John Protevi's Blog

The still-invisible dimensions of "Western philosophy"

Of all the reactions to this NYT Stone column saying that if philosophy won't "diversify," then we should rename philosophy departments as "Dept of European and American Philosophy," I thought John Drabinski's post distinguishing the decolonializing project from "diversity" approaches was the best.

 

John pointed out the still-invisibly-white dimension of "Western philosophy" with an anecdote about the incredulous laughter from his students when he points out that while he labels his course "Black Existentialism," the phil dept's offering isn't named "White Existentialism," but just "Existentialism." John continues: "That laugh at the absurdity of visibility cuts to the heart ... whiteness doesn’t just hide from visibility, it is in fact defined by its insistence on being invisible – what Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks calls the colonial measure."

 

Among other reactions, there was Eric Schliesser's post, in which he showed that putting Jewish and Islamic philosophy under the "other" or even "non-Western" category revealed a still-invisibly-Christian dimension. This moved me to the following remarks which I left at his place but reproduce here:

1) Very good way to show Christianity as another dimension of invisibility, along with "white" per Drabinski, hidden behind "Western." I think we should take that as a clue to uncover other interlocking dimensions of invisibility along with those two. "Western" also stands for "still-invisibly-ableist," "still-invisibly-hetero," "still-invisibly-anthropocentric," and so on. I don't include "still-invisibly-male" as that dimension of unthought default setting mode for philosophy is now becoming visible (to many people at least) thanks to the centuries of work by feminists.

 

[After the fact comment: so, in my view, behind our usage of "Western philosophy" -- and even more so, behind "philosophy" -- there's a multiplicity at work: a heterogeneous set of interlocking processes of (de-)racialization, (de-)gendering, (de-)ablizing ... , with concrete bodies politic being crystallizations of those dimensions. I think there are connections here with "intersectionality" that I'm going to try to work out this summer.]

2) When Schliesser notes the racism and genocidal calls of "the others" that you can find when you read outside the "Western" canon, that is to my mind a devastating counter to calls to "diversity." The call has to be to de-colonializing, de-racializing, de-ableizing ... philosophy, not just to broadening our sources. It's to change the way we do philosophy, to bring out the invisible dimensions which serve the social-structure-forming (or at least reinforcing and justifying) as well as epistemic, moral, and aesthetic functions of philosophy.

3) The still-invisibly-Christian aspect allowing "Western" to be used as it is didn't become awkward after slavery and colonialism the way it did after Auschwitz, perhaps because of the long term nature and intricate workings of slavery and colonialism meant the entire society, religious organizations and doctrines included, were so permeated by and so involved in the reinforcement and justification of those power relations that can't we see that involvement in the past, let alone see it now in our current society, still structured as it is by the succeeding permutations of the racism and exploitation that were slavery and colonialism. The documentary evidence presented in the case of the Jesuits at Georgetown show just how direct that involvement could be; the real challenges lie in showing the more indirect cases -- as well as continuing to unearth other direct ones.

 

Eric then replied on Facebook to the effect that we tend to homogenize "the West" and thereby render invisible the fighters against slavery and misogyny within "the West" and thereby risk reinforcing injustice, accepting a crude historicism and incompletely complex narratives. 

 

In response I of course acknowledged his points, and then wrote,

 

"When, upon Chike Jeffers's suggestion I made my Spring 2015 HMP course centered on the Atlantic, and included Montaigne's "Of Cannibals," the De Las Casas vs Sepulveda debate, and Jim Maffie's work on Aztec philosophy, I also included Cugoano's Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery, I made sure to stress the internal conflict within "Western philosophy." One point I made went something like this: "we talk about the polemical mode of philosophy, but it's mostly just folks scoring points in a seminar room, but Cugoano against the slavers, that really was war, in the form of philosophy. They weren't his "opponents," or his "interlocutors" -- they were his enemies."

 

4) Elsewhere on Facebook I made this comment to forestall the "lack of specialists" objection to changing our approaches:

 

"The de-colonialism challenge -- or better, rooting out all the "still-invisibly-X" dimensions of the "philosophy" multiplicity -- is a generational and collective project. People today are going to have to retool a little, but the hope is that the kids we turn on to de-colonialized (....) phil in our UG courses will go on to be the specialists we're not. This is not some impossible project. Think of 30 years ago in French Studies. Plenty of ppl trained in Hexagonal literature added a little bit of Francophone lit here and there, and over time it's become a research speciality, mostly with kids turned on by those early profs. And there was an importation of African and Caribbean profs into French departments. I think a similar story would be told in English departments both w/r/t post-colonial / de-colonialized / world lit, and w/r/t cultural studies and so on." 

