My former colleagues at another university in Middle East have also been moved to online teaching indefinitely, with the students…
“It is no secret that contemporary philosophy is under the spell of the Other”
48 responses to ““It is no secret that contemporary philosophy is under the spell of the Other””
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I cringed when I read that a couple of days ago. But I guess there's a charitable interpretation in which "contemporary philosophy," being uttered by a professor interested mostly in work by X, Y, Z European thinkers, refers to the work of those thinkers and commentary on that work. Certainly there are generalizations of this type from Anglophone philosophers about what goes on in the Anglophone world, and I don't see much wrong with that. (It might be inappropriate to say something like this on NDPR, though, where I assume the readership is largely comprised of people who don't spend a lot of time thinking about "the Other.") However, the statement would be factually wrong if the reviewer was talking about *anything* that could be reasonably construed as philosophy and dumb if he is intending this as an indirect put-down of streams of thought not concerned with "big ideas" like "the Other." I tend to think that neither of these things is happening here, but that's a guess. Or perhaps most readers of this blog don't think that the sort of stuff that concerns itself with "the Other" is very good philosophically. I'm agnostic on that front, as I've read almost none of it.
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If true, it was certainly a secret to me. I had no no idea. And still don't.
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It is my thesis that Skempton's ethico-political considerations are DECIDEDLY automatic, not "rather automatic," pace Marder. I will demonstrate this by showing how a brain-in-a-vat-on-a-trolley would parse the analytic-synthetic distinction in a way that undermines premises 3, 5, and 11a of Marder's argument.
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When I apply to grad programs in philosophy for next fall, I plan to mark "Other" as my area of interest.
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Ephraim Kishon has a story called “Jewish Poker”. Jewish poker is played without cards so all you can do is bluff – and you have to bluff high. I think that this is the secret of Derridean post-modernism as currently practised in U.S. humanities departments: in the end, it’s all competitive hyperbole – who can be more radical?
Someone starts off with a huge unsupported generalization. For example, they write a book saying that the whole of Western thought is under the hegemony (good word) of (say) “logocentrism”, that its genealogy has to be exposed and deconstructed to reveal the Other that it “covers over and disavows”.
That’s a high bid, but you can top that. Why not write a review saying that this is to give “the Other” a “hegemonic status”, that this too needs to be deconstructed and given a genealogy? Say that the re-valuation of values hasn’t been radical enough, that “the Nietzschean trans-valuation is far from being complete: in its second stage, at the threshold of which we find ourselves today, it will necessitate a de-hierarchization of the already inverted values, so that alterity, too, would lose its newly acquired transcendental status, just as sameness and identity did in twentieth-century thought.”
Of course, tone and style matter. Although you’ve left banalities like “sameness and identity” (and hence, presumably, essence, cause and logical inference) far behind, don’t hesitate to use terms like “necessitate” for the ideas you are advocating, or (although you don’t believe in such fetishes as truth in interpretation) to describe others’ interpretations as “deeply flawed”. To think that once you've toppled the idols of objectivity you can't write as if they were still standing is a sign of hopeless logocentrism.
It’s good too to write as if your native language isn’t English, or that, at least, your English has been saturated by what you’ve absorbed in your many years on the *rive gauche*. A nice Derridean-Althusserian touch here (see Judith Butler, *passim*) is the spurious use of the term “precisely” when you make an especially vague assertion (“The promise of deconstruction lies, precisely, in its ability to inspire this post-metaphysical thrust ‘beyond the same and the other.’”) Introducing your sentences with pompous phrases like “Let us note that …” may not add anything of substance to them but it does convey the impression that you are addressing your audience from a position of authority (a podium at the École Normale?). Above all, the secret is to convince people that you are further up the mountain than everyone else and looking down on them. Writing in this condescending way won’t make you popular, no doubt, but what the hell – oderint dum metuant!
Where will it all end? Presumably, this too can be out-bid – perhaps someone else will come along and offer a genealogy of deconstruction or a deconstruction of genealogy. There doesn’t seem to be any limit to how many iterations the transvaluation of valuations can go through. Yet there must – surely – come a point where the whole thing vanishes up its own …
But what to do until that happy day? Certainly, it is heart-breaking for those of us who would like Continental philosophy to be taken more seriously, but how do you argue with people for whom “reason” and “argument” (like “sameness” and “identity”) are simply terms in a “hegemonic discourse” they have left behind? And, if they can shrug off the Sokal hoax and take Alain Badiou seriously, they are obviously past being laughed back into sanity by a sense of the absurd. So I think that all the rest of us can do is to keep out of their way and leave them to patronize one another to their hearts’ content.
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O dear. As far as I can see, what I think of as contemporary philosophy almost completely lacks any sense of the Other. Comments 1 to 5, the ones up before I wrote this, could be taken as evidence for this view, though in different ways.
