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INTRODUCTIONS TO FRENCH PHILOSOPHY
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Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) became known as one of the leading founders of semiotics. By reducing language to its rudimentary structure, what he calls the “linguistic sign,” Saussure succeeds in establishing linguistics as an independent science. Saussure’s theories not only vastly changed the field of linguistics, but also ushered in a new era of intellectual thought – a movement that is known today as “structuralism.” According to the theory, different concepts, ideas, and realities, all of which were previously thought to exist independently of language, are in fact dependent on a collective linguistic structure. Language forms the basis of all thought. Saussure’s structuralism influenced a number of important future theorists from various fields, such as Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, and Lévi-Strauss. Three years after his death, his lecture notes were published under the title, Cours de linguistique générale (Course in General Linguistics). Primarily written down by his pupils, this collection of notes underwent several editions and is now considered to be Saussure’s most significant accomplishment.
The concept of freedom, in Saussurean structuralism, is nothing more than a linguistic sign that bears the stamp of collective approval. In Course in General Linguistics, Saussure posits that different sound images, the “signifier,” and the concepts they represent, the “signified,” have an arbitrary relationship to one another. Signifiers can take the shape of a combination of written and spoken letters or symbols, whereas the signified concept gives these combinations meaning. When pieced together, signifier and signified form the basic principles of a linguistic sign. Designated values distinguish one sign from another. Although the value of a sign is subjected to change, the signification of signs is always dependent on binary oppositions. The sign “freedom,” for instance, distinguishes itself from “restraint” merely because it is an opposite sign. Values that are considered to be free only signify themselves through values that are regarded as unfree or restricted; one sign cannot exist without the other. Moreover, one does not posses the ability to alter the signifier and signified relation. In this respect, there is no individual freedom of choice. One is born into a community of speakers, and thus must adhere to prescribed laws of a collective linguistic system. Nonetheless, Saussure stresses that alteration and evolution is a necessary and unavoidable process in language – something that is invariably regulated by social forces.
Jan Hengge |
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Le Corbusier (1887-1965), born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, was an architect famous for his contributions to what is now called modernism, or the International Style of architecture. Le Corbusier was heavily influenced by the problems he saw in the industrial city at the turn of the twentieth century. He believed that industrial housing techniques contributed to crowding, squalor, and a sense of confinement, and felt that society could be improved through the application of appropriate housing concepts. Le Corbusier took it as his generation’s duty to rethink the meaning of architecture for a new technological and socially egalitarian age. For Le Corbusier, the lack of ornamentation and a general geometrical simplicity were not only functional and free, but also revealed the truth of a building in its naked essential existence. His architectural style was based on a vision of a future society that would be true to its own industrial nature. Le Corbusier’s career spanned five decades, with buildings constructed across central Europe, India, and Russia, and one structure in the United States, the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1962). He was a painter, sculptor, writer, and furniture designer, and was one of the most influential urban planners of his time.
Le Corbusier’s 1923 collection of magazine articles, Vers une architechture (Towards a New Architecture), is perhaps the most important architectural book of the twentieth century. In it, Le Corbusier explicates his technical and aesthetic theories, his views on industry and economics, and his conception of the relation of form to function. Moreover, he proclaims famously that a house is a machine for living, the components of which should behave as perfect servants, sustaining and serving the inhabitant so that he may be free to pursue higher aims. In the following selection from this book, entitled “Architecture or Revolution,” Le Corbusier claims that emancipation from a somewhat Marxian sense of alienation can only be achieved through the construction of a liberating kind of housing that will edify rather than enclose the worker. For Le Corbusier, it is only through the pursuit of an architecture better suited to human needs that revolution can be avoided.
Brook Aidan Rosini |
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Jean André Wahl (1888-1974) was a professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne from 1936 to 1967. He is best known as one of the first people to introduce to France Kierkegaard (Études Kierkegaardiennes, 1938) and Hegel (Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel 1929). Wahl was firstly a historian of philosophy. Yet in his refusal to interpret Hegel along totalitarian lines and in his close intellectual affiliation with the Anglo-American tradition (in particular Alfred North Whitehead and William James) of empiricism and pragmatism, he developed his own unique brand of existentialism.
