She starts out by commenting on the sad fact that one rarely has any clue how anyone will read anything one writes:

One writes without knowing whether the reader will read closely or not, whether the work will be understood in terms of what came before, and for the most part, one is content with being read intermittently, partially, and perhaps even relieved that no one will look too closely. I don’t have the luxury of that relief with either one of these essays. Oddly, in being asked to respond to them, I am also asked to write yet more precisely on the occasion when it seems to me that, surely, I have already written too much.

Then she continues with a reflection on the inconsistencies that emerge from writing that develops over time:

Further, I’m in a particular bind, since it never occurred to me to try and establish an internally consistent philosophical position. Because I am, as I write, a living being, I develop new views, call some of the old ones into question, change tracks, return to older problems in new ways. But I have never, I think, sought to reconcile the writing that I have done at one time with the writing I have done at another. In part, I do not want to look back too closely, since I am living and thinking now, but also because whatever I am living and thinking now emerges from that “before” and in ways for which I am surely grateful, but for which I have no ready account. That others seek to take account of what I have written across several works is surely a gift to me, though it is not one I could or would give myself, and so not one that I can offer in return. My response will have to be something other than an account in any systematic sense. After all, one writes and then writes again, but it is probably not the case that what one writes first serves as a set of philosophical premises from which the later work is derived. There is perhaps a different kind of temporality at work, a circling back to issues left unprobed, new efforts to approach a set of problems, the exercise of a certain possibility of repetition that does not seek to produce a seamless continuity between what is past and what is present. Indeed, the discontinuities allow for the possibility of starting anew, starting again, with some of the same problems with which one began.

If one wanted an accessible image of the difference between systematic philosophy and critical theory, this is probably as close as one can get.

(From “Reply from Judith Butler to Mills and Jenkins,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 18(2):180-195.)

“Education is intended to improve people’s intellectual ability. What it really does is create arbitrary competition among people.”

“To gain knowledge, $$, and power.”

I thought their answers were quite interesting, partly for the interrupted way in which a healthy cynicism makes its furtive appearance, and partly because I suspect that my students largely fed back to me the stock narratives that the college was always feeding them (about critical thinking, opportunity, etc). In other words, the students always tell you what they think you want to hear. Or rather, since they rarely know much about you individually, what they think a generic professor would want to hear.

At the same time, perhaps I should give them credit for being quite idealistic on the whole about the value of education. Here’s what they said.

• Education is for students to learn how to critically think. Being educated helps you understand the world and aspects within it.

• Education is supposed to be for the expansion and knowledge of all people regardless of age, race, gender, or religion. However, education has become a privilege to those who can afford to pay for it and the access to resources.

• Education is for the purpose of creating an elite status. Education (for the most part) accelerates an individual to success + subsequent wealth (usually). I think this is the motivation to pursue higher education.

• To provide us with options, expand our perspectives & increase understanding/empathy. Also, to let us know how little we really know.

• To learn – learning fosters personal & societal growth. So essentially education is for fostering growth.

• To gain knowledge, $$, and power

• Upward movement/mobility + to extend the mind

• Education is intended to improve people’s intellectual ability. What it really does is create arbitrary competition among people.

• Education is intended for ensuring that the mass population can make well-informed decisions in their lives, giving us the highest-functioning society.

• Education is used to teach people basic knowledge or skills that will be beneficial for the future.

• To learn & develop skills for your everyday life.

• Knowledge = opportunity. The more you know the better.

• Education is a tool to help those who receive it be able to use knowledge and information positively and with good judgment to better oneself.

• to expand
  the mind
  of
  an
  individual

•  To gain knowledge about a subject, often so you can find a career within that subject.

• To show employers you have knowledge of a particular field.

• To have a certain status.

• It is to pass on knowledge so we can continue to build and grow our society.

• It’s to help you become a more well rounded person, does it always work? Nope.

• Choice that can give you choices (which you may not want to make) / To see the world with a more critical (less ignorant) eye / Opportunities to make change for yourself and others. Education gives choice and opportunity; it’s up to the individual to take it or not.

