from Hypatia Volume 15, Number 4ìA Matter of Affect, Passion, and Heartî:1 Our Taste for New Narratives of the History of Philosophy
PENELOPE DEUTSCHER
Hypatia vol. 15, no. 4 (Fall 2000)© by Penelope Deutscher
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This article compares translation and commentary practices surrounding the texts associated with French feminism with those of contemporary French women philosophers more generally. Many of the latter, discussing the history of philosophy, ask questions such as ìHow do texts play against the means they supply themselves?î and ìHow are philosophical forces, and the institutions of commentary, countered, destabilized, deregulated?î Deutscher asks what institutional means areavailable to understand this work as innovative philosophy, and to what extent these projects can usefully be analyzed as the gestures of women in philosophy.
Philosophers ... [and] their interpretations are partial in several ways: they skip over topics, such as the passions, that are perceived as marginal or irrelevant to a particular interpretation of what philosophy is; they focus on philosophers whose work most easily answers to the preconceptions created by this interpretation; they select from the works of favoured philosophers those which strike them as most relevant and coherent; and having thus shaped the subject, they string philosophers together into schools and traditions....The landscape is flattened, stripped of many of the vistas and surprises that enliven a journey, and deprived of the singularity and complexity that makes a region distinctive. Such a map is not only misleading but—to many people, at least—less enticing than it might be, for although flat lands have their charm, they are also monotonous. —Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth Century Philosophy (1997, 15-16) What is naturally uninteresting? Flimsy concepts ...or on the contrary, concepts that are too regular, petrified, and reduced to a framework.... Even the history of philosophy is completely without interest if it does not undertake to awaken a dormant concept and to play it again on a new stage, even if this comes at the price of turning it against itself. —Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (1994, 82-83)
In 1989, Nancy Fraser guest edited a special issue of Hypatia, opening ìits pages to the intense and important controversies surrounding recent French feminist theoriesî (Fraser 1989, 1). If none of the figures included in that issue reappear in these pages it is not because work by and on Kristeva, Kofman, Irigaray, and Beauvoir has not evolved remarkably since 1989. In the eleven years since the Hypatia special issue on French feminism, the breadth and depth of secondary commentary on Kristeva, Kofman, Beauvoir, Irigaray (and also Hélène Cixous) is such that each merits a special issue devoted to developments in and on their work alone. The 1999 special issue on new approaches to Beauvoir, guest edited by Margaret Simons, bears witness to this fact.That each would merit a special issue is not just an assessment of their worth, but also of the fact that certain institutional practices interior and exterior to feminism have found them worthy. Commentary has been devoted sufficient for them to have become institutionalized: not everywhere, not unproblematically, but a doctorate on any one of these figures is viable in many continentally oriented philosophy programs. A quantity of anthologies and volumes which have been published in the area of French feminist theory since the early 1980s.
A decade later, Hypatia's pages are again being opened up to a diverse group of contemporary women philosophers working in France. This volume attempts a snapshot of innovative work undertaken by contemporary women philosophers in a variety of areas which includes classics, political philosophy, philosophy of science and mathematics, philosophy ofÝ language, and postcolonial studies, in addition to feminist philosophy and philosophy of gender.2
The issue is guided by a feminist interest in the politics of translation, and institutional practices governing patterns of translation. The French women philosophers whose work is today most easily contracted for English translation are those philosophers who work most clearly and directly on problems of gender. It is at the point where the writer's relationship to feminism is in her pages, more elliptic, that institutionally based translation funding sometimes dries up. This curious state of affairs does not reflect practices of institutional recognition of women philosophers in France, where, to quote Françoise Duroux's comment cited in Michele Le Doeuff's ìFeminism is Back in France—Or Is It?,î ìin philosophy, a feminist perspective still seems a bit ridiculous or hysterical, and many women hesitate to compromise themselvesî (Duroux 1999, 5). Le Doeuff remonstrates, feeling that Duroux should give credit to the tenacity of the many women who have developed feminist philosophy under this duress. But she does not fundamentally disagree that a feminist perspective is not greatly respected in the elite philosophy institutions of France.