As a Jew during WWII, Wahl was sent to a concentration camp in Drancy, France. He escaped, eventually fleeing to the United States. From 1942 to 1945, with support from the Rockefeller Center, Wahl created in New York the École Libre des Hautes Études, designed to bring together French students and scholars living in exile with American writers and intellectuals. Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens each participated in discussions. He was later given a position at Mount Holyoke, where he created Décades de Mount Holyoke, modeled on the series of conversations known as Décades de Pontigny started by Paul Desjardins in 1910. Wahl eventually returned to teach in Paris, where in 1945 he delivered perhaps his most important lectures on the work of Heidegger. His writings and teachings had a broad influence, from Michel Henry (who conducted his Thesis under Wahl) to Emmanuel Lévinas and Jean Paul Sartre. He was an important part of the generation of the 30s.
“Freedom” is a chapter from Wahl’s only book written in English, The Philosopher’s Way (1948). Here, the author situates his investigation of freedom between two classical justifications of the term: the fatalist’s submission to a universal cause (Epicurean) and the determinist’s devotion to particular truths (Socratic). Covering much ground in a short span of time, this essay illuminates numerous perspectives on the meaning of freedom, eventually morphing them together into a singular, decisive conclusion.
Nathaniel Greenberg |
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The work of Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) had a tremendous impact on psychoanalysis, philosophy and especially literary criticism in the 20th century. Drawing on such diverse thinkers as Hegel, Freud and Saussure, Lacan can be difficult to comprehend but also a rich source for further investigations. Unlike Freud, who gained some of his major insights through experiments with neurotic patients, Lacan developed his first psychoanalytic models by studying cases of paranoia. In 1932, he published De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité; his doctoral dissertation, in which he attacked several dominant modes of psychiatric explanation. Lacan mainly objected to the practice of referring mental illnesses to a physical cause. To him, the personality of the patient—from intellectual capabilities to childhood experiences—was much more important than bodily factors. Lacan also strongly emphasized the social dimension of one’s psychic constitution. He argued that Aimée, the paranoid “subject” of his dissertation, tried to stab an actress because she had seen an idealized version of herself in the latter. Having exteriorized her “ego-ideal” (a term Lacan borrowed from Freud), Aimée engaged in a deadly struggle with the placeholder of that ideal. A few years later, Lacan elaborated on the notion of the split subject in his lecture “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” Lacan defined the mirror stage as the moment of self-recognition in the development of human beings. At the age of 6 to 18 months, infants have been observed to recognize themselves for the first time in a mirror. For Lacan, this meant that they have gained an ego, which is, however, at the same time an alter-ego because it is seen in a distant image. The finding that the subject is always already decentered has informed many so-called post-structuralist discourses. When Lacan delivered his lecture on the mirror stage in 1936, though, he was still convinced that an alienated patient might be cured by the “mirror” of the analyst. With his turn toward structuralism at the beginning of the 1950s, he abandoned such a dialectical concept of analysis. From then on, Lacan acknowledged the possibility that reflecting the projection of the analysand might objectify his or her misrecognition of the ego. Stressing even more the function of language in the formation of the subject, Lacan made the now famous statement that the unconscious is structured like a language.
In “Presentation on Psychical Causality” (1946), Lacan reiterated his argument that mental illnesses belong to the symbolic sphere and do not have an organic cause: “madness is experienced within the register of meaning.” (135) That is why a mad person may not show any corporeal defects but will be unable to form coherent sentences. Lacan focused his critique of the “organo-dynamism” of his colleague Henri Ey in this presentation. According to Lacan, Ey’s psychosomatic approach cannot explain the many different forms of madness. Moreover, Ey wrongly believes that “‘mental illnesses are insults and obstacles to freedom; they are not caused by free, that is purely psychogenic, activity.’” (128) In Lacan’s view, Ey makes two mistakes here. First, he clings to a mind-body dualism that does not do justice to the way human beings perceive objects. Human beings are essentially thinking, self reflecting beings and so they are not completely determined by material causes. Secondly, psychotic persons have not acceded to the symbolic order and therefore are free. Lacan states that “madness is freedom’s most faithful companion.” (144) Hence, the freedom of mentally sane human beings is not circumscribed by material circumstances but by the symbolic order.