Is indifference to the Other a serious problem? The issues involved in answering that are surely extremely complex, but some raise many of the same foundational issues as experimental philosophy or feminist philosophy does. Who really is our audience? And what really do we think we are doing? And who is this "we," kimo sabe?
To say this is not to say that I'm keen on reading about hegemony and lack thereof in very long sentences. It gets as difficult as Kant and is much less familiar. Still, do be aware that a lot of academic administrators are familiar with that discourse, or think they should be, so selective use of it can bring boring meetings alive with challenge. Discussions of parking are often replete with hegemonic discourse, and this is certainly worth pointing out.
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Your clearly under the spell of the Other, Michael.
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Michael Rosen's comment is the best and funniest thing I've read on this blog in three years!
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Unfortunately there are no jobs in the JFP this year for AOS: Other. Not even any AOC: Other. I feel there is something hegemonic about this that cries out for deconstruction.
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It all depends. Are talking about the Other-than-that or the Other-in-itself?
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Michael Rosen's comment is brilliant, just spot on.
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Ann Jaap Jacobson says, "be aware that a lot of academic administrators are familiar with that discourse…" Now that explains A LOT.
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Three cheers for Rosen! He _nailed_ it!
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Where can the Other find anOther?
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I second/third/etc the kudos to M. Rosen.
I think that in ethics and soc/pol philosophy we can be interested in this business of 'The Other' and related implications. (Must it be capitalized?) For example. the Rawls v. Galston (et alia) debate could be construed as a debate about how citizens view one another as 'Other,' rather than as fellow citizens.
What is disturbing to me is this neo-speak that utterly obscures any meaningful discussion of real issues. I admit: it makes me gag. There, I said it, flame on. 🙂
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I too love Michael Rosen's remarks. bril. Sign me up for that spell.
There may be just a few tips you forgot to mention. For instance, signaling the rejection of 'hegemonic discourse' by using the word hegemony is, in fact, old fashioned. It's much better to use, say, the word "beyond". Very important to be beyond things. This is helpfully accompanied by the addition of 'centrism" to that which one is beyond: e.g. "beyond logocentrism" (though itself perhaps slightly old hat) will do nicely. One does, however, need to be careful here, lest the whole business be too easily rendered intelligible. So for example, "beyond the Stepford wife' or 'beyond the gender binary' are clearly mere simulacrums of the real thing, as the most spell bound among us can parse those two thoughts and render them not only intelligible, but sensible. Also, ideally, rejection of this particular logocentrism of intelligibility should take the form of "x beyond y". Coming soon to a Center near you, the conference: "triangles beyond tricentrism".And job seeker– not deconstruction. strategic misreading.
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I also tend to dismiss things that I haven't been taught to love. But the rampant abuse of "Derrideanism" in literary theory and cultural studies does not, by itself, undermine Derrida's engagement with texts, both canonical and marginal. The animus against this trend tends to have the rather unfortunate side-effect of contributing to the continued silencing of those who do find, in this notion of "the Other," a language they need to express their perspectives. There are, for example, many people doing fine work in philosophy of race, philosophy of gender, philosophy of animals, etc. who find this language indispensable. And why shouldn't they?
So, while there are those of us who *do* find this language to be a strategy of obscurantism, there are others of us who find this language deeply meaningful. Whether or not this language is perceived as a "jargon" depends on whether or not one has learned how to use it. It doesn't do anyone any good for us to be dismissive of those who have learned how to use this language, and who find it indispensable for giving voice to their experiences, just because others of us haven't. What counts as "reasonable" will be as pluralistic as our forms of life.
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This sort of language is of course ridiculous for all the reasons Michael and everyone else says. It's also more than a little dated, even among the denizens of "theory" and "continental philosophy." What no one has really raised as an issue so far is whether it is a good use of time and space on the leading blog in academic philosophy to make fun of a marginal review of a book published by a marginal press.
BL COMMENT: The review did appear in the decidedly non-marginal Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, which is usually an outstanding forum. Fortunately, space in cyberspace is limitless!
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Jonathan: perhaps Prof. Leiter's time and space is so valuable that he cannot be trusted with it! Its importance to our national discourse suggests that, at minimum, a House Committee be tasked with its management.
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Jonathan, At least two commentators above tried to raise some substantive questions. I did it lightly, but Carl Sachs was more blunt.
Sachs mentions kinds of areas concerned with the Other. Let me also mention that the lack of concern with an even more general "the Other" – namely, those outside of philosophy – means that much in contemporary philosophy of mind is really concerned with how philosophers think they think. There are a lot of ways in which this is true, but one concerns the widely held thesis that vision is for the discovery of new facts. Tons of recent research strongly indicates that that's one of the things vision does most poorly.