 

That I should have to make such a point shows the ridiculous self-ghettoization of far too many philosophers, who are -- and I'm using the genderizing term advisedly -- scared of the cooties they'd pick up by actually knowing the first thing about the history of almost all the other humanities disciplines. (Which is not to say they have all successfully confronted the de-colonial project instead of settling for "diversity" qua boutique exoticism -- a "world lit," or "world music" course here and there.)

 

5) So, w/r/t current practice, the dividing lines should not be between Eastern and Western, or between continental and analytic, but between work furthering de-colonializing, de-racializing, de-abilizing, de-gendering, .... and work that is "still-invisibly-white," "still-invisibly-abilized" and so on.

 

[UPDATE, Th 12 May, 10:51 am CDT: is that a forced choice? Is there a tertium non datur? Is there philosophy that is neither de-invisiblizing nor still-invisibly-X but just plain philosophy? I would of course be open to discussion on that question.]

 

Let's not be thread-jackers all the time! Or, A Plea for Particularism

What I like in this piece by John McWhorter about the Yale president's decision to keep the name of Calhoun College is the author's insistence that we can make judgments, draw lines, and discuss particular cases. We can thereby resist the all-too-prevalent leaping from concrete demands ("we must remove Calhoun's name on this residential college") to grand principles ("should we remove the names of all slave-holders from all buildings?").

That move, something to which I would say philosophers are especially prone, lends itself (I would say non-coincidentally) to facile slippery slopes ("what's next, remove the name of people who didn't educate their daughters properly?") and reductios ("so you're saying we should change the name of the capital city of the nation because Washington was a slave-holder?").

So, fellow philosophers, let's not be inveterate thread-jackers. Let's cultivate the capacity to stick to the topic and discuss concrete demands. If a significant movement arises that demands the removal of Washington's name from the capital city, we can discuss the merits of that demand. In the meantime, let's discuss Calhoun. (And if you're at Princeton, let's discuss Wilson.) There's nothing wrong with a series of concrete discussions.

And speaking of liberal pieties about "discussion" as ways to avoid, well, real discussion, it would be good to call the bluff of the "discussion" proponents. (The Yale president's ostensible reason for keeping Calhoun's name on the building was that it would foster "discussion.") Make Yale a 24/7/365 discussion zone about past, present, and future links between racism, slavery, reparations, student debt, public space and memorialization.

Let's have every single department be required to give a public presentation on their website about their discipline's perspectives -- in all its range of opinion and controversy -- on the above topics. From Anthropology and Architecture to Economics to Philosophy to Psychology to hell, Botany and Zoology (I would love to know what the lasting effects of the industrial plantation system had on the flora and fauna of the South, what effects the mills had on the Northeast, and so on).

The President wants "discussion"? Let's have him marshall the awesome resources of the Yale faculty and students and have a real "discussion."

Text of talk at DRM Ceremony, April 20, 2016

LSU Distinguished Research Master Award 2015

April 20, 2016

John Protevi

Phyllis M Taylor Professor of French Studies and Professor of Philosophy

I am deeply honored to receive this award before so many friends and colleagues at the university that has played such a great role in my life. My thanks go to President Alexander, Provost Koubek, Vice President Valsaraj, Associate Vice President Beck, Associate Vice President Kousoulas, the members of the Council on Research, and to the staff members of ORED who have made this occasion possible. In addition, I’d like to thank Dean Haynie, Associate Deans Blanchard and Richardson, and the College of Humanities and Social Science staff, as well as my colleagues and the staff and students in the Department of French Studies and in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies. And most certainly I want to acknowledge the love and support of my family, especially my wife, Kate Jensen, with whom I’ve shared an amazing 21 years.

It’s customary on these occasions, I think, to take a look back at one’s research trajectory. My current work brings together recent French philosophy, with recent developments in the life sciences and the cognitive sciences, all with an eye toward the concrete intersection of the social and the bodily that we live out everyday. I call that intersection “the body politic,” by which I mean to bring out the individual bodily aspect in addition to the usual collective civic aspect.

How I got there, though, requires a little storytelling. I was trained in what we call “continental philosophy,” that is, classical German and French philosophy from the 18^th to 20^th centuries (from Kant to Habermas on one side of the Rhine and from Rousseau to Foucault on the other). I was especially taught to connect those thinkers to the masters of the then-canonical Western tradition: Plato and Aristotle of course, but also Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Hume and so on.