Andreas Pöschl |
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Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991) published over 60 books throughout his life. In America he is primarily acknowledged as an urban sociologist while his philosophical contribution remains undervalued. However, Lefebvre’s philosophical influence on western Marxism and postmodernism is so significant that he was acclaimed by Fredric Jameson as “the last great classical philosopher.”
Lefebvre was perhaps the first Marxist philosopher to shift his emphasis from an understanding of modern society as the center of “production” to modern society as the center of “consumption.” Concentrating on a micro-analysis of “everyday life,” he reoriented Marxism away from the traditional macro-analysis of social structures. Compared with the concrete and meaningful “daily life” of ancient societies, “everyday life” in modern society is abstract and fragmented. Its meaning is evacuated by the mass consumption of the overwhelming signs, displays and products created and controlled by the modern bureaucratic society. This consumption of ubiquitous signs, which can be infinitely copied and disseminated, stimulates people’s illusionary desire and instills in them an endless pursuit of the “make-believes.” During this process of mystification, human beings are deprived of totality, reduced to abstractions and alienated from their real life. However, Lefebvre insists on a dualistic reading of “everyday life.” Even though “everyday life” is inauthentic and alienated in the modern society, the attributes of real humanity still lies buried in “everyday life” and can only be evoked and realized by revolution.
Lefebvre’s hope of revolution leads to his discussion on freedom. In the excerpt from Critique of Everyday Life (1948), he regards Marxism as a real critical knowledge of everyday life. Having critically analyzed the “individuality,” “mystification,” “money,” “needs,” and “work”——all of which are alienated (or become the tools for alienation) in the modern society, he calls for concrete and dialectical freedom. In the modern society, the concrete, individual “freedoms” are reduced to “freedom in general.” Therefore, people tend to equate abstract freedom (e.g. the political emancipation, or the independence of a nation/state) to the concrete freedoms of human beings. However, such an illusion of freedom is created by ideological mystification. Concrete freedom, which lies deeply in the de-alienated “everyday life,” can only be realized in the dialectical process of “becoming” and through man’s relentless action to break “mysterious, oppressive and blind necessity.” As Lefebvre notes, it is precisely “knowledge and action” that elevate human beings from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.
Twenty years later, facing the increasing alienation caused by the booming industrialization, Lefebvre published Everyday Life in the Modern World (1968). In the selected article, he notes that knowledge, which previously played a crucial role in the realization of freedom, has become increasingly unreliable. Arguing against the prevalent Structuralism, Lefebvre believes that the structuralized knowledge tends to sum up all the disconnected experiences into a unity and claims mastery over experiences. However, knowledge detached from the everyday experience of life creates compulsion, not freedom. Only through permanent cultural revolution can the “concepts of art, creation, freedom… be restored and required their full significance.” Here, cultural revolution does not resort to the systematization of knowledge, but rather a Baudelaire-like experience of the “moment” in everyday life. “Creation” and “experiential value” are emphasized to contrast the lifeless mechanical world. Lefebvre lists three revolutionary elements of the process towards freedom: sexual revolution, urban reform and festival life, all of which bring human beings back to the original “adaptation to” rather than “mastery over” nature. Here Lefebvre’s Marxism is clearly mixed with the influence of Nietzsche and Heidegger.
Yizhong Gu |
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Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) arguably chose existentialism as the project that should define his being. Publishing numerous novels, plays and philosophical treatises, Sartre spent a lifetime trying to make his ideas known. He has often been considered the main representative of existentialism–the cultural and philosophical movement that dominated Europe’s intellectual scene in the 1940s and 50s. Existentialist thought may be described as an attempt to capture human existence in new terms. For existentialist philosophers, neither scientific nor moral theories fully explained the existence of human beings. Instead, thinkers like Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger and José Ortega y Gasset sought to conceive of categories that allowed for human subjectivity. Their concerns were shared by such artists as Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, André Gide, André Malraux, Alberto Giacommeti, Jean-Luc Godard and Ingmar Bergman.
