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 |  Subject: Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy Since 1960  Tue Feb 25, 2014 7:54 pm | |
| The late 20th century saw a remarkable flourishing of philosophy in France. The work of French philosophers is wide ranging, historically informed, often reaching out beyond the boundaries of philosophy; they are public intellectuals, taken seriously as contributors to debates outside the academy. Gary Gutting tells the story of the development of a distinctively French philosophy in the last four decades of the 20th century. His aim is to arrive at an account of what it was to "do philosophy" in France, what this sort of philosophizing was able to achieve, and how it differs from the analytic philosophy dominant in Anglophone countries.
His initial focus is on the three most important philosophers who came to prominence in the 1960s: Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida. He sets out the educational and cultural context of their work, as a basis for a detailed treatment of how they formulated and began to carry out their philosophical projects in the 1960s and 1970s. He gives a fresh assessment of their responses to the key influences of Hegel and Heidegger, and the fraught relationship of the new generation to their father-figure Sartre. He concludes that Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze can all be seen as developing their fundamental philosophical stances out of distinctive readings of Nietzsche. The second part of the book considers topics and philosophers that became prominent in the 1980s and 1990s, such as the revival of ethics in Levinas, Derrida, and Foucault, the return to phenomenology and its use to revive religious experience as a philosophical topic, and Alain Badiou's new ontology of the event. Finally Gutting brings to the fore the meta-philosophical theme of the book, that French philosophy since the 1960s has been primarily concerned with thinking the impossible.
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Reviews:
This is part of a new series called the "Oxford History of Philosophy", which seems to have recently been launched with a scatter of unusual titles (Early Modern India) for such a series. It seems unlikely to be anything like a standard set of histories: Kenny, Copleston, etc. A reader new to French philosophy would be fairly bewildered by the various names and references; a more advanced reader would find it to be a different interpretative "take" on the history, e.g. there is an amusing section on how the famous philosophers (Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, etc.) made their way through the academic steeplechase (or not) in France. The book is quite uneven in the depth of its discussions, but it is always clear. As suggested, it is not remotely a standard "history" -- it is a discussion and interpretation by the author of a few of the famous authors of the period. The most useful discussions for me were on the varieties of anti-Hegelianism, and a very lucid discussion of Deleuze's take on Nietszche. I think a stronger narrative might have included the Lacanian influence, Althusser, and the late return of Bergson to centre stage. Also: where are the women? (Kristeva for one). Much of the later part of the book covers the weird trajectory whereby French philosophy suddenly veered towards the end of the 20th century into a kind of neo-medieval negative theology (Derrida/Marion) and ended up replaying (repeating!) in very obscurantist ways both the claims of Dionysius the Areopagite, and the Mendelssohn/Jacobi/Spinoza fight in the 18th century about whether or not philosophy could say anything useful about religion, and what are its limits......All very strange -- eternal recurrence of the differance.
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I admit to being one of those people, to whom Gutting points in his conclusion, who thinks that analytic philosophy is preoccupied with banalities. But I also think that analytic philosophy does not merit the name "philosophy" at all: it is an endeavor in self-congratulating smugness that valorizes the most insipid of academic practices and scares off young and adventurous talent who might be inclined to contribute something truly philosophical and of value.
Gutting's work, as to its merits, is a respectable journalistic account of what has been transpiring in French philosophical (yes, philosophical) circles since the 60's. However, I would not give this book to students who are just beginning to explore these thinkers, and would instead require that they grapple with the work of Gasche or even Jameson. Or, I would strongly recommend Peeters' biography of Derrida, for a full blown picture of the French and American academic scenes in which this thinking played out.
Gutting is right to point out how these French thinkers (the term is applied enthusiastically here) all drive to move beyond Hegel, which any philosophy worthy of the name should be doing (as I think Hegel himself would have welcomed). But he grossly underestimates the Nietzschean aspect of their work: this being the driving energy and spirit of their work, which is to strive to put into play not just "conceptual innovations" -- behaving like good American conceptual entrepreneurs -- but to strike out into the margins of human living in order to discern the rudiments of what can become a new humanity altogether.
If a certain lack of "rigor" and "clarity" as defined by the reactionary and pedantic or even "liberal" conceits of the analysts is the price to pay, so be it.
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French Philosophy Fads and Fashions
France has had a fashion culture ever since the days of the ancien regime's court at Versailles. I appreciate French aesthetic fashions, such as beautiful women modeling attractive clothing styles and sumptuously elegant interior decoration designs. But I am grimly jaded about academic philosophy fashions. I see Gutting's book as an academic fashion gazette of chic philosophies by fashion-dictating French writers.
When coherence depends more on the reading ("deconstructing") than on the written text itself, it becomes a metaphysical parlor game; what Harold Bloom calls "that proverbial picnic, to which the authors bring the words (or some of them, anyway) and the readers bring the meanings." Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida bring to mind the fourth-century BC obscurantist Chinese philosopher Kung-sun Lung of the School of Names, who is ridiculed for his signature refrain: "A white horse is not a horse." They also bring to mind today's California New Age obscurantist Orphics like Matthew Fox, David Spangler, David Toolan, and Chogyam Trungpa.
One of the occupational hazards of philosophy is that when a philosopher dreams up some obfuscation, he thinks his great moment in the sun has arrived, and he announces a new philosophy. For French philosophers this practice seems to have become de riguer. It has not only yielded a fashion industry that manufactures obscurantist verbal parlor games, but has also served as a license for dilettantes to pontificate about public policy.
Admittedly Gutting is not uncritical of the several authors he considers, and he struggles strenuously to conjure meaning from the loquacious labyrinths.
http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Impossible-French-Philosophy-History/dp/0199674671
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RR Phantom
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| | Subject: Re: Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy Since 1960 Tue Feb 25, 2014 8:23 pm | |
| that proverbial picnic, to which the authors bring the words (or some of them, anyway) and the readers bring the meanings.
Philosophic fruitcakes! |
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