That this presumably unwitting concentration on the philosphical self is a problem has been a constant theme in feminist philosophy, and it is a major topic in experimental philosophy. There might even be something worth saying about it.
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Rosen is clearly unwilling to waver between pure singularity and generality, or to allow whoness to differ from, defer, be differed, and deferred by whatness. This smacks of a predilection for a single pole in a dichotomous opposition!
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i take the first sentence of the above review to mean, simply, that a lot of people who call themselves philosophers today are talking about something called 'radical otherness'. to think that mentioning this is somehow a slight against philosophers who aren't talking about otherness is a bit of a stretch.
i don't pretend to know "the secret of derridean post-modernism as currently practised in u.s. humanities departments" – perhaps they're a bunch of phonies. perhaps they engage in "competitive hyperbole" instead of rigorous scholarship and perhaps this isn't a problem that's limited to their departments. i did find it funny, however, that michael rosen had no problem beginning his post with "a huge unsupported generalization", while at the same time criticizing the authors of 'derridean post-modernism' for doing the same.
as for logocentricism and its blind-spots, i think i can offer a simple analogy for the point being made by skempton. whenever a previously excluded minority group gains greater access to the dominant culture (say when women and blacks were allowed to vote or work in traditionally male-dominated/white-dominated institutions), they're often confronted with two quasi-contradictory tasks. first, they have to work to include themselves in the group. but unless they're going to do what martin luther king, jr. called 'integrating into a burning house', they also work to fix the problems of the group to which they're demanding inclusion. this occurs in part because, having been on the outside looking in, they're in a unique position to recognize its weaknesses and failings. in other words, their issue with a system of exclusion isn't only the contingent fact that they've personally been excluded, but also that the system may continue to be exclusive to others. (this is akin to zizek's analogy to help explain hegel's 'negation of negation': the first thing an oppressed class usually wants is to eliminate the oppressor and run things for themselves – that's negation. but the oppressed group often has to give up this fantasy, come to terms with the former oppressor, and hopefully build a new culture run by neither side – that's the negation of negation.) so it makes sense that the inclusion of women and minorities in the voting public or in the workforce didn't just include a bunch of new members in the same old system – it altered the way we think about democracy, the middle class, the culture of the workplace, and so forth.
similarly, it's not possible to turn logocentricism into an unqualified evil and alterity into an unqualified good. once we work to include alterity, we must simultaneously let that inclusion change the supposed dichotomy between the two. this is what i take to be the meaning of: “the Nietzschean trans-valuation is far from being complete: in its second stage, at the threshold of which we find ourselves today, it will **necessitate a de-hierarchization of the already inverted values**, so that alterity, too, would lose its newly acquired transcendental status, just as sameness and identity did in twentieth-century thought.” in parable-like terms: order excludes chaos, so to glimpse what order excludes, you've got to indulge in a little chaos (or 'transcendentalize alterity' a little); but don't over-indulge, because if you affirm chaos willy-nilly, you remain stuck in the same ordered pair as before. it's the same difference between, on the one hand, black supremacy as a response to white supremacy, and on the other, a thorough anti-racism. a first step is to invert the values, but the second step is to patiently deconstruct them.
i find rosen's criticisms of style to border on ad hom. he's not dealing with the claims presented, nor even demonstrating why they lack coherence within their specific conceptual scheme. he's just preaching to a crowd of coverts about how funny-sounding the noises coming out of the mouths of a neighboring tribe are. this wouldn't be so dangerous if it were taken comically. but i fear people might mistake rosen's comments for something like a refutation. and that would be, excuse the repetition, "deeply flawed".
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It should be made clear that use of the "other" in Continental circles has a phenomenological purpose, even though our fellow post-structural and deconstructionist brothers and sisters have forgotten this moment of clarity. The use of this phrase had its root in Husserl's Fifth Meditation in the Cartesian Meditations in which the meaning of another is completely outside how consciousness constitutes the sense objects have for me. The other is not like my expectations of a penny falling off a table. The other is not known and has no meaning as an epistemic object. As such, different "Continental" philosophers (there's really no such thing really other than the convenient shorthand of job application advertisements) sought to capture the structure of how the Other is given phenomenologically. It is common to say such things as "the Other is given in its radical singularity." This simply means that I am given as Ed, not a member of some species, nation or ethnic group. If you understand me not as who I am, as radically individual, you've somehow reduced my alterity to some criteria–this is the implicit premise of every Derridian. The entire history of Western metaphysics reduces difference to unifying categories in all areas of philosophy, including ethics. You might have been a Kantian and thought of me as a lawfollower and lawmaker and treated me accordingly. You might have pigeon-holed me as a Jew or one of those colored folks. You might have seen me as woman or horrible writer before my name is Judith. These discourses of the other have their root in a very common everyday lived-experience.
