Undoing Gender (39 page)

Well and good, but I would like to suggest that a certain embarrassment has been introduced into this institution, into what Pierre Bourdieu has called the “ritualized institution of philosophy.” That embarrassment consists of the fact that the term “philosophy” has ceased to be in control of those who would define and protect its institutional parameters. Surely, those who pay their dues to the American Philosophical Association and enter into that committee structure at various levels of power have been struck, surprised, perhaps even scandalized by the use of the word “philosophy” to designate kinds of scholarship that in no recognizable sense mirror the academic practice that they perform and which they understand as their duty and privilege to define and protect. Philosophy has, scandalously, doubled itself. It has, in Hegel’s terms, found itself outside itself, has lost itself in the “Other,” and wonders whether and how it might retrieve itself from the scandalous reflection of itself that it finds traveling under its own name. Philosophy, in its proper sense, if it has a proper sense, wonders whether it will ever return to itself from this scandalous appearance as the Other. It wonders, if not publicly, then surely in the hallways and bars of Hilton Hotels at every annual meeting, whether it is not besieged, expropriated, ruined by the improper use of its proper name, haunted by a spectral doubling of itself.

I don’t mean to introduce myself as that spectral double, but it may be that my own essay, which is on philosophy but not of it, will seem somewhat ghostly as a result. Let me reassure you that the perspective from which I write is one that has been, from the start, at some distance from the institution of philosophy. Let me start, then, in the spirit of Edmund Husserl, who claimed that philosophy was, after all, a perpetual beginning, and refer to my own beginnings, humble and vexed as they surely were. When I was twelve, I was interviewed by a doctoral candidate in education and asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said that I wanted either to be a philosopher or a clown, and I understood then, I think, that much depended on whether or not I found the world worth philosophizing about, and what the price of seriousness might be. I was not sure I wanted to be a philosopher, and I confess that I have never quite overcome that doubt. Now it may be that having doubt about the value of a philosophical career is a sure sign that one should
not
be a philosopher. Indeed, if you have a student who contemplates that bleak job market and says as well that he or she is not sure of the value of a philosophical career or, put differently, of being a philosopher, then you would, as a faculty member, no doubt be very quick to direct this person to another corner of the market. If one is not absolutely sure about the value of being a philosopher, then one should surely go elsewhere. Unless, of course, we discern some
value
in not being sure about the value of becoming a philosopher, unless a resistance to its institutionalization has another kind of value, one that is not always marketable, but which nevertheless emerges, we might say, as a counterpoint to the current market values of philosophy.

Could it be that not knowing for sure what should and should not be acknowledged as philosophy has itself a certain philosophical value?

And is this a value we might name and discuss without it thereby becoming a new criterion by which the philosophical is rigorously demarcated from the nonphilosophical?

In what follows, I hope to show how I was introduced to philosophy in a fairly deinstitutionalized way and to show how this distance from the institutionalized life of philosophy has in some ways become a vocation for me and, indeed, for many contemporary scholars who work in the humanities on philosophical topics. I want to argue that there is a distinctive value to this situation. Much of the philosophical work that takes place outside of philosophy is free to consider the rhetorical and literary aspects of philosophical texts and to ask, specifically, what particular philosophical value is carried or enacted by those rhetorical and linguistic features. The rhetorical aspects of a philosophical text include its genre, which can be varied, the way of making the arguments that it does, and how its mode of presentation informs the argument itself, sometimes enacting that argument implicitly, sometimes enacting an argument that is quite to the contrary of what the philosophical text explicitly declares. A substantial amount of the work done in the continental philosophical tradition is done outside of philosophy departments at the current time, and it is sometimes done in especially rich and provocative ways in conjunction with literary readings. Paradoxically, philosophy has received a new life in contemporary studies of culture and the cultural study of politics, where philosophical notions both inform social and literary texts that are not, generically speaking, philosophical, but which nevertheless establish the site of cultural study as a vital one for philosophical thinking within the humanities. I hope to make this clear by narrating my own engagement with philosophy and my turn to Hegel. Toward the end of my remarks, I will discuss the place of Hegel in contemporary scholarship on the question of the struggle for recognition within the project of modernity.

My first introduction to philosophy was a radically deinstitutionalized one, autodidactic and premature. This scene might best be summed up by the picture of the young teenager hiding out from painful family dynamics in the basement of the house where her mother’s college books were stored, where Spinoza’s
Ethics
(the 1934

Elwes translation) was to be found. My emotions were surely rioting, and I turned to Spinoza to find out whether knowing what they were and what purpose they served would help me learn how to live them in some more manageable way. What I found in the second and third chapters of that text was rich indeed. The extrapolation of emotional states from the primary persistence of the
conatus
in human beings impressed me as the most profound, pure, and clarifying exposition of human passions. A thing endeavors to persist in its being. I suppose this signaled to me a form of vitalism that persists even in despair.

In Spinoza I found the notion that a conscious and persistent being responds to reflections of itself in emotional ways according to whether that reflection signifies a diminution or augmentation of its own possibility of future persistence and life. This being desires not only to persist in its own being but to live in a world of representations that reflect the possibility of that persistence, and finally to live in a world in which it both reflects the value of others’ lives as well as its own.

In the chapter titled “On Human Bondage, or the Strength of the Emotions,” Spinoza writes, “No one can desire to be blessed, to act rightly and to live rightly, without at the same time wishing to be, to act, and to live—in other words, to actually exist” (Prop. XXI, p. 206). And then again, he writes, “Desire is the essence of a man, that is, the endeavor whereby a man endeavors to persist in his own being.”

