One of the problems with Continental writing is that it is unreadable to anyone who lacks an extensive background in the history of philosophy. It is difficult, for example, to pick up a copy of Derrida’s Speech and Phenomena without already having a deep familiarity with the work of Husserl, and it is difficult to pick up Husserl without already having a background in a whole host of philosophical texts. Increasingly I have students approach me remarking that they have bought my book, Difference and Givenness. Every time I hear this I cringe with shame and embarrassment. What value could this book possibly have for them outside of a deep acquaintance with the work of Deleuze and familiarity with Kant, Bergson, Hegel, etc? I feel as if I’m wasting their money and the money of anyone who is not steeped in Deleuze.
I would like to write a book that anyone could pick up, regardless of whether or not they have a philosophical background. When I fantasize about writing such a book I am not fantasizing about writing a book that is “easy” or “clear”. Rather I am fantasizing about a book that could function as an element of other assemblages or networks without the reader already having to be linked in to a pre-existent and extensive network characterized by the history of philosophy. The adventure of such a book would be premised not on maintaining its identity or the sameness of a message throughout all of the possible relations it enters into among readers, but would rather function as an element, like lavender in the region of wine grapes, contributing to the production of new productions. Here the history of philosophy wouldn’t be absent or ignored, but would be, as it were, virtual or in the background. Philosophy wouldn’t proceed through the activity of commentary as is practiced in Continental thought today, but rather there would be direct ownership of one’s writing and appropriation of the history of philosophy. Just as the peppers in my garden are borne of the soil, the water, and air out of which they grow without displaying these elements in any recognizable sense, such a writing would be willing to take direct responsibility for how it has “prehended” or integrated that history without thematically making that history the issue or question of the writing. Is it possible, today, to write in the fashion of a Descartes, Spinoza, or Hume?
Larval Subjects . 
June 3, 2009 at 5:31 am
I think the question to ask is: Why is it scary to contemplate writing such a book?
For me, it is scary because I imagine critics saying, “So-and-so already said this two hundred years ago”, or “This book is naive”, or “This book thinks too much of itself”. These things are almost guaranteed to be said, even if they are not strictly true.
I would consider “Philosophy In the Flesh” such a book. Here are the opening words — tell me if they make you wince:
They sure made me wince.
June 3, 2009 at 6:04 am
Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations
June 3, 2009 at 6:15 am
As someone who possesses neither the desire nor the time to read over philosophical predecessors like Kant, Hegel, etc… I honestly appreciate your effort to ground discussion in examples and simple terms, rather than repeated textual allusions. I have read a lot of Deleuze though and I intend to give Difference and Repetition a shot.
June 3, 2009 at 6:44 am
Writing as a romantic?
June 3, 2009 at 8:02 am
Sure it’s possible. However, I think that it would be successful only if written by a “famous philosopher.” Anyone else who writes it would probably be criticised for being a deluded, uneducated, rogue “pop philosopher,” especially if regarded well by the general public. Isn’t your “fantasy” here basically to practice what Deleuze and Guattari wrote in What is Philosophy?
June 3, 2009 at 12:49 pm
I have great sympathy for this desire of Levi’s. On day back when I was writing my dissertation I gave a copy of a section of that doc to my then-wife to ask for some proof-reading help; I was wanting to send it off as part of a job application. She didn’t like it at all. The next day I began taking all the jargon out. If I couldn’t write an idea in English, I couldn’t and wouldn’t write it. My impression is that my work became alot more sophisticated and a lot more grounded in the ethnography and the history of anthropology at the same time. So, go for it. It would be a book that I could and would read.
One other thing, if I may. I would appreciate more attention to the conditions and processes under which one order of phenomena (say physics) gives rise to another order of phenomena (say chemistry) and thereby chemistry emerges in such a way that it influences the operations and processes of physics within chemical organizations. I’m sorry if I’m not being as clear as I would like.
Schrodinger wrote about some of this in What is Life, getting all the way from quantum mechanics and Brownian motion to bio-chemistry and life as systematic energy exchange which can reproduce itself. The chaos theory people talk about this as strange collectors. I tried to describe one of these things I found at the center of Balinese cosmology for Levi once. My impression, having read a lot of ethnography and thinking using Edelman is that something important turns inside out in the move from C’ to C.
But it is your book, Levi, not mine.
June 3, 2009 at 2:36 pm
contra christopher, I’m not at all sure it’s possible, if I understand what you’re contemplating, precisely because it’s a very ambitious aim, and much harder to write the kind of book you describe.
However, I believe quality always wins out in the end.
If the book hits the mark it’ll eventually be read no matter the name behind it.