Should they be articulated with a bit more precision? Maybe. But what if my language and all other categories subsume the structure I am critiquing? You invent a new language to philosophically contribute to philosophy.
Ex. All moralists assume a lot, including the motivation to follow it. This is a problem a la Bernard Williams. He devises a way to talk about the motivational problem.
Should we at the same time mock that which we don't understand? Probably not. It would be unphilosophical to assume Williams has no point because of an ambiguous usage of inner/external folk talk about values and motivation. By analogy, we might not be part of a deconstructionist community just as much as those folks in ethics coming to grips with the complexity of our moral psychology. Of course, you could think this is a book by a marginal press written by a marginal philosopher, and if you continue to think that, then there's not that much I can say to convince you otherwise. I can say that is shortsighted, however, and where would it stop being marginal… What's marginal? Northwestern U P, Indiana Bloomington U P. It's rather strange really, that word "marginal." Just about anyone who reads French and German thinkers (certain positivists notwithstanding) becomes marginal rather than studying at some departments that substitute "logic" as their language requirement. That should be marginal in as much as limiting good philosophy to the solving of problems only without being very historically accurate.
I rest my case.
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I think being under the spell of the Other beats being under the spell of trolley carts and fake barns.
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It seems to me that (a) most philosophers working in the Anglophone academy – including those employed by PGR-ranked programs – do not practice the type of philosophy that Marder and Skempton do (call these '[I]nside philosophers'); and (b) philosophers who practice the type of philosophy that Marder and Skempton do belong to an extremely small and tightly-knit cadre that has virtually no power or influence within professional Anglophone philosophy as a whole (call these '[O]utside philosophers').
If I am right, then why do so many I-philosophers go out of their way to ridicule, demean, undermine, lambaste, etc. O-philosophers? Isn't it true, to paraphrase Wittgenstein, that "whatever is regarded as completely beneath one's contempt should be passed over in silence"? If I-philosophers have truly earned their "hegemonic" professional and institutional status on merit alone, shouldn't they treat O-philosophers with utter indifference rather than habitual bullying and scorn?
The answer is obviously "yes." Beating up on O-philosophers – who are powerless, insignificant, and marginal by the lights of the I-philosophical establishment – smacks of insecurity. Everyone admits that I-philosophy has won the day and isn't going anywhere any time soon. So why not just leave the O-philosophers alone? Surely there are less reactive ways to spend one's time as an I-philosopher.
BL COMMENT: I think Professor Jun's speculations about motives here are quite silly, and it is equally well the height of melodrama to call any of this "bullying." Anyone who cares about philosophy is understandably bothered and annoyed by such bluffing being passed off as a way of "practicing" philosophy, or being featured in what is otherwise an exceptional philosophical resource, the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
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To add to what Brian has said in response to N.J. Jun's comment, I should observe that the pseudo-philosophical claptrap to which most of us are taking exception is dominant in some other areas of the humanities (especially literary subjects). It's very important for philosophically knowledgeable people to object when literary theorists and their fellow travelers toss around their Derridean inanities about "Western metaphysics." Confronted with such inanities, non-philosophical observers are apt to conclude that the whole discipline of philosophy is humbug. Philosophically knowledgeable people are thus well advised to speak out frequently and forcefully in order to distance themselves from the charlatanry that passes for philosophy in other parts of "the Anglophone academy."
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First of all, what is with the "quotation marks" around everything?
Second of all, if certain non-philosophical observers are apt to make generalizations about philosophy on the basis of some stuff they're reading in literary theory, then those non-philosophical observers are not worth taking seriously, are they? Why do you care what such people think about philosophy? Intelligent non-philosophical observers will presumably avoid making such generalizations. On the contrary, they will conduct a more thorough investigation into contemporary philosophy which will, of course, disabuse them of any notion that "Derridean inanities" (that is not a deflationary use of quotation marks) are representative of the mainstream.
How can folks claim on the one hand that "party-line continentalists" are irrelevant then claim on the other hand that they are dangerous charlatans who are sullying the good name of philosophy? It seems to me that it's one or the other.
BL COMMENT: One clarification: I do not take the phenomenon represented by this review, and criticized by Rosen so aptly, to be quite the same as what I was calling Party-Line Continentalism.
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To N.J. Jun: I placed quotation marks around two phrases. The fustian phrase "the Anglophone academy" was quoted from your previous comment. The equally fustian phrase "Western metaphysics" is used with extravagant frequency by the literary theorists to whom I was referring.
