Philosophy and Vulnerability

Catherine Breillat, Joan Didion, and Audre Lorde

Matthew R. McLennan

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350004092
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

Issues surrounding precarity, debility and vulnerability are now of central concern to philosophers as we try and navigate an increasingly uncertain world. Matthew R. McLennan delves into these subjects enthusiastically and sensitively, presenting a vision of the discipline of philosophy which is grounded in real, lived experience. Developing an invigorating, if at times painful, sense of the finitude and fragility of human life, Philosophy and Vulnerability provocatively marshals three disciplinary "nonphilosophers" to make its argument: French filmmaker and novelist Catherine Breillat, journalist and masterful cultural commentator Joan Didion and feminist poet and civil rights activist Audre Lorde. Through this encounter, this book suggests ways in which rigorous attention to difference and diversity must nourish a militant philosophical universalism in the future.

1

Introduction: Towards a definition of philosophy which incorporates vulnerability

At the time of writing, my four-year-old son has started to work out some of the broader implications of change. He has had an exceptionally big year: a new house, a new neighbourhood, a new baby brother, and the start of junior kindergarten. Although he’s weathered most of it in characteristic good cheer, there are sometimes moments just after I’ve read him his bedtime story and just before I’ve tucked him in for the night when his reflections and his questioning take an unexpectedly serious turn.

‘Dad, are you and Mom getting older?’

‘Yeah son. All of us are.’

‘Will you be different next near?’

‘I will. Probably just a few more grey hairs if I’m lucky.’

‘No no Dad! I don’t want you to get old. You can go to the haircut shop and they’ll fix it! . . . Will you live to be one thousand?’

‘I’m afraid that nobody lives to be one thousand.’

‘How about one hundred and nine?’

‘Maybe. I could. But I’ll have to take really good care of myself, and also have a bit of luck.’

‘How do you take care of yourself to be one hundred and nine?’

‘I’d have to do things like get enough sleep, avoid too much junk food, exercise often, and visit the doctor.’

‘Ok Dad. On your one-hundred-and-ninth birthday I’ll make sure you have a nap. And that people bring you a cake but it’s not sugary.’

My son is on to something, and he will spend the rest of his life coming to terms with it. Human lives are vulnerable lives; human beings are vulnerable beings. While these claims might seem so obvious as to require no comment, it is remarkable that contemporary thinkers – and tellingly, many of them from feminized, racialized, queer, poor and disabled vantage points – have had to insist upon the fact of human vulnerability, painstakingly reworking our normative frameworks to incorporate it. From classical social contract theories to contemporary neoliberal discourses of personal accountability, a corrosive myth of self-sufficiency and radical autonomy has emerged which exerts a powerful effect on thought and language. This myth is deployed in the service of those in power, at all echelons of power. Its ideological function is, first, to convince those who are more and even most vulnerable that they are essentially responsible for their own plights. Second, it functions to discourage solidarity by transforming nascent social analysis into a moralizing discourse that punches both laterally and down (Harvey 2009; Brugère 2013; Butler 2015).

It is no wonder then that vulnerability should be a strategically important concept in the social sciences and humanities. What is at stake is the construction of a philosophical anthropology that tears at the ideological veil of neoliberalism. Many contemporary philosophers and thinkers from across the humanities and social sciences have contributed significantly to this ongoing, counter-hegemonic project. Though an overview of their innovations would be both interesting and timely, this book has a somewhat different aim. In what follows, I wish to rework the definition of philosophy itself according to the theme of vulnerability. In other words, I will depict the practice of philosophy as constitutively involved with vulnerability, and this at an existential or ‘pre-disciplinary’ level. This would suggest that vulnerability is in the background of disciplinary philosophical activity even if professional philosophers would downplay, ignore or deny it.

My aim is simply to show that this vision of philosophy is plausible, and I am less interested in meta-philosophical argumentation than I am with showing examples of existential philosophy in action. On the basis of a stipulative definition supported by prior research, I will provide compelling examples of existential or pre-disciplinary philosophical engagement – effectively, object lessons in philosophy as I construe it happening outside of the norms of the discipline, in various idioms, and linked in obvious ways to existential questions or questions of lived experience organized around the theme of vulnerability.