While the roots of philosophical existentialism reach back to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Sartre specifically built his argument on Husserl’s phenomenological method. Husserl suggested that phenomenologists should study the structure of consciousness by bracketing out questions about the existence of material objects. According to Husserl, whether an object exists outside of consciousness or not becomes irrelevant as soon as it is experienced. What remains important, however, is as what the thing is perceived. For Husserl, consciousness is always intentional, i.e. a consciousness of something. Sartre elaborated on this notion and reasoned that consciousness has to be an absolute nothingness precisely because it is a consciousness of something that is outside of it, of something that it is not. If one can only be conscious of something external to consciousness, Sartre argued (and thereby fell back into the “natural attitude” Husserl rejected), then consciousness and the object world belong to two different kinds of being: the for-itself (pour-soi) and the in-itself (en-soi). It becomes apparent here why existentialists had to develop a new categorical framework in order to grasp human existence. Human beings consist of matter and mind, solid being-in-itself and dynamic being-for-itself, and so they elude fixed, “objective” concepts. Thanks to their consciousness, human subjects can moreover negate their own being, or facticity. Sartre’s interpretation of Husserl’s intentional consciousness in “La Transcendence de l’Ego. Esquisse d’une description phénoménologique” (1936) demonstrated that consciousness transcends the given. Yet Sartre added that this holds only true for a pre-reflective consciousness. For Sartre, consciousness is pre-reflective and present to it-self at first, but ceases to actively “nihilate” when it reflects upon itself, i.e. takes itself as an object. In the same essay, he criticized the Cartesian cogito for actually being such a self-reflective consciousness. The consciousness of Descartes’ “I am” is, according to Sartre, different from the pre-reflective consciousness of the “I think.” The nothingness, brought about by the latter type of consciousness, is specified in “L’imaginaire, psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination” (1940). Through imagination, Sartre expounded, consciousness “nihilates” twice: first, it withdraws from the world, and then it posits an object apart from that world. Since consciousness can always distance itself from the world, it is necessarily imaginary and therefore free from reality.
In L’Etre et le Néant (1943), his most impressive work, Sartre set forth his ideas about consciousness, being and freedom. Human subjects are essentially free, he claimed, because they need to decide at any moment whether they want to sustain or change their current states of being. Even if they have apparently yielded up to their fate, human beings have really chosen to do so. The powerful statement, “man is condemned to be free” still resonates today. Ultimately, human subjects create their own being through their actions; their projects or praxes reveal the meaning of their existence to them. That is why Sartre can also state that “existence precedes essence.” In his view, acts are intentional and require the projection of an absent ideal as well as the negation of a present reality. Under these premises, it hardly seems surprising that Sartre concluded his lecture “L’existentialisme est un humanise,” two years after the publication of L’Etre et le Néant, with the words “existentialism is optimistic, it is a doctrine of action.” There are, however, also significant limitations to one’s freedom. In L’Etre et le Néant, Sartre introduced a third kind of being: for-others (pour-autrui). As human subjects become objects for others, their freedom is confined. This circumvention of freedom does not require the presence of others, it suffices that a subject sees itself through another’s eyes. Moreover, human beings tend to limit their freedom themselves as they experience the true condition of their existence with immense anxiety. Facing the meaninglessness, the nothingness of their being, human subjects often resort to self-imposed limitations of their freedom; they deceive themselves about the freedom of their condition, they live in “bad faith.” Given these restrictions, the realization of one’s freedom becomes highly questionable.