Intelligent non-philosophical observers don't have unlimited time to devote to ensuring that their impression of philosophical discourse is well-founded. On the basis of what I've beheld in my Cambridge college (where people from all disciplines mingle regularly) and at several humanities centers, I think that many such observers — including some who make funding decisions — take a jaundiced or wary view of philosophy because they associate it with the rhetorical posturing of literary theory. I've spoken out against such misconceptions in a number of contexts, and I've been excoriated by literary theorists for doing so. I don't regard such theorists as irrelevant; I regard them as pernicious.
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Inane reviewers are likely always to say inane things about inane books. No surprise there. I asked earlier it it was really worth all the fuss to point this out. My question now is whether the real villain here isn't the otherwise outstanding Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews for soliciting and then publishing the review. They should know better, no?
BL COMMENT: I wish they would know better in cases like this, since it detracts from the otherwise excellent reputation of the service. But a glance at the editorial board,
http://ndpr.nd.edu/board.cfm
may make apparent the names of some who do not know better. (The way NDPR works is Gary Gutting asks members of the editorial board to recommend reviewers in their areas.) -
I offer two responses to N. J. Jun (and others who find the OP offensive):
1) It's a blog post. A certain degree of silliness – even unkind silliness – is to be allowed.
2) As Matthew Kramer observes, there are real consequences for our profession when obscurantist lingo is tossed about, especially by lit theorists, under the guise of 'philosophy.'
In the NYT, we have a piece in The Stone by a professor of French at Cambridge. In this piece, someone presented by the NYT as a philosopher suggests that Wittgenstein and most/all other great philosophers have been autistic. He further speculates that the reason there are so few women in Philosophy is that we are less likely to be autistic. That he does not seem to have much of a clue about Wittgenstein simply ices the cake.
Now, this writer did not engage in faux "Theory' lingo, which is a plus. But, if one reads the comments, one quickly sees the utter disrespect with which many of our fellow citizens have for our field becuase this is what they are given to think our field is.
If we are indifferent tot the misrepresentation of our discipline – with all its variety of methodologies and objects of study – we passively submit to having our field and our own work dismissed as nonsense before anyone has seriously engaged it.
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P.S. I wish someone would explain to me how and why a certain group of people in literary studies came to define their [then current] pet approach as 'Theory.'
It took me more years than I should admit to understand what my colleagues in French, English, and Film Studies meant when they referenced "Theory.' (Of course, I did not grasp the implied capitalization.)
Talk about hegemony.
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With all due respect to Professors Leiter, Kramer, and Sistare, there is little reason to believe that O-philosophy poses any serious threat to I-philosophy. Several decades have passed since the Yale critics first introduced "deconstruction" to English readers and the balance of power in the Anglophone philosophy profession has remained fundamentally unchanged. (Actually, I-philosophy is arguably much stronger and more deeply entrenched now than than it was 20 years thanks to success of the PGR and similar projects.) I do not believe that comments on the NY Times, for example, have the power to alter the academic status quo in any real sense. Show me evidence that O-philosophers are causing (or are capable of causing) appreciable harm to the I-philosophical establishment and I will gladly concede the point.
By the way, even if Professors Leiter, Sistare, and Kramer are right, are snarky, vituperative blog comments really the best way to go about defending philosophy from the barbarians at the gate? It seems to me that "real philosophers" would mount such a defense by providing substantive philosophical criticisms, perhaps in more scholarly venues. With few exceptions, all I see here is rock-throwing — including at me ("fustian," anyone?) — certainly nothing that would convince the misinformed readers of the NY Times, for example, to see matters aright.
BL COMMENT: I'm not entirely sure where this particular discussion is going. Bad philosophy is bad, and should be held up for ridicule. Someone really patient, with endless time, can write up a careful critique of bad philosophy–scholars have done that on occasion, with limited effect. The readers of the NY Times are not the audience for this discussion. Bad philosophy is still well-represented in academic philosophy departments in the US and elsewhere; indeed, there's an entire professional organization, SPEP, which champions bad work on and inspired by the Continental traditions in philosophy.
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Okay, I'll take sides with Jun. Jun makes a fair attempt to explain what this entire post and commentary is about. Otherwise, it's difficult to discern why this post was actually made. The best I could come up with is that it's an indirect way to confirm the view that the NDPR has made an editorial blunder. If this is not the purpose of this post, then maybe it is just another chance to beat up on a certain philosophical style, in which case Jun is onto something. Whatever the case may be, I do like the way that Jun diagnoses the whole thing, suggesting that something insidious and subterranean is at work.
Both Kramer and Sistare express worry about how philosophy is perceived by non-philosophers. This is fair since philosophy always seems (whether this is true or not) on the verge of extinction, and philosophy departments need to do all they can to stay relevant and win favorable 'funding decisions' (Kramer), although plenty of philosophers could care less about interdisciplinary conversations with their university colleagues.