This task forms part of a broader division of labour in the counter-hegemonic project of unseating neoliberalism. It is politically necessary because the practice of disciplinary philosophy is one avenue where the myth of self-sufficiency and radical autonomy has often, if not generally, held sway. Western/settler philosophy, in particular, has often served as a workshop for the ideological justification of hegemonic power – pretending to the role of what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘royal’ as opposed to nomadic or critical science (Deleuze and Guattari 2005: 367–8, 373–4). But since the address of philosophy is always universal and egalitarian (Badiou 2012: 26–7), even when only implicitly, or even against the grain of the contents of its address (Rancière 2003; Shaw 2016), it is therefore a built-in vocational responsibility of Western/settler disciplinary philosophers today to reconceive and to rework their practice in an egalitarian way. And this implies reconceiving the social role of the disciplinary philosopher (something like the philosopher-as-social-worker) and rethinking what the disciplinary philosopher does. What she does, I will argue, is profoundly if often only implicitly tied to human vulnerability.

The guiding idea of the book is, therefore, to flesh out a definition of philosophy that incorporates vulnerability as a crucial component. Before proceeding to a discussion of methodology and an overview of the book’s contents, I will have to provisionally define and suggest the link between my two crucial terms: ‘philosophy’ and ‘vulnerability’.

‘Philosophy’

The argument herein follows from a previous book in which I reconstructed the dispute between Alain Badiou and Jean-François Lyotard over the definition of philosophy (McLennan 2015). Despite their considerable differences on the matter, the two thinkers were shown to hold in common a notion of philosophy as a militant activity of thought, which is provoked or occasioned or opened up by events (in the ontological sense of radically new, inherently incalculable and inassimilable occurrences). Philosophy in the Badiou–Lyotard dispute takes on a heroic cast since it figures as the vocation of a finite mind which, struck as if by lightening, has committed itself to the task of measuring up to what appears as the impossible or the mysterious or the infinite.

In the wake of Badiou and Lyotard, I will herein cleave to the notion of philosophy as an activity. It is to be distinguished from what are often called ‘philosophies’, that is, opinions, world views or philosophical systems. Regarding the last of these, I want to avoid a misunderstanding. I am not suggesting that canonical Western philosophers like Hegel or Spinoza or Schopenhauer, who constructed intricate philosophical systems by spinning out basic insights, should be excluded from the ranks of the philosophers. Rather, I claim that there is a meaningful distinction to be drawn between the system (i.e. the finished body of doctrine) and the activity of thought (i.e. the philosophizing) that produced the system. The reader would be right, however, to surmise that my sympathies generally lie with those canonical Western philosophers and more marginalized figures who put the emphasis on the activity and who were prepared to pull up stakes and start anew as necessary (Lyotard certainly, but also Putnam, Russell, Wittgenstein, Weil and so on). I will not plead for this sympathy here, but will note that if a philosopher is willing to leave everything behind as her thought process dictates, then this could be interpreted as evidence that her true master is the vocation rather than the system. In the terms I am presenting here, this would render her exemplary.

Moreover, I continue to maintain that philosophical activity is militant. As I put it previously, philosophy is an activity that doggedly resists ‘the leveling and domesticating pressures of economic reason’ (McLennan 2015: 121). This point can be further generalized: philosophy digs in and resists the instrumentality and self-interestedness that for thousands of years have ridiculed, reduced or banished it.

Socrates is the most prominent Western example of a philosophical militant, on account of his martyrdom to the search for truth – but we could add Hypatia, Boethius, Bruno and many others to the list of martyrs. The philosopher thus construed is traditionally contrasted with the sophist, who functions in typical depictions as a stand-in for mundane calculation and self-interest. The traditional depiction of the sophist (e.g. Protagoras) positions her very closely to the philosopher but with crucial differences. She tends to affirm a similar notion of human finitude with respect to knowledge, but one that is radical and logically self-defeating (claiming, e.g., that there is doxa or opinion but no absolute truths). True, the sophist deploys among her armoury of ruses¹ the very same rationality or logos of the philosopher – but only logo-logically (self-referentially) and tactically. Thus, the sophist meets the philosopher on the same terrain but with a certain irony, and while detaching her activity from the life and death commitment to truth and wisdom that defines the archetypal philosopher’s vocation.

We should doubtless be cautious about drawing too neat a distinction between philosophy and sophistry on methodological and historical grounds (Crome 2004; Cassin 2014; McLennan 2015). But we may also make a further point about tactics: it is not clear why the philosopher would be under any obligation to martyr herself at every turn in order to count as a philosopher. She is a philosopher, I would argue, provided that the arc of her life bends overall in accordance with her vocation. She could, for example, remain a philosopher while deploying her reason sophistically in certain cases, as a tactical expediency – for example, to obtain or to maintain her hold on a job in the academy, or to play the administrative ‘war of position’ therein, precisely to tilt things in favour of the survival of philosophy and the other humanities. The category of ‘militant’, in short, does not equate to that of ‘martyr’, or ‘fundamentalist’ or the like (though it certainly includes them). Rather, it singles the philosopher out as one who has a clear sense of vocation and always defers to it in the last instance. With this in mind, we may cautiously assert that the archetypical sophist ultimately cedes to political expediency, whereas the archetypical philosopher ultimately does not.²