Andreas Pöschl |
Emmanuel Lévinas (1906 – 1995) was born in Lithuania, where he received a traditional Jewish education. He became a French citizen in 1930. As a soldier during WWII, he was captured by German forces. It was during his imprisonment that he began work on his first major texts De l'Existence à l'Existant and Le Temps et l'Autre (1948). Prior to the war Lévinas studied at the University of Freiburg. There he met and studied under both Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Lévinas’s work was also greatly influenced by Judaism. The underlying quest of his most important works, including Totality and Infinity: an essay on exteriority (1961), engage the basic question of how to live together, independently and dependently, as both spiritual and economic creatures. Lévinas worked closely with Jean Wahl, whose concentration on the concrete and existential forms of thought encouraged Lévinas’s rejection of the totalitarian philosophies in the tradition of Hegel. Moving beyond the aloofness of traditional metaphysics and phenomenology, Lévinas infused his philosophy with great concern for human rights, social equality and spiritual wellbeing. The experience of the Other, the meaning of face-to-face interaction and the pervasive power of the Golden Rule are among his most important contributions to modern philosophy.
“The Ego and the Totality,” was published in Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, in 1954. “Conceiving of a freedom external to my own is the first thought.” Lévinas writes. “It marks my very presence in the world.” The primary topic of this essay is contained in the title: the relationship between the ego and the multiplicity or totality of all egos. Rare for Lévinas, religion, metaphysics and ethics are tightly interwoven here. While freedom is what is at stake, the role and nature of freedom is the key to this fascinating and sprawling investigation into human interaction, justice and responsibility. The essay captures many of the crucial ideas of Lévinas’s philosophy.
Nathaniel Greenberg |
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Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-present) is known as an anthropologist and leading structuralist. He began his anthropological fieldwork in Brazil, where he studied Amazonian Indian tribes. Lévi-Strauss became particularly interested in the social structure of kinship, namely the roles of women in non-western cultures. Influenced by contemporary structural theorists, he later started his work with language and its influence on culture. By rereading traditional anthropological findings, Structural Anthropology (1958) studies societal behavior in a broad range of ethnographies. In this book, comprised of a collection of essays, Lévi-Strauss examines societies, ranging from South American and Asian to European cultures, through the lens of linguistic structures. More specifically, he is interested in the psychological functions of language – how linguistic structures form the basis of social kinships, laws, and mythologies. He asks whether particular aspects of social life, including art and religion, can be studied using linguistic methodologies, and if these aspects actually mirror the structure of language.
Drawing on Saussurean semiotics, Lévi-Strauss’s notion of freedom is closely tied to linguistic structure and its influence on social behavior. Various sound images and their signified meanings are unconsciously interconnected in the human psyche. On a purely structural level, the signifier-signified connection appears arbitrary, but plays a significant and meaningful role in society, in that it forms the basic structure of a collective language. If comprehensible communication is to be ensured, adherence to the social structure of language is necessary. Because language is collectively agreed upon, individual freedom is compromised. Certain values of societal signs and symbols may undergo significant transformations, as part of a dynamic language, whereas others appear inherent, invariable, and historically bound. The latter type cannot be freely altered; rather, value is predetermined by the social laws of a culture, according to Lévi-Strauss. Similarly, as a signified concept, freedom is nothing more than a social value. Society designates the expanses and limits of freedom, and anything that falls outside of the social realm is, and continues to be, restricted. Consequently, if one assimilates into the symbolic order of society, one’s freedom is inevitably confined.
Jan Hengge |
Louis Althusser (1918-1990) is best known for his structural reinterpretation of Marxism and incessant concentration on “ideology” as a core concept of Marxism. In his most influential book For Marx (1965), Althusser responds to the dramatic year of 1956 when Stalin was severely criticized by the Twentieth Congress for various cruel deeds. This event stimulated vehement attacks on Stalinism and a resurgent humanistic interpretation of Marxism. Although Althusser disagreed with Stalin’s Econominism, he also strongly objected to the humanistic Marxism. For Althusser, Marx’s Humanism occurred only in the Young Marx Period. Around 1845, he argued, Marx had an epistemological break and stepped from an ideological period into a scientific period. In this way, Marx established a new anti-humanist science, the concrete, practical and universal science of the history of “social formations.”
