Wednesday, August 31, 2005
(1:10 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
No more masters
We really do tend to be looking for philosophical heroes, we continentalists -- so difficult not to look for heroes, for canonical figures, for the man who is going to come along and set things right after endless generations of misunderstanding. "For milennia, humankind stumbled along in darkness -- the [The Master] was born, and went to school, and wrote a book, and everything changed." Whether The Master consciously sets himself up as an oracle (Heidegger) or is set up as one by some (probably American) constituency (Derrida), the goal becomes, at first, tireless advocacy, followed by an almost unconscious reliance on this established authority.In this past century, we have had our Holy Trinity of French philosophers (Derrida, Lacan, Foucault), accompanied by their Blessed Virgin (Deleuze -- much admired, not deeply touched). Now their successors are starting to come into their own: Jean-Luc Nancy becomes the "new Derrida" (having pretty clearly gotten the nod from the man himself), Žižek the "new Lacan" (or the old Lacan raised from the dead), Agamben the "new Foucault," Badiou the "new Deleuze." A ready-made set of real live European thinkers, ready to hand for those seeking a new authority, seeking to write articles and even books that say, "The Master has no patience for such tired, obselete conceptualizations as those evinced by past generations -- this is where The Master turns the very enterprise of human understanding upside down."
This is not to say that the thinkers listed here are focused on completely revolutionizing human thought, entrenched as they are in the textual traditions of European philosophy. Certainly they wish to follow the traditional path to philosophical success -- some novel, but rigorous, readings of important figures in the tradition, followed hopefully by some creative conceptual work. As for clearing away the clutter to allow reality to show itself in its unadulterated glory at last -- no, that's not what they're about, not even Žižek. That's what disciples make out of these thinkers, even when the disciples are careful to note the revolutionary insight that perhaps one doesn't need to develop a complete system in order to be a philosopher anymore, perhaps one doesn't need to authoritatively address every area of human experience, perhaps one can't do so and had best not pretend. Such caveats are catalogued along with the rest of the authoritative utterances -- yet another slogan to defend.
How to escape this? How to know that I myself haven't fallen prey? It's well known that I am uncomfortable with the seeming acceptance of Badiou as a Master by some (thankfully no one seems to be doing the same with Nancy or Agamben, though Homo Sacer is granted oracular authority to some degree) -- is it just because I myself have accepted a kind of Žižekian orthodoxy, but wish to pose as yet another "moderate" policing the degree to which others can advocate the views they have found convincing? Even that "admission" would be automatically Žižekian: Proclaim your loyalties, follow the path, it will get you somewhere at least, better than these lukewarm liberals who do nothing because they do everything. Would it even be possible to be led out of an instinctive romanticism of the Great Philosopher, other than by the Last Great Philosopher, the Last Master -- the one who finally deploys the sovereignty of intellectual authority against itself in order to set thought free, once and for all?
Must we "admit" that personal charisma, oracular authority, is the constitutive stain of the Western philosophical tradition? And what would it mean to "admit" it? What would it mean to "take it into account"?
