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Chapter Page
Introduction ix
I A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women
A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women 3
Balloon Magic 19
My Louise Bourgeois 25
Anselm Kiefer: The Truth Is Always Gray 34
Mapplethorpe/Almodóvar: Points and Counterpoints 40
Wim Wenders's Pina: Dancing for Dance 46
Much Ado About Hairdos 52
Sontag on Smut: Fifty Years Later 61
"No Competition" 79
The Writing Self and the Psychiatric Patient 96
Inside the Room 118
II The Delusions of Certainty
III What are We?: Lectures on the Human Condition
Borderlands: First, Second, and Third Person Adventures in Crossing Disciplines 343
Becoming Others 367
Why One Story and Not Another? 382
I Wept for Four Years and When I Stopped I Was Blind 400
Suicide and the Drama of Self-Consciousness 416
Subjunctive Flights: Thinking Through the Embodied Reality of Imaginary Worlds 434
Remembering in Art: The Horizontal and the Vertical 452
Philosophy Matters in Brain Matters 473
Kierkegaard's Pseudonyms and the Truths of Fiction 487
Notes 507
Author's Previously Published Essays 551

A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don’t start measuring her limbs. We love with our desires-although everything has been done to try and apply a canon even to love.1

-Pablo Picasso

The important thing is first of all to have a real love for the visible world that lies outside ourselves as well as to know the deep secret of what goes on within ourselves. For the visible world in combination with our inner selves provides the realm where we may seek infinitely for the individuality of our own souls.2

-Max Beckmann

Maybe in that earlier phase I was painting the woman in me. Art isn’t a wholly masculine occupation, you know. I’m aware that some critics would take this to be an admission of latent homosexuality. If I painted beautiful women, would that make me a nonhomosexual? I like beautiful women. In the flesh; even the models in magazines. Women irritate me sometimes. I painted that irritation in the “Woman” series. That’s all.3

-Willem de Kooning

A compelling, radical, “richly explored” (The New York Times Book Review), and “insightful” (Vanity Fair) collection of essays on art, feminism, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy from prize-winning novelist Siri Hustvedt, the acclaimed author of The Blazing World and What I Loved.

In a trilogy of works brought together in a single volume, Siri Hustvedt demonstrates the striking range and depth of her knowledge in both the humanities and the sciences. Armed with passionate curiosity, a sense of humor, and insights from many disciplines she repeatedly upends received ideas and cultural truisms.

“A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women” (which provided the title of this book) examines particular artworks but also human perception itself, including the biases that influence how we judge art, literature, and the world. Picasso, de Kooning, Louise Bourgeois, Anselm Kiefer, Susan Sontag, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Karl Ove Knausgaard all come under Hustvedt’s intense scrutiny. “The Delusions of Certainty” exposes how the age-old, unresolved mind-body problem has shaped and often distorted and confused contemporary thought in neuroscience, psychiatry, genetics, artificial intelligence, and evolutionary psychology. “What Are We? Lectures on the Human Condition” includes a powerful reading of Kierkegaard, a trenchant analysis of suicide, and penetrating reflections on the mysteries of hysteria, synesthesia, memory and space, and the philosophical dilemmas of fiction.

A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women is an “erudite” (Booklist), “wide-ranging, irreverent, and absorbing meditation on thinking, knowing, and being” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).