However, everything changes when it comes to mounting dossiers submitted to Anglo-American presses proposing the translation of contemporary French women philosophers. Figures currently unknown to English speaking audiences must be fitted into already existing categories of publishing viability, where a well-recognized area of publication is what has become known as French feminist philosophy. Work which does not fit this category, or seems to be hors catégorie, is much less likely to find translation support than work which does. Furthermore, many translations are supported by French government funding, particularly where their commercial viability is not evident. Support for such funding may well turn on the question of whether the individual in question is already a celebrated intellectual, and is less likely for figures who are currently unknown. Yet where translation funds are refused on these grounds, the very translation in question might have contributed to the eventual perception that a certain woman philosopher is a ìcelebrated intellectual.î
For all its ambiguity, feminism is also its own institution, and its practices, its consolidations and openings, are also to be tracked, and sometimes countered, displaced, and kept on the move, not by those whose interests are antithetical to feminism, but by those interested in maintaining a space of diverse and multiplied voices of women philosophers. Most importantly, this involves a displacement of Eurocentric feminist philosophy, which has been of concern to Rada Ivekovic, included in this special issue. Future ìnationî-based special issues of Hypatia should look to developments in philosophy and feminist thought in Japan and India; this turn would consolidate the interest in changing perceptions of Europe-based feminist philosophy seen in the 1993 special issue on Eastern European feminisms edited by Nanette Funk. But insofar as a second special issue on France is offered here, it hopes to refigure understanding of philosophy by women attributed to France, and to draw attention to publishing and state funding and other practices which contribute to a regularization of this understanding. In addition to its inclusion of women working in a diverse range of areas, the philosophers it includes range from younger philosophers to senior figures, such as Claude Imbert, head of philosophy at Paris's Ecole Normale Supérieure. It also includes women who have long engaged with and made vital contributions to debate in France from Belgium (Stengers) and from the former Yugoslavia (Ivekovic).
While it is most easy to identify feminist interests in feminist writings about gender, feminist questions diffuse women's philosophical practice in many different ways: in relation to issues of methodology, of style, of recognition, of institutional place, of the location of women within historical and contemporary canons, modes of recognition of innovative philosophy, questions of ìwhoseî and ìwhichî history of philosophy one wants to read and participate in, questions of what draws women to philosophy, and what repels them, questions of from what positions, and in what contexts, innovation is most facilitated. Questions of concern to feminism arise in the stories of how women who write particularly maverick books about Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the sophists, the stoics, Byzantine philosophy, ancient Indian philosophy, Kant, and phenomenology are perceived. All of the writings included are suffused with a concern about what contributes to, consolidates, and can displace and open up the institutions of philosophy to plural interpretations and voices.
The particular group of women philosophers working in France to whom this special issue of Hypatia opens its pages share, it can be argued, a particular relationship to the history of philosophy. They have taken up a displacing relationship to it through the method of close commentary. Their work is marked by the intertwined stances of analysis, critique, and resistance to accepted interpretations. They ask questions such as, ìhow do texts play against the means they supply themselves? How are philosophical forces countered, destabilized, deregulated? How are institutions of commentary—the very making of philosophers, concepts, and voices—consolidated, or countered, destabilized, deregulated?
Of course, such stances are not specific to women philosophers or feminism. To cite the most obvious examples, they are variously taken by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze, points of reference for many of the philosophers included in these pages. But perhaps women philosophers—particularly when developing neither easily demarcatable feminist philosophies nor original systems—find it more difficult to see their work interpreted as an important, original corpus, deserving of secondary study, colloquia, festschriften, special issues, and commentary. The suggestion is that women philosophers have a greater difficulty not in being respected and established in the discipline, but in being recognized as independent and original thinkers with corpuses which attract the kinds of implicit practices which establish philosophers in such terms.
The politics of translation is a critical issue for the status of women in philosophy. Translation practices are one of the most significant means of establishing women philosophers as recognized and important thinkers. Not to translate is to designate the interest of the writer in question local and temporary, in an overall context where the local and temporary is still opposed to that which is legitimated as important on a transcontinental and more enduring basis. A telling question for feminist assessments of philosophy today is not just how many women are present in philosophy departments in particular countries, present in publication, or present at conferences. One of the most indicative questions today, one in which this special issue hopes to engage Hypatia's readers, is to what extent the work of women philosophers is being translated. If we do have a sense of the interest in Heidegger in Japan, of the ongoing dominance of Habermas, Gadamer, and Apel in Germany, to give two examples, many are unfamiliar with the most innovative women philosophers in these countries unless we are able to read these languages in the original.
The writings presented here are of a particular nature. They are in most cases commentary on other philosophers, usually historical, of a close and precise kind. They are re-readings; almost invariably, they displace dominant interpretations of the philosophy in question—but ìlightlyî in manner and spirit. In some cases, only a reader familiar with the area will know of the commentary that ìça cloche,î things are not quite right. But a Frege specialist, a Wittgenstein specialist, a specialist in the sophists, or in Byzantine philosophers, may be gravely shaking their head.They may not be considered the most trustworthy commentators, and it may be that the untrustworthiness of women is experienced more uneasily in the domain of philosophy.
So, the writings included in these pages are put to the reader as a provocation: how will they be understood? What institutional and institutionalized means are available to us to understand them? What methodologies are at work, and how do we respond to them? How shall we understand them, and when should we, as the gestures of women in philosophy? What do they tell us, not so much about women in philosophy or women in philosophy in France (for there are as many methodologies which do not appear in these pages as those that do), but about philosophical institutions and their adequacy to the work of the women they incorporate, their ability to take note of, and profit from, the original voices represented here. While there are many contemporary French women philosophers who might have been included, the absence of every one a source of regret, it is hoped that in relation to those which appear here, the answers to these questions are difficult and thought-provoking.