Last, like Badiou and Lyotard, I will therefore also insist that philosophy’s core characteristic is the refusal from within an avowed position of finitude to finally cede to that finitude. There is something in the practice of philosophy that has to do with being seized, caught out and caught up in what is greater, even infinitely greater, than oneself. But this engagement with the infinite plays out as a characteristic obstinacy, for which canonical philosophers from traditions around the globe are often best remembered. This obstinacy is precisely what makes a philosopher (in terms of vocation) out of the one who philosophizes (in terms of activity).

I should caution here, however, that if it is appropriate to draw rough comparisons between philosophy (logos under the aegis of truth, or infinitude) and sophistry (pure logologos under the aegis of opinion and political expediency), then we might also entertain the possibility of a third, arguably hybrid category of thought. According to Badiou’s conception of ‘antiphilosophy’, there is a mode of thinking that seeks to affirm both human finitude and the infinite absolutely, but in a gesture that simultaneously strives to abolish the very logos through which philosophy and sophistry both labour, and to declare fidelity to a higher truth than the truths that are said to be accessible to philosophy. As I described it previously, ‘the antiphilosopher lives a life where the body is permeated and wracked by the concept, or by the infinite which outstrips every concept, and the en-actment of his very existence shows what philosophy only vainly attempts to say’ (McLennan 2015: 90). Thus, the antiphilosopher resembles the philosopher in her obstinate fidelity to a higher truth and in her self-conscious groundedness in finitude. Moreover, the antiphilosopher is a close cousin to the sophist in the pretension to depose or to have already deposed philosophy, but this time through an attempt at the very demolition of its logos itself rather than through a purely logo-logical, ironical and ultimately tactical ‘retorsion’ of the philosopher’s arguments.³

There is evidently a certain compatibility between the figure of the antiphilosopher and that of the Christian mystic, who typically affirms the infinite but through a mode of thought that would radically efface or abject the human being’s pretension to think it without grace; Badiou lists canonical Western (anti-)philosophical militants such as Paul, Pascal, Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on this score (Badiou 2003, 2011). But to flesh out Badiou’s picture, we should also note the pervasiveness of what could be construed as antiphilosophical themes in Judaic⁴ and non-Western traditions. The traditional depiction of the ancient Chinese sage Chuang Tzu, who affirms the existence of that which lies beyond our grasp while also insisting we cannot properly think it, is typical in this regard: ‘Our life has a boundary but there is no boundary to knowledge. To use what has a boundary to pursue what is limitless is dangerous; with this knowledge, if we still go after knowledge, we will run into trouble’ (Chuang Tzu 2006: 22).

I have already stated that I am hesitant to draw any strict boundary between the philosopher and the sophist – on account, primarily, of my allowing the former to borrow tactically from the latter, while retaining her identity. Similarly, I am less than convinced of the need to cleave strictly to Badiou’s characterization of the antiphilosopher. This is largely due to the fact that we might frame the antiphilosopher’s attempt to demolish philosophical logos as simply a particularly acute moment in philosophical reflection; that is, a moment that speaks to philosophy’s own status as logologos, its inherent recursivity. It is inherently possible in the practice of philosophy to take up philosophical positions with respect to philosophy itself – and this implies the concomitant possibility of philosophy’s taking up arms against itself, militating for its own abandonment and therefore by its own lights falling into paradox.⁵ If we grant, however, the existence of antiphilosophy as a distinct mode of thought, then like the sophist, the antiphilosopher on Badiou’s telling is ultimately a perennial partner or intimate enemy to the philosopher – one who, through constant antagonism, keeps the philosopher honest about the scope and limits of her powers, lest she lapses into dogma and sectarianism.

Assuming then that we can distinguish in a rough and ready way between philosophy, sophistry and antiphilosophy – as tendencies in thought, perhaps, rather than as strict types – we have an image of the philosopher as one who affirms human finitude (like the sophist and the antiphilosopher), as well as the gulf between this fin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Also available from Bloomsbury
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Towards a definition of philosophy which incorporates vulnerability
• 2 Catherine Breillat I: An erotic suspension of the ethical
• 3 Joan Didion: Becoming frail
• 4 Audre Lorde: We must learn to count the living with that same particular attention with which we number the dead11The title of this chapter is a quote pulled from Lorde (1980: 54).
• 5 Catherine Breillat II: Embrace of Weakness?
• 6 Conclusion: Vulnerability and the profession
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Copyright Page