Again, if I understand you, what you’re wishing for is the kind of book that one doesn’t choose to write, but that chooses you. It sort of arrives at your door one day with at note saying “write me” and a small sachet of concentrated passion attached.
For some reason I’m reminded of Nietzsche’s decrying the “why” question and affirming that if he carried his reasons around with him he’d be naught but a barrel of reasons (I think somewhere in Zarathustra).
so, I encourage you!
June 3, 2009 at 5:45 pm
Badiou’s books Ethics and Infinite Thought seem to fit this bill, right?
June 3, 2009 at 5:53 pm
Levi, I think you’ve already been doing this well in many of your posts about assemblages and principles and so on..
But, it’s even possible to include some of the relevant jargon in such a way that the reader can say, OH, that’s what they mean!
For example, I am a test case of someone who have never studied philosophy in an academic setting and has not read a lot of authors such as Adorno, Zizek, Badiou, Agamben, Nancy, etc. Or, rather, I have tried to read bits and pieces of these writers but have gotten stuck and frustrated on their, to me, unfamiliar terms and assumptions.
Recently, though, reading Bruno Bosteels’ “Hegel in America” at http://nessie-philo.com/Files/bruno_bosteels_hegel_in_america__full_text_.pdf (along with his 2005 POLYGRAPH essay, “Badiou without Zizek”) SOME of the points made by these authors that I mention suddenly started clicking into focus in ways that they never had before. This is despite the fact that there is nothing at all “easy” about Bosteels’ essays!
While it was probably not Bosteels’ intent to write this way, to me the combination of these two essays came across in a sort of tour-guide / bestiary or even fabular way that worked for me when other, more systematic introductory texts to these difficult authors still left me confused… Mark
June 3, 2009 at 7:31 pm
Dear Levi,
I couldn’t agree more about the difficulty and uselessness to most people, even very intelligent people, of most continental philosophical writing.
Yes, the fear of writing a readable book is that the real, card-carrying philosophers of the academy will laugh at it. Please overcome that fear, or rather, write it in spite of that fear which is entirely justified. It is a far, far more ethical project to write your readable book than to produce yet another unreadable but academically respectable one — and here I mean “ethical” in the sense of honoring other human beings at the cost of pursuing your own narrow advantage.
By writing a readable book, you imply that you care about readers—people—beyond the narrow sphere of academia, that you care about what they think, and you care about whether they care about what you think. Thus, you give a gift of attention and respect to them. On the other hand, if you just go ahead and write another unreadable book, you are boosting your own career and doing something advantageous to yourself, but it’s nowhere near as altruistic. Perhaps you don’t want to be altruistic. Understandable. Then don’t write something readable. Otherwise, do.
Speaking of the gift of attention – I was poking around just now among your past posts looking for the one where you talk about Lacan (I think it was) talking about the analyst who sort of erases himself to be fully present to the analysand, or something to that effect, which I found very interesting. I was looking for it because I just wanted to point out that it sounded kind of like Simone Weil’s writings on attention as a kind of altruistic work, which I was likewise poking around in while working on another project this afternoon, and I wondered if you’d read her or if Lacan read her, or if she read Lacan … :) anyhoo …
(Kind of interesting too, the idea that writing a particular sort of book could count as a gift of attention just as the analyst’s listening to the analysand does—but to write a readable book, it means you really have to put yourself thoroughly in the head of your imaginary reader, almost the way an analyst would, so that you tailor your writing to the reader in a giftlike way, rather than in the dogmatical point-pounding way of the academic jargonmonger.)
June 3, 2009 at 7:58 pm
Oh, and it’s also interesting that kvond mentions Wittgenstein, as Wittgenstein was (as you probably know) someone who didn’t really read a lot of other philosophers – he read Frege, Russell, Whitehead, and few others of his contemporaries, but not much else (although, somewhat bizarrely, he WAS steeped in Otto Weininger).
Wittgenstein was, of course, a thorough nutjob and a genius, so he didn’t care what anyone else thought, but I think it’s possible to draw a lesson in authenticity from him — he cared about the problems, he worked on them, he wrote about them in as plain a language as possible (which in the end produced some very difficult texts) and published them. He didn’t worry about reading every other philosopher first before daring to write a word of philosophy himself, he didn’t bother asking all the questions about whether it was possible and would it be worth it and whether he was repeating things that had already been done and what the academics would think. He just went off and did it.
But then there’s the issue of a philosophical life versus philosophical work — a lot of producers of philosophical works don’t live very philosophical lives, hence the unreadability of their works; and the works of those who live philosophical lives often end up looking more like scripture or poetry or literature or self-help or “pop” psychology or “pop” philosophy than like works of philosophy. Hopefully it’s not an exclusive either/or, but hopefully too if one had to choose it’s better to live the philosophical life.