So how did I get there, that is, to the study of “continental philosophy”?

Kathryn Gines wins Joyce Mitchell Cook Award at the APA

One of the highlights of the APA Eastern for me was when, upon being presented with the first Joyce Mitchell Cook Award by the Committee on the Status of Black Philosophers for her book, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question, Kathryn Gines of the Penn State Philosophy Department paid tribute to Joyce Mitchell Cook by reading parts of her correspondence with Cook in preparation for the first meeting of the Collegium of Black Women Philosophers, where Cook was honored. 

A brief biography of Dr. Cook from Adrian Piper's website:

Dr. Cook was the first African American woman to have been graduated from a professional philosophy program in the United States, and the first to receive a Ph.D. in Philosophy. She received a B.A. With Distinction in Philosophy from Bryn Mawr College in 1955; a B.A. (1957) and M.A. (1961) in Philosophy and Psychology from St. Hilda’s College, Oxford; and was in residence at Yale University from 1957 to 1961, where she did a dissertation in the theory of value and received her Ph.D. in 1965.

While at Yale, she was the first woman graduate student to be appointed as a teaching assistant, and was Managing Editor of the Review of Metaphysics. In that capacity she published frequent short reviews of recent philosophy books. Her commentaries remain models of clarity and philosophical acuity.

After teaching at Howard University for many years and working in the White House as a speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter, she retired early to pursue her scholarly interests more fully. Her general areas of expertise were Ethics and Social and Political Philosophy.

At the time of her death on 6 June 2014, she had been working on a manuscript on the concept of the black experience, which promised to be a major contribution to the field. Dr. Cook is interviewed in George Yancy, Ed. African-American Philosophers: 17 Conversations (New York: Routledge, 1998), pages 263-286.

Professor Gines was presented the Award by Charles Mills and George Yancy. 

The October Statement: No Rankings, Not Now, Not Ever

The September Statement contains a begged question [see Update 2 below]:

We are only declining to volunteer our services to the PGR while it is under the control of Brian Leiter. With a different leadership structure, the benefits of the guide might be achieved without detriment to our colleague. 

But are there any (net) benefits of a ranking system (even an improved one)?  Some think not: 

1) Jessica Wilson ("We need to grab the means of production, and stop looking to others to tell us who and what is of philosophical value.")

2) Mitchell Aboulafia ("Rank-and-Yank: What’s Next for the Philosophy Rankings Game?")

3) Ed Kazarian ("Maybe The Best Rankings Are No Rankings At All")

4) Me ("discussion > ratings > rankings")

Those who don't want rankings can affirm that by commenting below. I'll also allow links (just links please) to other arguments for and against rankings.

I don't want to debate rankings here, or discuss the behavior of the author of the PGR.

• If you want to do the former, you can visit Eric Schliesser's post for the case for rankings, or any of the above links for the case against them. 
• [UPDATE: lively discussion at New APPS: "Against ranking"]
• If you want to do the latter, I don't think you'll have any trouble finding places to do that.

[Update: I don't see any conflict between signing both the September and October Statements; several folks below have signed both. Please use your name in commenting though; I don't see the use of accepting pseudonymous "signatures".]

[Update 2: Over at FP, in comment 4, I accept magical ersatz's claim in comment 1 that I'm overstating the "begged question" claim by reading "benefits" in the "September Statement" as "net benefits"]

[Update 3: Sat 4 October, 11 am CDT: We now have 111 signatures.

Here are some other arguments against rankings, and in some cases, proposals for what should replace them:  

5) Rebecca Bamford ("There should be no more ranking, and more information gathering and sharing. We should have an honest, inclusive, discussion about ways forward")

6) Megahertz at xcphilosophy ("Merit vs Justice, or why we shouldn't rank philosophy programs")

7) Noelle McAfee ("A search engine for philosophy")

8) Robert Vallier ("Imagine if you will a giant database with a graphic-user interface [in which] every member of the profession would have a Profile with essential career information")

9) Anthony Beavers ("Noesis and the Encyclopedic Internet Vision")

Leupin parle de Glissant

A écouter!

Fall 2010 Talks

I'll be delivering four talks this fall: 

1. Yi-Fu Tuan Lecture Series, Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin, Madison. Friday, October 1. I'll talk on my Deleuze and War Music paper. 

2. Keynote speaker, Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy / Société canadienne philosophie continentale, University of Alberta, Edmonton. Thursday, October 14. I'll speak on my "New Transcendental Aesthetic" paper.