I did not know at the time that this doctrine of Spinoza would prove essential for my subsequent scholarly work on Hegel, but this is the early modern precedent for Hegel’s contention that desire is always the desire for recognition, and that recognition is the condition for a continuing and viable life. Spinoza’s insistence that the desire for life can be found nascent in the emotions of despair led to the more dramatic Hegelian claim that “tarrying with the negative” can produce a conversion of the negative into being, that something affirmative can actually come of the experiences of individual and collective devastation even in their indisputable irreversibility.

I came upon the Spinoza at the same time that I came upon the first English publication of Kierkegaard’s
Either/Or
, skirting Hegel until I arrived at college. I tried to read in Kierkegaard a written voice that was not exactly saying what it meant; in fact, this voice kept saying that what it had to say was not communicable in language. Thus, one of my first confrontations with a philosophical text posed the question of reading, and drew attention to its rhetorical structure as a text.

As pseudonymous, the author was unforthcoming, never saying who it was who was speaking, nor letting me escape the difficulty of interpretation. This extraordinary stylistic feat was compounded by the fact that
Either/Or
is two books, each written in a perspective that wars with the other perspective, so whoever this author was, he surely was not one. On the contrary, the two volumes of this book stage a scene of psychic splitting that seemed, by definition, to elude exposition through direct discourse. There was no way to begin to understand this work without understanding the rhetorical and generic dimensions of Kierkegaard’s writing. It was not that one must first consider the literary form and rhetorical situation of the text and then one might cull from those its philosophical truth. On the contrary, there was no way to extricate the philosophical point, a point that has to do with the insuperability of silence when it comes to matters of faith, without being brought through the language to the moment of its own foundering, where language shows its own limitation, and where this “showing” is not the same as a simple declaration of its limits. For Kierkegaard, the direct declaration of the limits of language is not to be believed; nothing less than the undoing of the declarative mode itself will do.

Kierkegaard and Spinoza were, for me, philosophy, and they were, interestingly, my mother’s books, books bought and perhaps read for some undergraduate course at Vassar in the early 1950s. The third I found was Schopenhauer’s
The World as Will and Representation
, and that belonged to my father. It appeared to have traveled with him to Korea where he worked on the dental staff of the army during that strange and suspended state of war. The book was given to him apparently by a lover who preceded my mother and her name was engraved on the first page, and I have no way of knowing how she came upon this book, why she gave it to my father, or what having it or reading it might have meant to him. But I assume that my father’s lover took a class, or perhaps a friend of hers did, and that the institution of philosophy made the book available, and that I found it in my adolescent suffering at a time that allowed me to think of the world as having a structure and meaning that was larger than my own, that placed the problem of desire and will in a philosophical light, and exemplified a certain passionate clarity in thought.

So these books came to me, we might say, as by-products of the institution of philosophy, but in a deinstitutionalized form. Someone decided they should be translated and disseminated, and they were ordered by someone for courses that my parents took or that their intimates took, and then they were shelved, and emerged again as part of that visual horizon that graced the smoke-filled basement of the suburban home that was mine. I sat in that basement, sullen and despondent, having locked the door so that no one else could enter, having listened to enough music. And somehow I looked up through the smoke of my cigarette in that darkened and airless room and saw a title that aroused in me the desire to read, to read philosophy.

The second route by which philosophy arrived for me was the synagogue, and if the first route arose from adolescent agony, the second arose from collective Jewish ethical dilemmas. I was supposed to stop taking classes at the synagogue before high school, but I somehow decided to continue. The classes tended to focus on moral dilemmas, and questions of human responsibility, on the tension between individual decisions and collective responsibilities, and on God, whether God existed, and what use “he” might finally be, especially in light of the concentration camps. I was considered a disciplinary problem of sorts and given, as a sort of punishment, the task of taking a tutorial with the rabbi that focused on an array of Jewish philosophical writings.

I found several instances of writing that reminded me of Kierkegaard’s, where a certain silence informed the writing that was offered, where writing could not quite deliver or convey what it sought to communicate, but where the mark of its own foundering illuminated a reality that language could not directly represent. Thus, philosophy was not only a rhetorical problem, but it was tied in rather direct ways to questions of individual and collective suffering and what transformations were possible.

I began my institutionalized philosophical career within the context of a Jewish education, one that took the ethical dilemmas posed by the mass extermination of the Jews during World War II, including members of my own family, to set the scene for the thinking of ethicality as such. It was thus with difficulty that, upon arriving at college, I agreed to read Nietzsche, and I generally disdained him through most of my undergraduate years at Yale. A friend of mine brought me to Paul de Man’s class on
Beyond Good and Evil
and I found myself at once compelled and repelled. Indeed, as I left his class for the first time, I felt myself quite literally lose a sense of groundedness. I leaned against a railing to recover some sense of balance. I proclaimed, with alarm, that he did not believe in the concept, that de Man was destroying the very presumption of philosophy, unraveling concepts unto metaphors, and stripping philosophy of its powers of consolation. I did not return to that particular class, though I occasionally listened in on others. At that time, I arrogantly decided that those who attended his seminars were not really philosophers, thereby enacting the very gesture that I am thinking about today. I resolved that they did not know the materials, that they were not asking the serious questions, and I returned to the more conservative wing of continental philosophy about 30 yards away, in Connecticut Hall, acting for the moment as if the distance that divided comparative literature from philosophy was much greater than it could possibly be. I refused and rejected de Man, but I did sometimes sit in the back of his class. The deconstructionists from that time sometimes still look at me askance: why wasn’t I there in his classes? I wasn’t there, but I was not too far away, and sometimes I was there without appearing to be. And sometimes I left very early on.