Freedom, as a key concept of humanism, is critically analyzed in the selected essay “Marxism and Humanism.” For Althusser, freedom is only the humanist ideology of the “imaginary” and “lived” relation between men and the world. Althusser invokes two stages of Marx’s humanist period. In the first stage, Marx believes “freedom is the essence of man just as weight is the essence of bodies.” When the State comes to be the “State of human nature,” re-organizing its essence and becoming its source of reason, the true freedom of human beings is realized. In the second stage (1842-1845), Marx realizes that the State is itself a contradiction between its essence (reason) and its existence (unreason). Therefore, man is free only when he is first of all a “communal being,” a being consummated in relations (with men and with objects) rather than by the ego. If in these two stages Marx still professes a philosophy of man, the year 1845 witnesses his rupture with humanism, which Marx defines as an ideology. For Althusser, ideology is the organic part of every social totality and human society could not exist without ideology. However, ideology is also a mirror that reflects the imaginary rather than the realistic relationship between men and the world. In this way, freedom is only a humanist ideology. It does not describe the reality of freedom, but only expresses a will, a hope or a nostalgia of freedom. Althusser notes, the 18th-century bourgeoisie developed the notion of freedom, but they only aimed to liberate people for the sake of exploitation. In a word, freedom is a language game created and controlled by ideology, which generates the inescapable structures imposed on human beings. Does this overwhelming net weaved by ideology permanently smother people and prevent them from having real freedom? Althusser’s answer is indeed pessimistic.
Yizhong Gu |
Michel Henry (1922-2002) was born in French Indochina. After his father’s death, he moved with his mother to France in 1929. Henry was a student during the German occupation of France and was heavily involved in the French resistance. He became a professor of philosophy at the University of Montpellier in 1960, where he remained affiliated until his death. The broad scope of Henry’s philosophy is remarkably succinct, devoted to understanding life as it is and not as it is recorded by history. Trained as a phenomenologist, Henry positioned himself against the traditional phenomenology of Husserl, rejecting the idea of human consciousness as guided by perception and linked inextricably to the external world. In Christianity, Henry found a self-referential and adaptable philosophy of truth, generated from inside man. “Life,” for Henry, is constantly in the processes of generating its own truth and therefore eludes history and the sciences. His work has provoked and fascinated philosophers from Emmanuel Lévinas to Jacques Derrida. Since the beginning of the 21st century, religious as well as non-religious scholars have begun in earnest to review his work in its entirety.
I am the Truth, Toward a Philosophy of Christianity (1996), appeared late in Michel Henry’s life. The book captures the author’s commitment to understanding the importance of the New Testament as a valuable tool for reexamining modern criteria for truth and justice. In the chapter “The Christian Ethic,” freedom is not the principal topic, but emerges as one of the key reasons for the creation of a “new Commandment.” Focusing especially on the teachings of Paul of Tarsus, Henry examines the Christian sense of truth as linked to the experience of life. Christ is seen as both the embodiment and progenitor of free will, transgressing the laws of the Old Testament while giving rise to a new kind of truth, one based on freedom and the affectation of life.
Nathaniel Greenberg |
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Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924-1998) published what is perhaps the most famous philosophical formulation of postmodernism, entitled La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir (The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge) (1979). In this short book, Lyotard defines the postmodern as “incredulity regarding metanarratives,” which are grand theories and philosophies of the world. These stories include the idea of history as progress, the ability of science to reveal truth, and the universal progress of the history of mankind toward a final liberation, among others. Lyotard claims that in the postmodern era our social “language games”—terminology he borrows from Wittgenstein—no longer require metanarratives to justify the utterances made in them. In Lyotard’s works, the term “language games,” serves to denote the multiplicity of structures of meaning, the innumerable and incommensurable systems in which meaning is produced and rules for the circulation of those meanings are instituted. For Lyotard, postmodern culture no longer requires any form of legitimation beyond expediency or “performativity.” Lyotard analyzes the production of knowledge by science, as well as the discourse of everyday social life, in terms of discontinuity, plurality, and “paralogy.” According to Lyotard, modernist notions of verification, the value of systems, the possibility of proof, and the unity of science no longer hold true.