In ìWho's Afraid of the Sophists?î Barbara Cassin writes, ìThe teachings of the sophists serve as a good tool . . .to produce something like a new narrative of the history of philosophy . . .— as well as a new delimitation of the entity called ëphilosophy' in relation to the other entities it constructsî (this issue, 104). If one approach is shared by many of the philosophers included in this special issue, it is the commitment expressed to ìproduce something like a new narrative of the history of philosophy.î In the words of Françoise Dastur, ìI might practice [history of philosophy] but I don't practice it as a historianî (this issue, 174). What histories of philosophy are practiced in these pages? Histories which are concerned to intervene into a phenomenon Cassin refers to as ìtextual Darwinismî:
From Parmenides to Heidegger, there is a kind of textual Darwinism, a process of selection of the triumphant tradition which ends up defining our vantage-point on philosophy and its history. As for the remainder, the tradition only allows us to accede to it through a paleontology of perversion. For example, we are left with Anaximander, Heraclitus, Democritus and, paradigmatically, Gorgias' Treatise, which pushes ontology too far and hence cannot be treated indulgently as a token piece of rhetoric; in other words, we are left with all the figures who were pre-Socratic in a different way. (this issue, 104)
One group of writings included in this special issue consists of philosophers interested in past figures whose status is heterodoxical to the history of philosophy. Barbara Cassin's history of philosophy privileges figures marginalized by traditions of commentary and philosophical interpretation, pre-Socratic figures such as Anaximander, Heraclitus, Democritus, and Gorgias, rather than Parmenides, for example. Marie-José Mondzain's interest in the history of Christian philosophy focuses on the figure of Nicephorus and his development of a philosophy of the image and the icon. Michele Le Doeuff discusses the development of a philosophy of freedom by the little known 17th seventeenth-century woman philosopher Gabrielle Suchon. Isabelle Stengers's interest in Denis Diderot represents her amused fascination at with the most maverick and least ìseriousî of enlightenment philosophers. Rada Ivekovic interprets ancient Buddhist philosophy from the perspective of those interested in postmodernism. Cassin, Stengers, Mondzain, and Le Doeuff ask us to refresh ourselves with novel concepts such as a pre-Socratic theory of performative ontology, a seventeenth-century theory of dynamic freedom as repentance, a Byzantine philosophy of iconocracy as material power, or a view of science as the speculations of the free imagination whose function is to divert and amuse, an approach to science more appropriate to the time of the literary salon.
But, discussing her interest in the sophists and their capacity ìto produce something like a new narrative of the history of philosophy,î Cassin also comments: ìOf course, it turns out that the canonical texts, too, have to be treated in the same fashion .... This occurs in their heterodoxical moments, when they are obliged to confront the ëothers': witness the extreme difficulty of book Gamma of Aristotle's Metaphysics or Plato's Sophist. It also appears in the very singularity of the works that are created, torn between denials and inventionsî (this issue, 104).
We might use this comment as a means of considering the relationships among a second group of philosophers included in this special issue. The philosophers discussed by Monique David-Ménard, Antonia Soulez, Catherine Malabou, and Claude Imbert—respectively, Kant, Hegel, Frege, and Wittgenstein—are hardly marginal. But these writings are read unusually. For one thing, these philosophers are read through the prism of their more heterodoxical writings. Kant is interpreted by David-Ménard through essays which are usually designated marginal, if not obscure, such as An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind and Dreams of a Spirit-Seer. Her work La Folie dans la raison pure argues that The Critique of Pure Reason is organized by Kant's debate with the ìmadî thought of the visionary Swedenborg. Wittgenstein is interpreted by Antonia Soulez in terms of fragments on ethics in rarely discussed papers such as ìA Lecture on Ethicsî and ìLectures on Freedom of the Will.î Hegel is interpreted by Malabou from the perspective of his anthropological writings, notably his Encyclopaedia. Frege is interpreted by Imbert with a particular focus on his letters, journal entries, and fragments, which shed light on, to repeat Cassin's phrase, the singular way in which his work is ìcaught between denials and inventionsî (this issue, 104) or, to use Imbert's idea, the way in which his work operatively exceeds the possibilities it gives itself. How might our understanding of Frege become less ìregular and petrified,î to use Deleuze's expression? How can we think of Frege as retheorizing reason, not as ìthe center of all possible intelligencesî but as the ìprismî of the disjointedness of language? How can Frege become a newly conceived persona who enables us to rethink the ìunusual characteristics affecting the constitution of rationalism,î its ìanthropology,î its ìtemporal gestation,î its lack of authority over its own proper usages? How can we incorporate a reading of Frege in an approach to philosophy interested in restoring ìthe forgotten possibilities of thoughtî? (Imbert forthcoming).