(Am I making sense at all today or am I just spewing platitudes, the very sort you’d want to avoid in your book? Oh well, it’s been a long week with my daughter teething what are hopefully her last teeth for a while …) :)
June 3, 2009 at 9:45 pm
I would add that I think there’s a difference between writing a book that requires familiarity with a large philosophical corpus in order to be appreciated and a book that while avoiding names, schools, and so on makes the reading enjoyable both for those who know the tradition and those who don’t, one level not necessarily being “better” than another…
As for the fear of “someone’s already made this point,” that’s for readers to decide. I doubt two people, however close, can really make the same point, unless they are copying it from the same source, which is, as I understand it, the main problem of continental writing.
June 4, 2009 at 2:31 am
Interesting to read Claire Parnet’s interview with Deleuze in 1989, on reading and teaching philosophy:
“Parnet asks a methodological question: it’s no secret that Deleuze is rather self-taught , when he reads a neurology or a scientific journal. Also he’s not very good in math, as opposed to some philosophers he has studied, like Bergson (with a degree in math), Spinoza (strong in math), Leibniz (no need to say, strong in math). So, she asks, how does Deleuze manage to read? When he has an idea and needs something that interests him, but doesn’t understand it at all, how does he manage?
Deleuze says that there’s something that gives him great comfort, specifically that he is firmly persuaded in the possibility of several readings of a same thing. Already in philosophy, he has believed strongly that one need not be a philosopher to read philosophy. Not only is philosophy open to two readings, philosophy *needs* two readings at the same time. A non-philosophical reading of philosophy is absolutely necessary, without which there would be no beauty in philosophy. That is, with non-specialists reading philosophy, this non-philosophical reading of philosophy lacks nothing and is entirely adequate. Deleuze qualifies this, though, saying that two readings might not work for all philosophy. He has trouble seeing a non-philosophical reading of Kant. But in Spinoza, he says it’s not at all impossible that a farmer or a storekeeper could read Spinoza, and for Nietzsche, all the more so, all philosophers that Deleuze admires are like that.
So, he continues, there is no need to understand, since understanding is a certain level of reading. If someone were to object that to appreciate a painting by Gauguin, you have to have some expertise about it, Deleuze responds, of course, some expertise is necessary, but there are also extraordinary emotions, authentic, extraordinarily pure, extraordinarily
violent, in a total ignorance of painting. For him, it’s entirely obvious that someone can take in a painting like a thunderbolt and not know a thing about the painting. Similarly, someone can be overwhelmed with emotion by a musical work without knowing a word. Deleuze says that he, for example, is very moved by Lulu and Wozzeck, and that [Berg’s] concerto To the Memory of an Angel has moved him above everything else.
So, he knows it’s better to have a competent perception, but he still maintains that everything that counts in the world in the realm of the mind is open to a double reading, provided that it is not something done randomly as a someone self-taught might. Rather, it’s something that one undertakes starting from one’s problems taken from elsewhere. Deleuze means that it’s on the basis of being a philosopher that he has a non-musical perception of music, which makes music extraordinarily stirring for him. Similarly, it’s on the basis of being a musician, a painter, this or that, that one can undertake a non-philosophical reading of philosophy. If this second reading (which is not second) did not occur, if there weren’t these two, simultaneous readings, it’s like both wings on a bird, the need for two readings together. Moreover, Deleuze argues that even a philosopher must learn to read a great philosopher non-philosophically. The typical example for him is yet again Spinoza: reading Spinoza in paperback, whenever and wherever one can, for Deleuze, creates as much emotion as a great musical work. And to a some extent, he says, the question is not understanding since in the courses that Deleuze used to give, it was so clear that sometimes the students understood, sometimes they did not, and we are all like that, sometimes understanding, sometimes not.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Deleuze insists that he taught in exactly the same way at the Lycee as at the University and that:
…at Vincennes, he spoke to a mixed audience, young painters, people from the field of psychiatric treatment, musicians, addicts, young architects, people from very different countries. There were waves of visitors that changed each year. He recalls the sudden arrival of 5 or 6 Australians, Deleuze didn’t know why, and the next year they were gone. The Japanese were constantly there, each year, and there were South Americans, Blacks… Deleuze says it was an invaluable and fantastic audience. Parnet says that was because, for the first time, Deleuze was speaking to non-philosophers, his practice that he had mentioned earlier, and Deleuze agrees: it was fully philosophy that was addressed equally to philosophers and to non-philosophers, exactly like painting is addressed to painters and non-painters, or music not being limited to music specialists, but it’s the same music, the same Berg or the same Beethoven addressed to people that are not specialists in music and are musicians. For philosophy, it must be strictly the same, Deleuze says, being addressed to non-philosophers and to philosophers without changing it. Philosophy addressed to non-philosophers shouldn’t be made simple, no more than in music does one make Beethoven simpler for non-specialists. It’s the same in philosophy, Deleuze says, and for him, philosophy has always had this double audition, a non-philosophical audition as much as a philosophical one. And if these don’t exist together, then there is nothing.”