In the first selection, from The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard explicates how the postmodern sensibility, which has existed in various figurations throughout the history of human thought, has achieved prominence in the contemporary epoch. The postmodern period is one in which faith in universal reason has reached a crisis, in which there is a general suspicion of science and technology, and the concept of happiness seems like a political ploy. Lyotard employs the remnants of his radical Marxism blended with a Nietzschean perspectivism to undermine the Enlightenment grand narrative of freedom, which he describes as a mechanism used by the State to manipulate the populace.
In “The Grip (Mainmise)” (1990), Lyotard describes the temporal double-bind of contemporary life, in which individuals are born both too soon (in that one is born into a culture but must learn to speak its language) and too late (in that the culture into which one is born precedes the individual, making it impossible to adopt its history as one’s own). Lyotard claims that one is born to others before one is born to oneself, which delivers the individual into the possession—or grip—of others, essentially eradicating the possibility of emancipation. Lyotard questions what constitutes the concept of liberty itself, and concludes that emancipation is measured against time. The grand narratives of both secular and Christian humanism promise emancipation, of either the mind and body or of the soul. However, both metanarratives defer the moment of liberty to a distant point in the future that can never be experienced in an unmediated fashion. This promised emancipation equates the schematization of time with the course of history.
Brook Aidan Rosini |
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Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) and his many influential works on philosophy and literature led the eminent philosopher Michel Foucault to declare at the beginning of his “Theatrum Philosophicum” that “perhaps one day this century will be known as Deleuzian.” Though drawing on the history of philosophy, Deleuze’s studies of individual philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Henri Bergson, are more subversive than interpretative. Known for his purposeful manipulation and creative reading of various philosophic, mathematic, and scientific terms, Deleuze amusingly describes his own method as “a sort of buggery” or “immaculate conception” that “tak[es] an author from behind and giv[es] him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous” (Negotiations 6). Against the hegemony of thought, Deleuze regards the history of philosophy as an inspirational resource that provides impetus for creating non-preexistent concepts in a new service.
In a similar light, in his dialogue with Foucault in “Intellectuals and Power,” Deleuze sets free the dichotomized relationships between theory and praxis, and constructs a new definition of theory that grants his followers the freedom to use and appropriate his theory as a “tool box.” A theory, according to Deleuze, is by nature opposed to power. It will not be totalized, but multiplies (208). In “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” Deleuze further sheds new light on the conceptions of power and “control mechanism.” In contrast to Foucault’s disciplinary societies, societies of control “motivate” rather than regulate their subjects in the new capitalistic era of corporation and “free” market.
Su-ching Wang |
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Michel Foucault (1926-1984), one of the most distinguished philosophers of the twentieth century, has reshaped the way we conceive the ideas of power, history, and knowledge. His work has influenced a number of disciplines including political science, criminology, sociology, psychology, and gender studies (to name but a few). In 1970, he was elected to the Collège de France as Professor of the History of Systems of Thought, a position he held until his death. He published extensively, but was probably best know for his dense writing style and his unique way of tracing historically the relationship between power and knowledge. Drawing on the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Foucault terms such a historical investigation “genealogy.”
“Panopticism,” a chapter from his well-known book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, is an outstanding example of “genealogies,” in which Foucault not only analyzes the exertion of power and the production of knowledge but also traces the historical trajectory of the development of the prison. Instead of celebrating the notion of “freedom,” Foucault highlights the struggle against political power and social control. In a post-911 era, reading his “Panopticism” is extremely refreshing for us to understand the state-directed disciplinary mechanism of modern-day society. As Foucault points out, “[v]isibility is a trap” (200). What in fact is behind the seeming democratic country and the so-called “free” world?
Su-ching Wang |
Luce Irigaray is a linguist, psychoanalyst and above all a philosopher. Born in 1932 in Belgium, she later moved to France and attended the seminars of Jacques Lacan. Now she is the Director of Research in Philosophy at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris. She has held the research position since 1964. Her philosophical endeavor is colored by the departure from and critical intervention into her mentor, Lacan.