3. SPEP panel on Evan Thompson's work, organized by Donn Welton of SUNY Stony Brook. SPEP is hosted by McGill University and Université de Montréal. Saturday, November 6. This is also based on the "New Transcendental Aesthetic" paper. 

4. APA invited talk, Symposium on "The Concept of Life in Continental Philosophy." Other panelist is Tony Steinbock, Southern Illinois University. Boston MA, Monday December 27. Talk will be based in part on my Deleuze and Biology lectures. 

Toward a New Transcendental Aesthetic and a New Panpsychism

http://www.protevi.com/john/NewTA.pdf

Uploaded a conference paper I'll give twice this fall, to the Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy (CSCP) and to SPEP. Comments welcome!

Translation of short section from Simondon: "Topology and ontogenesis"

The translation is here: http://www.protevi.com/john/Simondon_topology_ontogenesis.pdf. 

The section is pages 222-227 of Simondon's L'Individu et sa genèse phsycio-biologique (Grenoble: Millon, 1995).

Draft of 19 July 2010. This translation is provided for academic use (personal study and classroom use) only; it is not for commercial purposes, nor for citation in any publication. A translation of Simondon’s L’Individu is forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press (by another translator, not me). Think of this as just a taste of the excellent philosophy of Simondon and hence an encouragement to buy the translation when it appears.

Academic use only; not for commercial purposes. 

Comments welcome at [email protected]. 

Two new books on empathy

For those interested in the evolution and neuroscience of empathy, here are two books I’ve enjoyed recently:

The first is Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, by Sarah Hrdy (Harvard / Belknap, 2009). It’s important because it gives a good evolutionary story of human empathy based on group child rearing practices. So it decenters (w/o unduly neglecting) the mother / child relation in favor of the “it takes a village” angle. What’s great is that she criticizes a common reading that war provides the selection pressure for in-group empathy, as well as the “Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis” (i.e., humans got good at mind-reading in order to cheat and catch cheaters w/in the group).  She also criticizes her earlier work (Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species [Random House, 1999) for being too individualistic / competitive. Very interesting stuff!

The other is Maia Szalavitz and Bruce Perry, Born for Love: Why Empathy is Essential and Endangered (HarperCollins, 2010). This book, in the popular science genre, has some great stuff on infant and child neurodevelopment and the need for love, affection, and care to enable eventual self-regulation of the stress response system. So more science to support the “essential interdependence” model. Covers some of the same ground as a favorite of mine, Bruce Wexler, Brain and Culture (MIT, 2006). Notes on Wexler available here. More stuff in this vein from the "Evolution and Biology of Morality" course I've taught recently.

Middlesex Marketing and Consulting Expenses skyrocket in 2009

UPDATE: Sunday 9 May, 5:15 pm CDT: much more is at stake in the Save Middlesex Philosophy campaign than just philosophy at one London university. Administrators all over the world are watching this situation and will have to think twice about such moves in the face of the international resistance the MDX admin is receiving. So please take part by writing a letter to the MDX Board: the program you save may be your own!

UPDATE Sunday 9 May, 3:00 pm CDT: Please see my Open Letter to the MDX Board. Please consider writing one of your own to the Board as well as to the administrators. 

-------

More interesting facts from the Middlesex 2009 financial statement, available here: http://www.mdx.ac.uk/Assets/Finan_stat_08_09.pdf (see page 32) we find the following trends in the period from 2008 to 2009: 

Expenditures for "marketing related costs" went from 1,679,000 pounds to 2,209,000 pounds

Expenditures for "consultants and professional advisors" went from 2,321,000 pounds to 3,122,000.

Yes, that's right. The year before Middlesex administrators closed the philosophy department, the admin authorized some 5.3 million pounds for marketing and consultants. They spent 3.1 million pounds on consultants alone.

How much did the consultants who recommended closing the philosophy department charge? Or did the admin come up with that on their own? 

How much less could they have spent on consultants to be able to retain the philosophy department? 

Regarding the previous post, how much of the increase in admin pay would be needed to retain the philosophy department? 

UPDATE, Friday 7 May, 2:20 pm CDT: useful links: 

Save Middlesex Philosophy website: http://savemdxphil.wordpress.com/

Petition site: http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/save-middlesex-philosophy.html

Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=119102561449990

UPDATE, Saturday 8 May, 11:00 pm CDT:

Statements in support of Middlesex philosophy by the APA and by SPEP

Open Letter to VC Driscoll, Middlesex University

29 April 2010

Vice-Chancellor of the University, Michael Driscoll
Middlesex University in London
The Burroughs
London NW4 4BT England

Dear Sir: 

I write in dismay upon hearing the news of the decision to close the philosophy program at Middlesex, and urge you to reverse course as soon as possible. 