Drawing the parallel between continental philosophy and literary theory is an old move, and may have had some force in the 90s, but is now at least a decade outdated. To raise this charge without some specific analysis of content demonstrates one's ignorance of what's actually going on in the broader philosophical community. And if you're working in philosophy and continue to attract this charge, you should put down Derrida and try on something else. It's easy to ridicule the Derrideans, as we know, but maybe not so easy to deride the Deleuzeans. There's no readymade put down for Deleuzeans, so I invite you to invent one.
Sistare thinks we should lighten up because this is, after all, just a blog post. Everyone knows this is not just any old blog, which means that just as there are 'real consequences' for 'rhetorical posturing', there are real consequences for the rhetorical posturing performed in this forum. Or are we claiming that there is no such thing as rhetoric in Anglophone/analytic/non-continental/real continental philosophy, or whatever the appropriate name is for it?
In the interest of safety, I'd like to ask how readers are to judge good NDPR reviews and 'The Stone' articles from bad ones. What I'm hearing is something like, 'We used to be able to trust the editorial team at NDPR, but now it's a crap shoot and you never know what you're going to get'. Are the good reviews the ones not solicited by Gutting, or not from marginal faculty members? Note that I'm not defending the review. I'd just like to hear some substantial criticism of it, not just caricature and generalization and shopworn platitudes. I'd also like to know what it means to properly represent the discipline of philosophy. Sistare thinks that it is possible to misrepresent it: does the NDPR misrepresent the discipline? Does 'The Stone'? If so, when does it represent well and when poorly? Specifying this criterion would help our 'fellow citizens' discern good philosophy from bad, for surely the average citizen is going to have as much trouble with advanced analytic jargon–not to mention symbolic logic–as they will with Pompous French Theory.
BL COMMENT: No one has questioned the quality of NDPR, indeed, the opposite. The particular nonsense at issue here is anomalous, and can be attributed, no doubt, to the fact that the editorial board includes some hacks and "Jewish poker" philosophers like Simon Critchley. So it goes.
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This has become quite heated, and I am sorry to have contributed anything to the heat. (I'm also apologetic for the many typos in my post upthread.)
From my perspective, it is not a matter of making 'outsiders' in philosophy feel more like outsiders, nor about making 'insiders' feel better about themselves. It is a matter of how the larger public perceives our discipline.
Students do not arrive at college knowing much of anything about what philosophy is. Their parents, our politicians, and others who have some hold on the purse strings probably know even less.
If our discipline is identified with overblown writing and vaccuous excuses for reasoning, that is a disservice to the discipline and those of us who work in it.
I am hardly an insider. I do care about how Philosophy is understood and misunderstood by those who are genuinely outside the discipline.
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I strongly second C. Sistare's comment. I admire many things Deleuze has written, particularly his writings on Spinoza. But when I see what qualifies as Deleuze-inspired "theory" in film studies and other disciplines I'm horrified and embarrassed. There is nothing wrong with criticizing those who feed such wankery.
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I find it very interesting that all the people who have posted on this thread and defended or explained some of the jargon use were able to do so in perfectly intelligible and simple English. It didn't even take that long.
That's what fuels my suspicion of writing in the style of the book review. If one can explain in simple English perfectly well what the jargon means, then I don't understand the people who claim the jargon is essential to being able to circumvent the boundaries of ordinary language and doing the sort of philosophy they want to do. -
I disagree with Sistare and Garrett. There's nothing heated about this exchange, unless you call genuine disagreement 'heated' (which is only now emerging in the thread). Now we're talking about Deleuze instead of Derrida, which means we're getting somewhere near contemporary philosophical discussion. Also remember, we shouldn't worry about what other programs are doing with philosophers because they represent themselves. We need to be concerned about philosophy's appearance. Literature departments have been written off countless times in this forum, so let's just write off film studies too. Who cares if they do crazy things with Deleuze, so long as philosophers do sane things with Deleuze. But that means that such a thing is possible, and that can't be right because Deleuze is one of those guys beloved by the SPEP cadre…
BL COMMENT: I share Professor Garrett's high opinion of Deleuze. If there are SPEP-affiliated philosophers who have done worthwhile work on Deleuze, it might be useful to cite the examples (there may well be examples, this is a request for information).
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@Julia: Agreed. The jargon and the style is the problem. There's no sense burying your philosophical insight in a haze of rhetoric. It's the writing that's the problem, not the philosophy.
@Brian, re: worthwhile work on Deleuze and at the risk of leaving many people off the list: Dan Smith (Purdue), John Protevi (LSU), Levi Bryant (Collin College), Len Lawlor (Penn State), John Sellars (West of England), Paul Patton (New South Wales), Todd May (Clemson), Beth Lord (Dundee).