We might group a third series of philosophers included in this special issue in relation to a mood articulated in one more comment from Barbara Cassin on her area of expertise: ìThus there was a different way of being pre-Socraticî (this issue, 103). Françoise Dastur articulates the will to find a different way of being phenomenological. She proposes that a reading and practice of phenomenology is possible according to which we understand it as a philosophy of the event. As she writes, we need not turn away from phenomenology towards philosophies we understand as countering phenomenology (such as, she proposes, those of Lévinas and Derrida). Dastur's comments are not made in a spirit of criticism of these philosophers, but perhaps in a spirit of resistance to the oppositional philosophical mood. Rather than assuming we need to oppose phenomenology, we can locate a phenomenology which operates otherwise, re-occupied to generate a thinking of waiting, surprise, and the new.
Catherine Malabou proposes a different way to be Hegelian. Rather than solidifying Hegelian texts in terms of their depiction of the unfolding of reason and their totalizing structure, Malabou asks, what is the correct question to bring to the texts of Hegel? Not whether we are Hegelian, not whether his philosophy is sound or legitimate, but can Hegel ìstill cause a stir?î (this issue, $$). In order to locate a Hegel who can ìcontinue to make an impact on the tendencies of our times,î she interprets his philosophy, in its detail, as a thinking of the future, and of the event so that it might be said that both Hegel and futurity are generated as new conceptual personae:
Hegel's different versions of a Philosophy of Nature. . . demand that we renounce the ìwell-knownî and familiar meaning of the future and, as a consequence, the ìwell-knownî definition of time. The possibility that one temporal determination—the future—can be thought differently, beyond its initial, simple status as a moment of time—of ìthat which is now to comeî—makes it immediately clear that time for Hegel cannot be reduced to an ordered relation between moments. Rather, we will understand ìplasticityî as primarily the excess of future over the future; while ìtemporality,î as it figures in speculative philosophy, will mean instead the surplus of time over time. (this issue, 201)
In rethinking a science which ìdoes not oppose objectivity to the human capacity for fiction,î but instead ìmakes full use of this capacity,î Isabelle Stengers proposes a different way to be scientific (this issue, 46). In locating Wittgenstein as ethical philosopher of the silent, philosopher of the ìsilence of what cannot be said,î Antonia Soulez locates a different way to be Wittgensteinian. She acknowledges that a discussion of the ìsubjectî in Wittgenstein's work will seem surprising, as far from the philosopher's major preoccupations (Soulez 1998, 100) as the free will he deems chimerical (104). However, an adequate thinking of Wittgenstein, she proposes, is one ready to think ethics, once disconnected from a free will attached to a subject, as ìin languageî (107). Once it is not locatable in a subject, what kind of subjectivity is conceivable, with Wittgenstein—a subjectivity in and of language itself? How is it connected to an ethics we understand not as exercised or adhered to by a subject, but an ethics in and of language?
And where Foucault elaborates an analytic of power, Françoise Proust proposes that we might want to elaborate an analytic of resistance: ìThis would be the transcendental of every resistance, whatever kind it be: resistance to power, to the state of things, to history, resistance to destruction, to death, to war, resistance to stupidity, to peace, to bare lifeî (this issue, 19). Operating in tandem with her analytics of life, disease, and death, Proust's De la résistance (1997) locates a way of being Nietzschean, Freudian, Foucauldian, and Deleuzian, together and otherwise.
Each of these readings is informed by the affection born by the writer for Hegel, for science, for Wittgenstein, for the Sophists, for phenomenology, for Deleuze and Foucault. Some might argue that the best way to be differently scientific or Hegelian, phenomenologist or Fregian is to occupy less closely the texts in question than seen in the readings included in these pages. But for the writers represented here, the close, keenly interested reading is a way to generate the new. The new does not come by opposition to the old. It comes from loving the old, from one's alert fascination with the old, to the point where the old can yield the new. No affect permeates these pages of catching out the historical philosophers discussed—there are no gestures of unmasking or triumphant exposure of the slip, the unwanted admission, or the undermining of a classic historical text. Multiple, conflicting lines are seen to permeate the writing of many of the philosophers included. But these complex lines are dislodged with a remarkably attentive sympathy, as if the philosopher knows she is not exempt from their ambiguity.
