Just a brief post. From time to time I express my ire over how Continental philosophy is practiced in the English speaking world. To be clear, I see this as an institutional issue pertaining to how English-speaking Continental philosophy graduate programs are organized, how our conferences are structured, and how our journals and presses are structured. It is a question of how power functions in these institutions and the impact of that power on thought. We are too attached to proper names. All thought, it seems, has to be filtered through certain privileged figures, rather than directly focusing on questions and problems.
I think the issue can be summed up with the simple question “could a continentalist write Naming and Necessity?” Would an English-speaking Continental philosophy program authorize such a work for a grad student? Kripke gave these amazing lectures at the astonishingly young age of 29. When I ask whether or not a continentalist could write such a book, I am not asking a question about the content of the text, but rather of a certain style that directly works through a problem or a question. We could just as easily ask where an English-speaking continentalist could write the Logical Investigations or Being and Time or Difference and Repetition? Here the question is whether the English-speaking world has created institutions and venues that are open to this sort of direct work. We can imagine what sort of forms these texts would take in an English-speaking Continental framework. Rather than Naming and Necessity simpliciter, we would get something like Husserl on Names and Necessity. Rather than Difference and Repetition, we would instead get Derrida and Kierkegaard on Difference and Repetition. Everything, it seems, has to be filtered through the proper name of some master-figure or father, and responsibility for authorship can never be directly claimed.
Where a Kripke can say “I am responsible for what I have argued and conceptualized, I am committed”, the English-speaking world seems to foster an environment where one can always say “well that’s just what Husserl says, I don’t know if I fully buy it or not.” It’s something closer to intellectual history than philosophy. If you doubt that English-speaking Continental philosophy is structured in this way, just look at the program for SPEP on any given year. In the English-speaking world we have debates between Deleuzians and Badiouians, whereas in Anglo-American thought we have debates between, say, connectionists and functionalists. The former makes the debate a debate between different masters, while the latter makes it a debate between different theories (and I realize I’m being a bit too black and white here).
I think there are two basic problems here. First, the continentalist approach is often an impediment to thought. Insofar as everything must be filtered through the voice of a master-figure, you’re not dealing directly with the problem and what the development of the problem dictates according to its own immanent logic as it’s unfolded. Instead you get a sort of interpretive scholasticism that is often more a matter of textual debates over just what the thinker meant and that all too often misses the field of the problem and is unable to follow it wherever it might lead due to allegiance to the master-figure: “The problem seems to lead in this direction but I can’t go in that direction because it would be contrary to what Lacan says in these other matters.” My ability to think through depression, for example, is stunted because certain dimensions of the malady are rendered outside the field of sanctioned discussion in a Lacanian framework due to these categories of that framework.
Second, I think this framework is deeply at odds with those political intuitions at the heart of continental thought when it’s at its best: anarchism and communism. Scholarship organized around the authority of master-figures is inherently Oedipal in character. It is not an-archistic, but mon-archistic. The master-figures are the monarchs and the job of the rest is to dutifully maintain allegiance to their thought. Yet genuinely anarchist politics must be communist in spirit. It can admit of no hierarchy of thinkers, no thinkers more privileged than others, no thinkers that would be masters, but must instead treat all thinkers as voices who do or do not prevail by virtue of the reasons and arguments they’re able to marshal for their case. Anarchist and communist practice ought reflect itself both at the level of worldly political engagements and at the level of a sort of style and ethics of thought. The young upstart like Kripke at the tender age of 29 with little in the way of extensive scholarship in the history of philosophy under his belt should, through the force of his arguments, the novel problems he poses, and the concepts he develops be able to stand on equal footing with Plato… Not in the sense that he has accomplished as much as Plato– of course not! –but in the sense that his concepts, arguments, and problems should count just as much. Instead what we seem to get is monarchial scholarship, where some voices count as others and the rest are lesser lords and serfs that obey those monarchs (monarchialism being one avatar of Oedipus and authoritarianism more generally). There thus seems to be a deep performative contradiction between the institutions we’ve actually formed and the sort of politics we advocate.
Larval Subjects . 
February 19, 2014 at 7:14 am
Thanks for a wonderful post, Levi. I think that, if we have to dispense entirely with the tutelage of the sort that has engendered pathological patriotism in the Name of the Father (today’s philosophical rock stars), we can also embrace along the lines of interrogating the significance of master-figure in the continuing Continental tradition, a sort of designing the tradition’s apocalypse in the manner of reducing signifiers to their last sign, the ecological, which knows nothing about the difference between natural and artificial, between raw and cooked, between necessity and naming.
I think of necessity here in the Nietzschean sense – “[Our] thoughts, our values, our yeses and noes and ifs and whethers grow out of us with the same necessity with which a tree bears its fruits – all related and connected to one another and evidence of a single will, a single health, a single earth, a single sun” (On the Genealogy of Morals).
Here, we can interpret Nietzsche to be actually identifying ecology as the true genealogy of morals which founded the human who produced a thermally reproducible population (economics). In all these objectifications of ecology, however, moral economics (all morality is economic) isolates a real force from its actual accomplishment. Nietzsche identifies the ascetic as the perpetrator of this moral economics, of this blurring of ecology in favor of pathological assertiveness. Today, the ascetic is a prominent figure in academia.