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Re: Deleuze, I would also add Jeffrey Bell (Southeastern Louisiana), James Williams (Dundee), John Mullarkey (Dundee), and Miguel Beistegui (Warwick), among others.
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Before we too quickly equate one vocabulary as "jargon" and another vocabulary as "clarity," I take it that we can probably accept that just as there are good and bad versions of Derridean or Levinasian "jargon," there are good and bad versions of what gets called jargon-free, clear and simple English. In the words of Bernard Williams, a philosopher by no means under the spell of the Other:
"In a way that will be familiar to any reader of analytic philosophy, and is only too familiar to all of us who perpetrate it, this style tries to remove in advance every conceivable misunderstanding or misinterpretation or objection, including those that would occur only to the malicious or the clinically literal-minded. This activity itself is often rather mournfully equated with the boasted clarity and rigour of analytic philosophy."
And while I found much of Prof. Rosen's parody hilarious and accurate in regards to bad versions or caricatures of deconstruction, I'm puzzled as to how he was able to relate any of this to his dismissal of Alain Badiou, who has also been a systematic critic of post-modernism and obscurantism. I'm left wondering what bad copies of Derridean rhetoric have to do with "taking Alain Badiou seriously," which seems to me a non-sequitur. Are we to take Sokal and Bricmont's irresponsible 2 pages on one early work of Badiou's as a refutation of Badiou's serious engagement with set-theory in "Being and Event?"
BL COMMENT: I am quite certain Professor Rosen is not basing his opinion of Badiou on anything written by Sokal and Bricmont, but on his reading of Badiou.
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I'm curious, Brian. You mention SPEP as an example of "bad philosophy" being well-represented in academic philosophy departments, an organization you characterize as championing bad work, and then go on to sincerely ask whether there are SPEP-affiliated philosophers who have done worthwhile work on Deleuze, admitting there may well be, which I take it, makes it somewhat safe to infer you don't quite know whether there are or not. As if I wasn't suspicious of your characterization of the organization of SPEP in the first place, not because of what I know about SPEP, but because of a lack of any argument or criteria argued for on your part, I am now even more suspicious. I suppose your claim about SPEP is still salvageable with a reasoned defense explaining how the work or the majority of the work done by SPEP-affiliated philosophers is "bad" despite being unaware of work, good quality or otherwise, done on Deleuze. If this is how professional philosophers make claims (without justification) in the public realm, a serious or not so serious format take your pick, things are much worse for academic philosophy than they may be at SPEP. I don't mean to suggest that every claim made here requires a justification, although that would be nice; but claims that involve characterizing the profession you yourself are a member of, perhaps should be taken a little more seriously to warrant a justification. Perhaps not. So then I ask: how would you begin to tease me over to your side of the claim and justify how it is that SPEP, as a whole, is representative of "bad philosophy"?
BL COMMENT: I didn't say that all philosophers associated with SPEP are bad philosophers, or anything close to that. I did say that SPEP champions and promotes bad work about and inspired by the Continental traditions in philosophy, but that is not all it does. There is a large scholarly literature on Derridean obscurantism, Heidegger's mistakes and scholarly recklessness, not to mention the incompetent work on Nietzsche that SPEP regularly champions. If you were really interested in justifications, you would avail yourself of that literature, but the demand for a justification is just a rhetorical ploy, as it almost always is in these contexts. I do not read secondary literature on Deleuze, but I have read Deleuze. I do not know that the scholars mentioned have done good work on Deleuze, but am pleased to have the names for future reference, and perhaps other readers will find the suggestions useful as well.
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Replying to Raoni: what's "irresponsible" about Sokal and Bricmont's 2 pages? I've just reread them; they do virtually nothing except provide an extended quotation from a work of Badiou's that they "acknowledge up front is rather old", and then point out the extraordinary non sequitur involved in going from the unprovability of the continuum hypothesis direct to the "triumph of politics over trade-union realism".
Oh, and they also note, passim, that "the `mathematics' in this paragraph are also rather meaningless." Which they are.
(Now, maybe Badiou's later work is entirely different in its mathematical care and reasoning. But we all have our filters as to what is and isn't worth taking time over. And if some writer on philosophy of physics, say, published an early work which indicated the writer didn't know the difference between protons and photons, I'd need a lot of persuading to bother taking time and trouble over their later work.)
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I'm currently working on the impact of proto-ethnographic reports from the New World and elsewhere in the 16th-18th centuries upon debates in early modern European philosophy about human nature and the causes of human diversity. I've found the notion of 'otherness', capitalized or not, useful in thinking about the source materials I've been reading. I don't care a whit about Derrida and his American epigones, but I'm always hesitant to jump on a bandwagon of derision for fear that the people being derided have, perhaps inadvertently, stumbled upon something useful. Human beings do in fact make a basic distinction between the in-group and the others, and this distinction is important for our understanding of social psychology, ethnic conflict, and so on. Some people in France have had some interesting things to say about this (Todorov comes to mind), and I'm not going to limit the range of materials I'm willing to draw on simply because of the boring provincial sociology of North American philosophy departments.