Common to many of those included here, such as Cassin, David-Ménard, and Malabou, is a resistance to consolidated interpretations of the history of philosophy. It is a concern seen also in Le Doeuff's interrogation of institutional practices which overdetermine issues about which there will be cultural debate: ìthe institutionalization of one topic as the only topic against all othersî (this issue, 238) and Isabelle Stengers's concern at the institutional practices which overdetermine which forms of scientific inquiry will seem self-evident.Ý All these philosophers ask us to be more alert to the ways in which we often give tacit assent to the pre-given circumscription of a territory, suggesting that we should strive more actively to generate new visions of, and interests in, pre-given questions, whether these relate to social questions, science, or the history of philosophy. Where Le Doeuff raises this question in relation to the recent ìparityî debate in France, and Stengers does so with regards to recent debate about in-vitro fertilization, Monique David-Ménard and Catherine Malabou have also analyzed normalizing circumscription of the history of philosophy, such as the tendency to consider Kant's and Hegel's anthropological writings marginal or trivial. Cassin analyzes the tendency to trivialize most of the Sophistic writings, and Mondzain the tendency to consider the Byzantine period and its passionate debates about the icon and image a period in which there is no philosophical thought (Mondzain 1993, 9). Soulez admits that problems of free will and ethics will be considered ìtrivialî and ìmodestî (Soulez 1998, 102) among the institutions of Wittgenstein commentary. Ivekovic notes the tendency to subsume problems relating to the postmodern to western contexts, and tries to open the question of what exchange may be possible between ancient and contemporary Indian philosophy and western philosophy in debate about modernism and postmodernism.
Imbert and Cassin both see an ongoing imperative in continuing to think otherwise than the Greeks, otherwise than Kant, and otherwise than Heidegger. In the words of Cassin, for example, ìIt is very difficult to rid oneself of the idea that philosophers today do anything else besides rework Heidegger's gesture, even the anti-Heideggerians who sought their training in Kant. In order to move out from this circumscribed territory, no less is required, doubtless, than (a) a redefinition of philosophy throughout its history... and (b) probably some new conceptual characters, to use Deleuze's expression. But the most frequent approach, which Deleuze himself initiated or at least made use of contemporaneously (using the Stoics, Spinoza and Bergson), is to draw attention to the readings Heidegger failed to perform, or did not performî (this issue, 103). Consider, in this regard, Françoise Dastur's interventionist reading of Heidegger, particularly her attention to certain writings such as the Rectorial Address, key in the heated debates about his involvement in national socialism. These debates3 focused on writings such as his 1933 address in which the German University is described as ìthe ëhigh' school that . .. educates and disciplines the leaders and guardians of the destiny of the German peopleî (Heidegger 1985, 471). But the interpretation of Françoise Dastur suggests that we can dislodge something else from even this discourse, the thought she wants to locate, that to be in one's time is to resist one's time. In her words:
If one re-reads that text which some consider evil, Heidegger's Rectorat's address of 1933, one understands that Heidegger is affirming that one can not follow, and can not obey, except by resisting. Whatever one also thinks, one has to recognize that this is a great thought. To be of one's time is not endeavoring to go backwards, towards a primitive ideal time, nor to passively undergo one's time. It really is to resist one's time, to be in one's time in a critical fashion, out of phase. (this issue, 176)
Cassin believes it is very hard to rid oneself of Heidegger. Perhaps, suggests Dastur, such an endeavor is doomed from the outset, and hers is a creative suggestion for how to read Heidegger so as to extract from his texts, in their detail and letter, an alternate thematics as affirmed by Dastur. If it is ìwithin Hegel's detailî that ìa philosophy of the ëevent'î can be elicited, in Malabou's view, it is within the detail of Heidegger, suggests Dastur, that we can dislodge a philosophy of resistance to one's time.
Not all the contributors to this volume share the view that it is very hard to rid oneself of Heidegger's gestures in particular. But most share an interest in, and concern about, the sedimentation of philosophical concerns and established lines of inquiry, a concern which Cassin's comment evokes. Most agree that in order to displace this institutionalization of problems and concerns, philosophy needs also to be peopled with new figures. These figures may be those marginal philosophers about whom we've heard little, as when Michèle Le Doeuff turns our attention to the writing of Gabrielle Suchon and Mondzain spotlights Nicephorus. Or established philosophers are converted into new conceptual characters, as when contributors pose questions such as ìWhose Wittgenstein?î ìWhose Frege?î ìWhose Hegel?î ìWhose Buddhism?î In the words of Emily Grosholz, ìPhilosophically, Claude Imbert argues that Frege made it possible for us to think our way past ancient (Greek) habits of thought, and of Kantian habits as wellî (this issue, 153). Whose Frege is she speaking of? As Grosholz writes, a Frege who ìarticulates a diversity of canons of expressionî (this issue, 152).
How should we understand these strategies of conversion? None of the writers included endorse positions ìanti-philosophy,î or espouse a radical break with the institutions of philosophy. Yet all are concerned about the petrifying of the history of philosophy. How to be otherwise philosophical? they ask, or at least, how to be otherwise institutional?
It is in these terms that we might think of Françoise Dastur's comment, ìMy teaching has always been characterized by its efforts to practice philosophy in a (paradoxically) non philosophical mannerî (this issue, 174).Ý Non-philosophical does not mean contra-philosophical. For in the words of Isabelle Stengers, ìEvery kind of minoritarian project is threatened by the snare of trusting those with whom one does battle. The risk is that one might accept the terms of the problem as they have been definedî (this issue, 42). The moment one has adopted a position ìanti,î or ìcontra,î one has already accepted the terms of that which one believes oneself to be against. How, then, can one tell new stories about the history of philosophy while avoiding the trap of overly rigidifying the philosophy one denominates in order to counter it? As Stengers writes, ìIt so happens, for my part, that the trap would be to accept that science has an identity, an epistemological identityî (this issue, 42). Is one in a displacing position, if one has already settled the matter of the identity of who and what one takes oneself to be displacing? How can this question be kept open, and not closed, in one's ìdisplacingî gestures?
