Weak Thoughts
Tired, I get a book of interviews to read from the library. It’s all about ‘Theory’ – that extraordinary proliferation of Continental philosophy and sociology in a number of disciplines. I’m amazed to find Theory described as an orthodoxy – this, no doubt, is because I teach in philosophy, which remains dominated by the Anglo-American Analytic school of philosophy. The thinkers that may seem old hat to students and lecturers in Law, Music, Theology and English are bright and new for me, since I read them only after my undergraduate studies.
Bright and new – Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida? Yes, because it is a battle to maintain a degree on which such thinkers can be taught. When I worked in Analytic departments, it was a great struggle to be able to teach Husserl – teaching Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty would have been unthinkable; ‘continental’ thought was not deemed philosophical. It was worse when I was as an undergraduate: we were presented with no post-Kantian ‘continental’ thinkers at all, which means no Hegel, Schelling, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty let alone Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida and others. Most courses drew on papers written in the Analytic tradition published, for the most part, in the last twenty years. Some were interesting, some were dull, but the approach to philosophy was narrow. As students, several of us campaigned to be able to study what we knew under that vague word existentialism. There was no chance of this, however. What about the philosophies of the East? There was no chance to come into contact with the great traditions of India and China – there was a course on Indian philosophy taught elsewhere in the university, but we were not allowed to study it.
I feared I was not philosophical enough and, retreating to my room, began to read literature, listen to classical music and look at art; when my degree was over, I got rid of all the philosophy books I owned. Thereafter, I found myself totally unable to read books like Discipline and Punish or The Concept of Anxiety let alone Being and Time and the Phenomenology of Spirit. Everything, of course, has changed. But having switched sides, I am ever conscious of the superficiality of my grounding in the Continental tradition and the paranoia which puts me always on the defensive with respect to what I take myself to be doing. And what am I doing? Trying to catch up, to read what I should read even as I churn out articles and books. Five years off when the current book is done, I tell myself. Study Aristotle, the Scholastics, take a look at British Idealism and reread the classics of Analytic philosophy I came across as an undergraduate. Understand the relationships between Husserl, Frege, Meinong and others; read Mach, Duhem and other neglected philosophers of science; study Whitehead. It is endless, of course. After all this, write on the great transformations in biology and science, on complexity theory and nanotechnology.
I am laughing as I write this. What chance do I have? Better to shuffle round in the niche I have found for myself … try and cling to the academy as long as possible. Why not? But then I read a book by Taminiaux and envy his scholarship; I read Stiegler and admire the vast project he has set for himself; I read the essays of Lacoue-Labarthe, impressed that he’s actually going somewhere, without understanding for myself exactly what he's doing. I wish someone would write books on Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, I say to myself, because in that way I won't have to do the work ...
Žižek says that his failure get a job when he finished his postgraduate studies saved him from mediocrity:
I think that if I were to have got a job at that point, I would now be a poor stupid unknown professor in Ljubljana, probably dabbling in a little bit of Derrida, a little bit of Heidegger, a little bit of Marxism and so on.
He went to Paris, of course. Whether one agrees or disagrees with what he does, he does something. For myself, I cling to the skirts of great thoughts and great thinkers – a little but of this, of that, but where does it lead? Commentary, endless commentary, but all the while drifting from doxa to doxa, adrift on the tides of intellectual fashion.