February 19, 2014 at 1:42 pm
these are of course the same faculty who endless tell us that they are teaching the skills need for “critical” thinking and other democratic know-how as their own institutions daily get more and more incorporated into the crony-capitalist borg/titans of our day without them being response-able enough to manage organizing any resistance worth noting,
and not sure really that philosophy and such have ever offered much in the way of skills/habituation that would actually enable people to organize the kinds of institutions (I assume you didn’t mean this literally ” deeply at odds with those political intuitions at the heart of continental thought when it’s at its best”) that would be more like their archive-fever dreams of on the page utopias. Maybe time now for something other than academic approaches to these problems of living?
February 19, 2014 at 2:46 pm
I think the lack of historical awareness in Anglo-American philosophy is lamentable. However, I think they still operate under privileged figures – It is just that those figures have positions rather than the names of individuals tied to them. When analytic papers name a position, the individuals they are addressing are implicit.
I know very little about the current state of affairs in US universities. Kripke gave the lectures for Naming and Necessity in 1970 and published them two years later. Do you think that he could do this now?
Also, if asked for an Anglo-’Continentalist’ who wrote in the ‘certain style’ you identify, I would immediately pick Donna Haraway – I have huge problems with her work, but her influence is undeniable. I guess whether you think this is valid depends on whether she counts as a philosopher, but then many of the French who are taken up in ‘continental philosophy’ were not in philosophy departments either.
February 19, 2014 at 4:01 pm
John,
I somewhat agree about the lack of historical awareness in Anglo-American thought, but then I also think there’s something to be said for bracketing history (in the next couple days I intend to write a post about historical time that indicates why I think this is so). I agree about the first person authorship of Haraway’s work, but also think it’s notable that she’s not in a philosophy department. In the States, at least, it seems to me that most of the Continental philosophy that’s done in the “Kripke style” (ie, introducing new concepts and lines of argument rather than commentary on others) is done in departments outside philosophy.
February 19, 2014 at 9:40 pm
a perhaps oblique try at this, sorry if i seem like i’m just repeating anything or dogmatizing:
1. the main strands of the prevailing mode of philosophizing in the u.s. tend to share certain attitudes to authority, the common feature of which, whether it’s sought in scientific objectivity, normatively-governed social practice, professionalized habituses, some kind of logical formality, etc., tends to be the suspicion of any individual claims to speak authoritatively.
2. a number of the big name continental figures who might be studied in the u.s. managed to do what they did through highly particularized feats of stylistic innovation, formal innovation, invocation of highly situated forms of cultural capital, etc. which simultaneously helped them claim authority outside the suspect modes mentioned in (1), while effectively raising the costs for anyone seeking to respond or continue their work in kind and probably pricing most such people out of the market.
3. the work of many of the figures in (2) is embedded in european traditions which are not present in the same way in the recent u.s. context (as for example they might have been in a past time, when oxbridge types read bradley and there were hegel societies all over america), so that the extent to which even sui generis achievements a la (2) are properly read as involved in inquiries, debates, discourses etc. which are more broadly held in common, is rendered somewhat moot in practice (in the u.s.).
4. for whatever reason, a useful tactic for a minor scholar interested in figures a la (2) working in a u.s. context is effectively to claim derivative authority for one’s work by hypostasizing the work of someone else, say by adopting the pose of a scholar of it, treating it as a peculiar source of authority which is presumably to be related in complicated ways to the more fundamental range of known sources of authority for things (this is a fond resort for all kinds of minor scholars, obviously, not just (2)-style ones).
5. a lot of the people from (4) remove themselves from debate with others with whom they at least notionally share some grounds for discussion, and obviously the ‘others’ are generally blithely ignorant or outright hostile toward (4)-style or (2)-style work to the point of making a point of never learning the first serious thing about it (let alone teaching it etc.), so there is little incentive on either side to maintain the conditions under which (4)-style scholars would -not- be isolated and their ways of working marked by some of the features under discussion above.
6. kripke himself is partly famous for something for which he -barely- took responsibility, his ‘interpretation’ of wittgenstein (check the way he introduces it as ‘wittgenstein’s argument as it occurred to kripke’, i.e. a past kripke, and is now being presented somewhat indifferently as if a lawyer were arguing someone else’s case), which is an example of a broader practice of interpretation in anglo circles that simultaneously reasserts the favored modes for claiming authority (impersonal, ‘soundly argued’ no matter why or by whom or to whom), wiggles out of any claim to individual responsibility, and diminishes any thought that a different mode of authority (such as that claimed / performed in wittgenstein’s work) might merit much more serious response than that.
7. an english-speaking continentalist of a sort did write a being and time, it’s cavell’s ‘claim of reason’, and i think the ways his work has been received and not received confirm a lot both about his/our context, and about how ‘work on problems’ will habitually be treated according to the model of personally-authorized-achievement a la (4) if it does its work more a la (2) than (1).
8. in the way cavell appropriates emerson, he seems to agree that the continentalist approach (understood in some way akin to (2), hopefully in line with what you’re referring to) is an impediment to thought, but regards that as essential to thought, in a ‘self-reliance’ kind of way. which would just mean that our context or our conformities to it more often keep us from really thinking than we would care to admit.