If ìnon-philosophicalî does not mean anti-philosophical, it means to resist and displace established narratives about who the main figures in the history of philosophy are, what their main philosophical contributions are, how we should characterize their texts, what the main philosophical themes are historically and today. But it means to do so in such a way as not to reconsolidate the identity, as one understands it, of the history of philosophy in one's countering gestures. A problem permeates Stengers's essay, as it diffuses through all the papers in this special issue. How can we imagine an ìother philosophy,î without pretending to imagine ìanother philosophy?î Thus the reserve seen in many of the papers included. We are presented with ìanotherî Wittengstein, ìanotherî Frege, ìanotherî Kant, ìanotherî Buddhism. Yet each gesture offers this presentation while working vigorously to avoid the countering position, and avoiding the presentation of these figures as another Wittgenstein, another Frege, another Kant, another Hegel, another Ancient India. As they are presented to us by Imbert, David-Ménard, Soulez, and Ivekovic, Kant is the philosopher who articulates the proximity of reason to madness, Frege the philosopher who opens up thought to history, anthropology, and multiplicity, Wittgenstein the philosopher who opens up thought to the philosophical work of silence, Ancient India the site for a thinking of relativism and anti-universalism.
Can one avoid consolidating the position of the ìotherî (history of philosophy) which reconsolidates the same while still calling into question homogenizing practices surrounding the interpretation of the history of philosophy? Where we see Stengers caution against an interest in the marginal position which would be grounded in an acceptance of oppositional terms, Cassin writes that her interest in the Sophist ìoriginates in an interest in the margin where these roughly crossed-out texts lieî (this issue, 105). But this is not, she explains, a project to relentlessly ìmake the margin into an area of research, legitimizing a militant pathos in favor of accursed thinkers, against debarments and exclusion.î ìHence,î she affirms, ìI will not be proposing a ërehabilitation' of the sophistî (this issue, 105).
What is Cassin trying to avoid, in her wariness of simply rehabilitating the marginal position? Perhaps she addresses the problem which is also raised by Isabelle Stengers in her writings on the history of science. How can one cultivate a taste for the new without losing the battle in our acceptance, suppositions about, or even our institutionalization of what is the ìoldî? Perhaps this is the paradox of ìinterest.î The very value of interest we adopt, a value permeating the papers in this special issue, accumulates its interest only on the back of sedimentations we would hope also to resist. There is no solution to this dilemma, beyond recognizing the debt of what we take as the new to our own contributions to institutionalization and normalization. One of the practices Stengers seems to endorse is an attention to the practices which contribute to normalization of lines of inquiry. She asks, who benefits from such lines of inquiry? Who does not contribute to the formulation of questions? To pose such questions may be an alternative to accepting the identification of the adversary. One would ask, not, who is the adversary, but, what practices contribute to the identification of an adversary, and how do my own practices function in relation to this question? Stenger's point is partly that feminism itself—of course—plays its role, has its interest and profit, and institutionalizes itself, and one's sense of this must accompany a practice which endorses a fostering or love of the new. So, in the words of Malabou, ìThe success, the ëfuture' of this approach, will depend on its capacity to remain open to the arguments that oppose itî (this issue, 200). If the philosophers here try to widen that openness in their readings, the accompanying onus is that their own readings be similarly open. As Le Doeuff writes, while a certain tradition may have associated philosophy with a ìconsolidating of power from above,î what can have more appeal for us today, and certainly for the philosophers included in this issue, is ìa definition of philosophyî which better ìallows for the possibility of dissentî (this issue, 249). It is in this spirit that multiple Hegels, Wittgensteins, Freges and Nicephoruses emerge from the detail of their own texts. In the words of Monique David-Ménard, ìReading against the way in which I had been taught, attending to the neglected details of his work, I came to discover in Kant an entirely different Kantî (David-Menard 1992, 41).
Catherine Malabou offers up the possibility of a reading according to which Hegel becomes philosopher of plasticity, and philosopher of the event. A philosophy of the event is also dislodged from Dastur's re-readings of twentieth-century phenomenology. Furthermore, Malabou's gesture suggests a strange tenderness seen,4 for example, in her interest in the ìgentlenessî of Hegel's Encyclopaedia, which might be related to the affect of enjoyment and appreciation diffused through Dastur's reading of phenomenology. Why such love for the philosophy one understands oneself to have changed? Perhaps it is love for the philosophy one has been able to change, not through grand gestures or oppositional agonism, but through mutation. Dastur loves phenomenology, but could we say that she loves the phenomenology she can change? Many of the readings included in this special issue breathe with love—love of scholarship, and of an active scholarship which is not dutiful, love of reading, love also of transformation.