BL COMMENT: I'm a bit puzzled how anyone reading the review in question, or Michael Rosen's comments about "Jewish poker" philosophy, could come away thinking that any participant in this discussion thinks that there are not valuable intellectual inquirie concerned with how one group conceptualizes a very different one.
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I want to echo the sentiment of Jonathan's comment to the effect that we may have better things to do with our time than poke fun at the connies on the occassion of a slight provokation. To mock the rive gauche crowd is a fine sport, especially here in Germany. I see a group of them even now outside, smoking and frowning competitively. Surely, the mockery is deserved given the quality of their research. But the fact is that these people are marginalized in contemporary philosophy (although sadly not in other fields of study). A more pertinant division in our field may be that emerging between those whose writings are clear and showcase methodological rigor and those who seem hell-bent on proving their literary talent in a philosophical setting. A work from one of the latter may be likened to an archetectual blue-print, drafted in style by a post-impressionist. The situation in moral philosophy is especially unfortunate and not getting better. Twice a week I read something to the effect of "let me say what I have in mind when I talk about terminustechnicus" followed by a page that may well have been ghost-written by Hegel. Let's have a post about how horrible it is to have to mine [action theorist's/ student of Rawls'/ political philosopher's] work because s/he has made a salient point but has burried it in a self-indulgent prose style. It's no secret that contemporary philosophy is sadly fettered by their lack of professionalism, moreso than it is by my dear collegues who believe themselves to be free of the spell of the other and are putting out their cigarettes now because it's time for seminar.
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Replying to David Wallace: You may disagree with my characterizing it as irresponsible, but what I meant was simply this: Badiou actually had a rigorous, extended account of how he understood mathematics, and its relationship to ontology and politics, published as “Being and Event” for several (8, I believe) years by the time Sokal and Bricmont were writing. You may agree or disagree with it (I do), but I take it that any responsible scholarly engagement should actually deal with those texts and arguments, rather than cherry-pick for the most outlandish citation imaginable to isolate for ridicule. All I’m asking is for actual engagement with arguments, rather than ad hominem, isolated quotes, and guilt by (mis-)association, and I don’t think that is setting the bar too high. Of course I agree with you that we all have our filters, and that not everyone should be expected to work carefully through Badiou’s 500+ pages in “Being and Event”. But I would argue that the responsible thing to do, in the case that one is either unwilling or uninterested in actually engaging in those texts and arguments, is to remain indifferent or silent about them.
BL COMMENT: There have been no ad hominem remarks on this thread.
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Raoni, you might think that Badiou's errors in that passage reflect very badly on him as a scholar, regardless of the quality of his other work. That's why we pass around our papers to knowledgeable colleagues before submitting them. One big mistake in print is hard to live down, and I'd say that that's how it should be.
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In defence of Sokal it's also worth saying that the book was written to argue that there was a general problem in philosophical circles with people misusing complex mathematical (and scientific) notions without understanding them. Whilst its certainly true that Sokal had a pretty low opinion of the work of the people he was writing about in general, its not particular inappropriate given what the book is trying to show to point up a particular instance of Badiou misunderstand some scientific or mathematical concept, even if Badiou later came to be more informed about mathematics and more careful in what he said. It could after all, still provide evidence for the general contention that a particular group of French academics (I'm defining group loosely enough that I would count mainstream analytic philosophers in the US as a group in this sense, to anticipate any nitpicking about how some of the figures in Sokal's book disagree violently with each other or never wrote about each other) were far too willing to tolerate and indeed laud books which made really silly errors about maths and the hard sciences.
The question of whether Badiou later published excellent work might be important if Sokal and Bricmont had devoted a whole chapter to his work, rather than a cursory two-page discussion of one example. Then it might be disengenuous of them not engage with his (apparently) more informed later work on maths. But they didn't, so there isn't really a problem here. -
Brian, You asked us to discuss the claim that "it is no secret that contemporary philosophy is under the spell of the Other." Many who came earlier than I to the discussion seemed to think that the simple use of the term, 'the Other', was frivolous, and that it implied commitment to all sorts of other frivolous beliefs. I pointed out that in itself there is nothing wrong with the term, and in some cases it can be useful. This was a legitimate contribution to the discussion, not a cause for puzzlement, and it should not have been taken to imply any misunderstanding of the review or of Michael Rosen's comment (which we were not asked to discuss).
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