: I just have one last question. Thinking generally about places like the Reilly Center here at Notre Dame that are creating space for interdisciplinary work, could you reflect on why that work is so necessary. “Interdisciplinary” is very much a buzzword within Academia, but from a practical standpoint you are a prime example of the vitality of that sort of work so I wondered if you could speak to that.
NA: I admit I am free to move around topics because I don't have an academic job. I think it’s much harder to do this within academic structures, given the requirements of the academic world. I can only do this because I'm outside the system.
And I see it again with political scientists: as I mentioned before, within their fields there is no training in scientific psychology, and yet it would seem necessary. The same goes with the psychologists who maybe don't have training in philosophy, or in the humanities, which are often ignorant of the sciences.
The thing is how do you do it practically? I have no idea. Because when you need to specialize you dig deep into something. You actually, by definition, are erecting walls. Now, if you can't undo the walls, maybe you can try to open windows, but in order to open the right window in the right place you need to know something about what's happening on the other side, and that's what we need to start doing.
We need to start having information percolating between the walls: to say, okay, I'm working on this and you need to know about this in order to be able to work on this completely different thing.
The world order is such that it's not happening. People talk about it but it can't happen in practical terms. And the problem is that whenever [interdisciplinary work] does happen it becomes another topic - like medical humanities, for instance, which has produced excellent work, but has also become another specialism. When we say “the literature of…”, or “in the field”, we are reinstating barriers.
It would be good to stop thinking about publications as a make or break for your career. It’s clear that the production of specialized knowledge is, in a sense, a privilege, especially in this world [of academia].
But most people are trying to just earn a living. I live in a country, Italy, where there are not many readers; books are only spoken about in some small circles, and it's actually quite sobering to realize that, and ask oneself what it is that this work–my work–is bringing to the world.
Let's have a sense of urgency and reality. Let’s step out of this cloistered academic system, and take an anthropological perspective on what we’re doing. Let’s see what its value is, ask what matters to you as an interconnected, intersubjective being. And then, keeping that in perspective, determine what you're going to do, not for the sake of academia, but for the sake of your own meaning, and meaning in your own life.
DG: Beautifully put. Thank you so much for sharing those insights with us and thank you again for joining us at Notre Dame as the the first writer and residence in the Reilly Center.
NA: I feel honored. Thank you so much. I really felt spoiled, and it was so enriching. I'd love to come back.