In addition to the many old and newly rethought philosophical values which saturate the papers included in this special issue—interest, resistance, restoration, diversity, plurality, the forgotten, dissent, openness, freedom, the event, time, and futurity—we also see the interest in philosophy as therapy in the work of both David-Ménard and Soulez, who share an interest in the methodological interconnection of psychoanalysis and philosophy. David-Ménard is interested in the conditions of possibility of rational thought, which she relates to the phantasms at work in the production of philosophical discourse. Antonia Soulez agrees: ìI am convinced that one does not choose one's questions for rational reasons. There is a deep link between them and one's story or encounters.î She adds, ìthe strategy of ëdisaffection' is part of the problem of writing philosophy, disaffection of desire, of suffering (take the statements about ësuffering' in Wittgenstein's remarks), what makes possible the sublimation of ëmy voice.'î All that belongs to the same question: ìHow far from desire has philosophy got since the time of Antiquity or of the religious philosophers (St Anselme, St Augustine)?î5 Where Monique David-Ménard analyzes the therapeutic function that Kant's critical philosophy plays for the melancholic philosopher, Soulez disengages a Wittgenstein who may be understood as analyzing the ìtherapeutic function of grammarî: when Wittgenstein devotes his attention to public language, ìPerhaps he considers that for a subject [on Soulez's interpretation, language] to be well, the language of that subject [on Soulez's interpretation, language again] must be ëin good health.'. . . But in this case, must we not therefore recognize that Wittgenstein's ethics concern . . . ëresponsibility'? It is only from this point of view that grammatical therapy is justified. We are in effect co-responsible for the health of the collective speaking bodyî (this issue, 144).
An interest in the therapeutic leads to a question which is opened up by the contribution of Isabelle Stengers and by its introduction by Elizabeth A. Wilson. Why is interest a feminist value? Wilson's introduction suggests that it might be seen as a therapeutic value: Interest, and its affective affiliates--excitement, enjoyment, surprise and laughter--seem to be attenuated in much of the contemporary feminist commentary on the sciences. More often than not feminist analyses of the sciences amplify interest in their chosen object of inquiry, not through enjoyment and laughter, but through the negative affects: anger, contempt, disgust, fear, shame. Yet the positive affective affiliation of interest-enjoyment is indispensable to well-nourished intellectual critiqueî (this issue, 38). This return to a history of philosophy as reshaped, re-read, and re-affected by contemporary women philosophers working in France is not, of course, restricted to them. It can be located in many directions in Anglo-American contemporary feminist philosophy. After a recent issue of Hypatia focusing on recent directions in Australian feminist philosophy, one might recall Moira Gatens's and Genevieve Lloyd's reading of Spinoza in Collective Imaginings (Gatens and Lloyd 1999), which bears methodological similarities to the readings in this special issue. In an interview published in Hypatia, the authors express their interest in revising a history of philosophy standardized in terms of Descartes and his legacy in favor of a figure who is for them, is the strongest sense, interesting:
[Susan James]: Why did Spinoza exert such a fascination?[Lloyd]: I think . . . it was largely because Spinoza spoke in an alternative voice, engaging with, and offering alternatives to, ways of thinking that I now see in retrospect as being the residue of Cartesianism in contemporary philosophy.î (Gatens and Lloyd 2000, 41)
As Lloyd goes on to explain:
I see what I'm doing with Moira . . . as a positive appropriation of the philosophical tradition rather than as a negative objection to it. . . . I'm now much more interested in the positive appropriations—in looking to sources in the philosophical tradition for ways of reconceptualizing issues that are under current debate, . . . than I am in the more negative criticisms of past philosophers. (45)
The problem reappears here. How can an alternative Spinoza be disengaged, the result of a positive appropriation, without this occurring at the expense of an entrenchment of Cartesianism as that which we understand Spinoza to provide an alternative to? Thus, Susan James (1997) adds to the interest in non-Cartesian seventeenth-century philosophers such as Spinoza, an interest in the more marginal characters of Cartesianism, such as Malebranche, and the less conventionally ìCartesianî aspects of Cartesianism, such as Descartes's thinking of the emotions and passions as crucial to rationality. Putting together the point that Descartes sees bodily motions as related to spiritual thoughts, sees the passions as dependent on the body, describes emotions as having both physical and mental aspects, and argues that habits of feeling are stored in the body, ìIt is not hard to imagine a less metaphysically rigorous defender of the Cartesian view of the soul might conclude that the body thinks, and that among its thoughts are the passionsî (James 1997, 106).