June 4, 2009 at 1:30 pm
Sounds like “Milles Plateaux” to me!
June 4, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Music for non-specialists must have a catchy melody and create an ambiance through timbre though. Compare Beethoven with 12 tone stuff.
But most musicians also think that this is part of what makes Beethoven a better composer. Which is, as far as I understand it, part of what Deleuze is getting at.
The pop culture and philosophy trope is one small area where the stuff Levy is talking about happens. Right now, most of the stuff (with the exception of two articles) I write on pop culture is accessible to a broader audience, and nothing else is. I get some academic respect from academics (really just because of where it’s come out) for the inaccessible stuff, but not so much for the accessible stuff.
More than once I’ve been asked by a friend with an incredulous expression, “Why are you wasting your time on that crap?” And there’s a sense in which I don’t think of that as my day job (though it is an integral part of following Lady Philosophy where she directs). If I get full professor it will be entirely as a result of inaccessible articles. That’s fine; I learn stuff writing in that manner too. But I always want that research to filter back down and inform something accessible as it did in the video games book.
I would love some day to be able to write good accessible philosophy that does not have the tie in with video games or Dungeons and Dragons or professional wrestling or yoga (these latter two are future projects). I don’t know if that’s possible though. God might be the tie together, though she too is largely an artifact of pop culture today. . .
As far as Levy- all I can say is that this blog is extraordinarily accessible for somebody with no background in continental philosophy. The combination of depth and accessibility make it one of only four that I religiously read. So if anyone can do the kind of thing you are talking about it’s you.
But maybe do think about a two track strategy (though again, maybe that’s what you are doing with the blog on one hand and the books on the other)? I guess I can’t really say how such a strategy has worked out for me until a number of years from now. Though the article, article, article system in analytic philosophy makes it an easier thing probably.
June 4, 2009 at 6:25 pm
[…] at Larval Subject mourns that a student had bought his book on Deleuze, knowing that without training in the obscurities of […]
June 5, 2009 at 5:10 am
What is different from the accessible philosophy born of the everyday you are proposing/aspiring and the sort of “everything is interpretable” stance for which you’ve critiqued Zizek?
June 6, 2009 at 4:25 am
There are such books; they are called novels, films, or paintings.
June 6, 2009 at 9:19 am
“Just as the peppers in my garden are borne of the soil, the water, and air out of which they grow without displaying these elements in any recognizable sense, such a writing would be willing to take direct responsibility for how it has ‘prehended’ or integrated that history without thematically making that history the issue or question of the writing.”
If you can write paragraphs like this, then you are already capable of writing the book in question. It’s already in reach; don’t try too hard with gimmicks (such as not mentioning any other philosopher at all; that’s not necessary).
June 6, 2009 at 9:28 am
[…] 6, 2009 I’m going to LINK TO LEVI AGAIN, because this is another especially inspiring post about the need to do continental philosophy that […]
June 7, 2009 at 6:31 pm
Me again (sorry). This morning I read a long excerpt of Sartre’s essay “Existentialism and Humanism” from an anthology – it’s actually super easy reading. I hadn’t read any of Sartre’s philosophical writing before and expected it to be the usual opaque word soup, but this was as clear as any newspaper article. So that was interesting, could be worth a look if anyone wants another example of accessible continental phil.
I guess this issue of the inaccessibility of continental philosophy really resonated with me because I have been trying to write some literary essays lately, and the questions I’ve pursued in that context seem to keep leading me (almost against my will) into philosophical texts, and it is terribly, terribly frustrating when it seems a given thinker like Heidegger or Lacan is saying things that are relevant to my “research,” yet I can’t for the life of me make out what they are talking about beyond a vague sense that it would be very interesting if only I understood it …
June 20, 2009 at 6:43 am
“What is different from the accessible philosophy born of the everyday you are proposing/aspiring and the sort of “everything is interpretable” stance for which you’ve critiqued Zizek.”
More specifically I guess, is how in terms of practice does what your proposing differ from what you say Zizek is doing when he engages objects of everyday and social life? I hope your explanation can touch upon the difference between some sort of Heideggerian ‘everyday’ and the sort of everyday life pursued in the Hegelian phenomenology, which undergirds the sort of distinction I think you’re making.