Irigaray re-reads Levinas in her essay titled “The Fecundity of the Caress: a Reading of Levinas, Totality and Infinity, ‘Phenomenology of Eros.’” Marking the gender-blindness of Levinas, she genders, sexualizes, and eroticizes Levinas’ ethics. Despite the fact that Levinas draws a clear boundary between Eros and Love, thereby placing the moments of ethics in the latter, Irigaray displaces this Levinasian ethical dynamic. Irigaray attempts to ponder upon the emerging moments of ethics in the erotic sexual relationships among many forms of love. Irigaray multiplies and expands the domain of the imaginary as a space where the possibilities of freedom can emerge. This essay can be located within her larger investment into the domain of the imaginary. What Irigaray has achieved in the essay is the liberating and revolutionizing of the ethics of Levinas by critically inserting an imaginative perspective of gender, sexuality, and Eros.
Nobuko Yamasaki |
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Julia Kristeva (1941-present) is a philosopher, psychoanalyst and novelist. Born in Bulgaria, she left for Paris at the age of 25, fleeing from Stalinist Bulgarian Communism. Kristeva continued her research in France and subsequently joined Tel Quel.Kristeva’s teacher Roland Barthes described her as follows: “Kristeva changes the order of things: she always destroys the latest preconception, the one we thought we could be comforted by, the one of which we could be proud: what she displaces is the already-said, that is to say, the insistence of the signified: what she subverts is the authority of monologic science and of filiations."
As suggested by Barthes, Kristeva’s philosophical endeavor is the incessant intervention into authority and above all a quest for freedom. She questions the authoritative interpretations of the Freudian and Lacanian notion of paternal threats, thereby insisting on the importance of the maternal function in the development of a child’s subjectivity. Kristeva’s intervention is at the same time an implicit critique of as well as the explicit displacement of Simone de Beauvoir, who was influential among feminists, as an advocate of boycotting maternity and motherhood.
In the interview titled, “What’s Left of May 1968?” Kristeva presents her thesis clearly: “I revolt, therefore we are still to come.” For Kristeva, the notion of freedom is inextricably connected with the notion of revolt. She reflects back on May ’68 as an event through which France expressed the fundamental character of freedom; that is, not the freedom to succeed, but rather the freedom to revolt. In order to think about freedom, Kristeva investigates the notion of revolt that is the endless state of questioning.
Nobuko Yamasaki |
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Tariq Said Ramadan (1962-present) was born in Geneva, Switzerland. His father, Said Ramadan resettled in Switzerland after fleeing persecution in Egypt, where his father, Hassan al Banna, founded the Muslim Brotherhood. Tariq Ramadan is a professor of Religion and Philosophy. He has taught at the University of Freiburg, the College of Saussure in Switzerland and Oxford University in England. Ramadan’s career has been marked by great success and great controversy. In the years following September 11, he became one of the preeminent European advocates for cooperation and debate over the presence and role of Muslims in western society. A Francophile trained in both Philosophy and Islamic Studies, his major works, including Western Muslims and the Future of Islam, To Be a European Muslim and Islam, the West and the Challenge of Modernity, center around the challenge of assimilation for Muslims living in the West. By reinvigorating the basic principles of Islam, Ramadan investigates the role of Islam in the construction of social identity.
“Encounter with the Universal” is the first chapter of Western Muslims and the Future of Islam (2004). Here, freedom is posited as a gift, one of the most powerful but precarious conditions of man. Ramadan argues that while Al-Quran clearly defines spiritual practice, social conduct remains conspicuously indefinite. On a personal level, man may choose to pursue or abandon his original covenant with God. Although Islam seeks to limit and guide freewill away from the decadence of indulgence towards submission and peace, the freedom of man to interpret Islam has created diverse and disparate forms of Islamic social conduct. Ramadan’s insistence on the diverse forms of Islam portrays most sects as factional and overindulgent in their freedom to interpret and govern. The true and fundamental character of the faith, the application of freedom towards submission, is lost on them.
Nathaniel Greenberg |
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