Many of the supporters of the program have already written to you pointing out the discrepancy between the University’s claim to support research excellence and this decision to terminate an internationally prominent unit. You know the numbers cited in this regard. I would in addition offer this personal testimony. I have reviewed two books by members of the philosophy department, Professor Hallward and Dr Alliez. The reviews were published in the leading philosophy book review forum, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. In addition, I presented a paper to the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy in December 2006. So it is with first-hand knowledge that I testify to the excellence of both the staff and students at Middlesex, an excellence that fully justifies their reputation as a leading centre for the study of contemporary European philosophy as it grows out of the long history of philosophy.

Philosophy in Europe traces its heritage back 2500 years to the ancient Greeks. Along with its sibling rivals mathematics and literature, it has formed the basis of our European culture since that time. For the last 800 years, since the founding of the universities of Bologna, Montpellier, Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge, it has been the centre of the university as an institution of higher learning. In view of this history, we can rightfully claim that it has been the work of many preceding generations of philosophers that has developed the prestige of the term “university,” and your decision to eliminate the philosophy program will lead all of us today who are the guardians of that tradition to fight to strip that name from the institution you lead, and to have it referred to simply as the Middlesex Training Institute. 

To put it bluntly, sir, you have no right to call your institute a university if this decision is not rescinded. Your decision amounts to the unjust appropriation of a name whose worth was built up by those preceding me in the philosophy tradition, and I pledge to work tirelessly with all my colleagues in philosophy world-wide to take back the name. The title of “university” does not belong to you and your team; it belongs to the cultural tradition at the centre of which philosophy has stood for thousands of years, and we, who work to further that tradition, will reclaim that name, as it is no less than our duty to those who have gone before us and whose work we honor. 

Yours sincerely, 

John Protevi
PhD, Philosophy, Loyola University Chicago (1990)
Professor, Department of French Studies
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge LA 70803 USA   

"Haiti and Human Nature" talk and time line

Have uploaded two new pieces to my research page at www.protevi.com: the pdf version of a PowerPoint on "Haiti and Human Nature" as well as a time line of events in Haitian history.

New paper uploaded: Deleuze and enaction in biology

Title of the piece is Larval subjects, autonomous systems, and E. coli chemotaxis.

UMP | University of Minnesota Press Blog: Author Q&A: On Gilles Deleuze, philosophical tools, and "Political Affect"

A preview from a recent Q&A with me. 

Q: How did you decide on case studies as a method of doing philosophy?

A: I think case studies are an important and under-used tool in philosophy, as opposed to thought experiments ... with case studies we’re not after essential distinctions at the borders of categories. Instead, we’re trying to explore concrete situations and the “problems” they express. Here is where my reliance on the thought of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze comes in. Deleuze did not think in terms of essences that would slot things into categories, but thought that events are the points of intersection of “multiplicities.” That’s a technical term for Deleuze which, roughly speaking, means a field in which several processes meet to produce events, much as a crystal or a lightning bolt or a hurricane forms out of a field of multiple processes. In dealing with analogous multiplicities in our social fields we see that (1) any one move changes the conditions for future moves and that (2) no one solution exhausts the potentials for future creatively different solutions ... The more we explore the Schiavo case, the Columbine case, the Katrina case, the more we realize that concrete situations are “crystallizations” of a problematic field, and that a change here or there, if it occurs at a critical point, might make all the difference in the world. (READ THE FULL Q&A)

via www.uminnpressblog.com

Q & A with me at the U Minnesota Press blog, about Political Affect.

Notes on Being and Event, Part 7 now uploaded

Here: http://www.protevi.com/john/Badiou/index.html

Notes on Being and Event, Part 6 now uploaded

Here's the URL: http://www.protevi.com/john/Badiou/index.html

Notes on Being and Event, Part 5 now uploaded

Here's the URL to the Badiou course page: http://www.protevi.com/john/Badiou/index.html. 

Go, little book

Political Affect is now a thing of this world, a commodity, a book. Which means that like Clayton Bigsby, I'm author of 6 books, 4 of them published. 

Notes on Being and Event, Part 4 now uploaded

Here's the URL: http://www.protevi.com/john/Badiou/BE_Part4.pdf