These are comments from a panel at SPEP
I would like to thank Shawn and John for graciously sending me this invite to participate in this roundtable on an intriguing and difficult topic – one that titans from Reiner Schurmann to Hannah Arendt and others have attempted to speak to all in different ways. Well, what can philosophy say about a public?
Ideally, they seem to all agree, nothing.
Michel Foucault, when asked in 1966 what the philosopher’s role in society was, gave us both a stern and subtle answer by responding “philosophers do not have a role in society. Their thought cannot be situated in relation to the current movement of a group”. Philosophical discourse’s untimeliness, which is what makes it contemporary and yet also outside its own epoch, lest it be nothing but cultural commentary, makes it nearly impossible for it to be that which speaks to a public without losing something essential. Obviously, this isn’t because philosophical discourses, or worse, philosophers themselves, compose some kind of vanguard or possess any esoteric lesson. It is completely different. For the sake of time I will only isolate two reasons which it cannot speak directly to the public, but nonetheless still implicate it.
First, philosophy which dubs itself “public philosophy” has already circumscribed a public, or population, which at its inception—irrespective of which form of modernist political thought you take up—immediately puts it in relation to a civil society and its connection to the state. Philosophy worth its salt is about displacement – it is that practice of an ethics of discomfort that seeks out fragments that let us contest how we have been constituted. To start from the level of the “public” puts philosophy in the epistemic position of the state, and at that point it is a social science aimed at the interrogation and management of a population. This doesn’t “reach” a public, it does not scandalize anyone – it stages it as an object of management with all the exclusions that make it possible.
Second, and I believe this is the more important one to the discussion we will have today, philosophy must always speak to those who are missing – to the vanquished and the hidden. A musician whose name eludes as I write this once said that poetry is for the words that fell off the page – that slip out of language and that horrid literary history and are free to be elsewhere. Philosophy, in this sense, must do the same. Philosophy is for those who are in the shadows – at the supposed gates of the public. It speaks to the missing or those who are not with us, not so that they can be folded into the beautiful society and extend its exclusion. Philosophy is at once more humble and more demanding. It must de-realize or neutralize those operations that take place day to day—that we assume are just a part of public life—that are built only on the blood of those who are not here.
Given why I was invited to participate in this roundtable, this might be a disappointing answer, but it is the only one I can give. Philosophy that stages its public is an art of administrating bodies. It is biopolitical cultural commentary. Historically, it is at this moment, at this intersection between an evoked public and the practice of philosophy, where philosophy concedes itself to the state and no longer has anything to say beyond extending the state’s interest. We don’t simply need to look to horrors of the twentieth century for this, we can look to the long counterinsurgency that academic philosophy has had increasingly little to say about.
RevoltingBodies 