Why have many feminist philosophers increasingly distanced themselves from negative objections to philosophy or philosophers? To follow the suggestion developed in the contribution by Stengers and the discussion of Sylvan Tomkins and Eve Sedgwick in Wilson's introduction to Stengers, this question may lead us to a new conception of the practice of philosophy, in terms of the affective range it allows us to occupy. The objection to the mode of negative criticism and objection need not be based on intellectual grounds alone. Perhaps it also expresses a positive hope for the quality of the affective range in which one lives and writes as a woman philosopher. What does philosophy enable us to be? Not just, what can we know, but what range of emotions, stances, and actions does it allow us to occupy? Does it expand our subjective possibilities as negative critics, or as lovers of the new—for example, the new that we find among the letter of the old? Could feminism engage in a therapeutic assessment of its relationship to the history of philosophy? I think this is the question indirectly asked by the many of the pieces included in this special issue, so consistently inflected by the affect of interest in and passion for philosophy and its history.
Perhaps they remind us to reclaim history of philosophy as one of those sites for the community of debate in which Le Doeuff suggests that freedom—as she would like to define it—is exercised, where freedom is associated with ìa certain way of changing one's opinionî (this issue, 250).
One of the criteria for the pieces included in this special issue is that they tell new stories about the philosophical-historical context in which they intervene. Institutionalized stories reduce the range of voices and narratives about the history of philosophy, and narrow the field. If the new stories about figures ranging from the sophists through to Deleuze presented in this collection are attractive, it is insofar as they add to the domain of narratives and debates about the history of philosophy. And if in the process they change and are themselves open to change, perhaps they may be associated with the thinking of freedom suggested by Michèle Le Doeuff and Gabrielle Suchon.
Notes
Thanks to Françoise Collin and many other colleagues in France, in particular Monique David-Ménard,Michèle Sinapi, and Françoise Duroux, for their great generosity in making known to me the work of many contemporary French women philosophers, and in helping to facilitate research in France towards this special issue. This research was supported by a grant from the Australian Research Council. Invaluable support was also provided by all the translators, whose efforts extended to the relentless pursuit of references, and whose painstaking work was deeply appreciated. Thanks to all the French women philosophers who assisted the translators and whose collaboration was invaluable. My personal thanks to the colleagues and family who also offered considerable help and ideas, including Sara Hein”maa, Peter Roeper, Paul Thom, Elizabeth A. Wilson, Krzysztof Ziarek, Max Deutscher, Michael Jasper, and Robin May Schott. Finally, very warm thanks to Hayden Bass, Dana Berthold, Alexa T. Schriempf, and Carrie Kepple for their patient and scrupulous editorial work and to Laurie Schrage and Nancy Tuana for their generous support of the issue.
1. Quotation from Françoise Proust, ìIntroduction to De la Résistance (this issue, 21).
2. Some of the writers included in this special issue, including Barbara Cassin, Françoise Proust, Monique David-Ménard, and Rada Ivekovic, were first included in a 1992 special issue of the French/Belgian feminist philosophy journal Les Cahiers du Grif, edited by the well-known feminist philosopher Françoise Collin, entitled Femmes/philosophie: les provenances de la pensée.
3. See, for example, Farias (1989) and, for a collection of writings debating the issue, Neske and Kettering (1990).
4. In her book on universals in philosophy, David-Ménard describes her work on ìthose edifices of thought founded on a notion of the universalî as a combination of violence and tenderness (David-Ménard 1997, 2).
5. Private correspondence of 21 February, 2000.
References
David-Ménard, Monique. 1992. La folie dans la raison pûre: Sur la genèse d'une lecture. Cahiers du grif 46: 41-45.
———.1997. Les constructions de l'universel: Psychanalyse, philosophie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1994. What is philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press.
Duroux, Françoise. 1999. Statut des études féministes en France. Diplômées 188 (March): 3-7.
FarÌas, Victor. 1989. Heidegger and Nazism. Ed. Joseph Margolis and Tom Rockmore. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Fraser, Nancy. 1989. Introduction. Hypatia 3 (3): 1-9.
Gatens, Moira, and Genevieve Lloyd. 1999. Collective imaginings: Spinoza past and present. London: Routledge.
———. 2000. The power of Spinoza: Feminist conjunctions. Interview by Susan James. Hypatia 15 (2): 40-58.
Heidegger, Martin. 1985. The self-assertion of the German university. The review of metaphysics 38 (3): 470-80.
Imbert, Claude. Forthcoming. An interview with Claude Imbert. By Penelope Deutscher. Women's philosophy review.
Irigaray, Luce.1985a. Speculum of the other woman. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
———.1985b. This sex which is not one. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
James, Susan. 1997. Passion and action: The emotions in seventeenth century philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Mondzain, Marie-José. 1993. Image, icône, économie: Les sources byzantines de l'imaginaire contemporain. Paris: Editions du Seuil.
Neske, Günther, and Emil Kettering. 1990. Martin Heidegger and national Socialism. Trans. Lisa Harries. New York: Paragon.
Soulez, Antonia. 1998. Essai sur le libre jeu de la volonté. In Leçons sur la liberté de la volonté, by Ludwig Wittgenstein. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
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