Reading back over their responses, I’m struck by the decidedly composite nature of many of these accounts. Many of them say in essence: learning is good in itself, and it serves instrumental functions (career, social change, money, etc). Really, it seems unsurprising that something as overdetermined as mass higher education would leave people with complicated feelings about its purpose.

It’s also interesting that many students want to preserve a definite distance between the self and the educational process. “Education… it’s up to the individual to take it or leave it.” “Education is a tool.” “Does it always work? nope.” In answers like this, education isn’t about the core of who you are. It’s about a process outside you that may or may not penetrate you. A humanist might exclaim here that all instrumentalism is alienation.

I hope to write more about that essay in the near future, and its remarkable comments on pedagogical erotics and transference.

But in the meantime, as a sort of tiny case study, it’s also useful to consider specific cases of philosophical or theoretical masculinism. I recently wrote a bit about Derrida and a bit about latter-day Marxist theory. Today I have a few tidbits that I found in David Macey’s 2004 biography of Michel Foucault:

•  While teaching in Clerment-Ferrand in the early 1960s, Foucault “cause[d] a scandal when he appointed [his partner Daniel] Defert to an assistantship in preference to a better-qualified woman candidate” (p. 64).
• When Foucault travelled abroad in 1973, “he was not happy when he had to attend formal receptions where he had to be polite to women in long evening gowns” (109). (I presume that Macey is trying to voice his subject’s own attitude, and not merely showing his own biases.)
• Describing Foucault’s general outlook in the early 1970s: “Feminism was of little interest to Foucault and had little impact on him, although he did publicly support the right to abortion and contraception. He has often [been] criticized for his masculinist stance and it is true that neither the book on madness nor that of prisons looks at gender or takes account of the fact that women and men tend to be committed to both prisons and psychiatric hospitals for very different reasons” (103).

I wouldn’t have expected the more specific anecdotes to be widespread knowledge, but I find it strange that although several of my teachers last decade liked to assign Foucault (especially History of Sexuality), I don’t recall the question of his general relationship to feminism or to women ever coming up. Partly that’s because many of my “theory” teachers were male. Not unrelatedly, that’s also because Foucault is so often read “as theory,” that is, as a decontextualized author removed from his social and biographical context.

Some might attribute this to a generic, timeless “masculine gaze” at work in what we call theory. But that masculine gaze is itself an evolving product of history; Le Doeuff singles out Rousseau’s awful comments about women as a turning point for the worse. So while I do think there’s a lot to be said about the generic or detemporalizing quality of theoretical masculinism, it’s equally important not to dehistoricize Foucault’s attitude towards women, and rather to situate it as carefully as possible in the specific forms of masculinism that characterized his institutional world.

Along these lines, Le Doeuff points out that homosociality among philosophers is partly the product of a pedagogical dynamic that leads teachers to have a fantasmatic desire to produce “heirs”.

One often sees the ‘masters’ (teaching either in a preparatory class or in a university) choosing ‘followers’, that is to say transmitting a flattering image of themselves to some of their pupils. This attitude is part of an important process of over-stimulations which organise the future take-over, and which indicate, often precociously, those who are going to feel ‘called’ (and in fact are) to play a so-called leading role in the philosophical enterprise. The teachers’ sexist and socio-cultural prejudices take on a considerable importance in this period of philosophical apprenticeship. Many women are aware of the unconscious injustice of numerous teachers; young men who have been selected ‘followers’, often, moreover, for obscure reasons, while women constantly have to fight for recognition. Incidentally, the personal involvement of teachers in this search for an heir apparent needs to be analysed. Perhaps this too is a question of an avatar, this time ‘from man to man’, of lack which torments the master and which, in the ‘man to woman’ case leads to a search for female admirers. This sexist distribution of favouritism certainly has to be denounced, but the mere existence of this type of behaviour must be criticised first. Besides, it would be useful to investigate the precise moment in the school or university course at which the teachers’ sexist prejudices are at their most effective as an instrument of selection. My impression is that it occurs later than the selection based on socio-cultural criteria. [English trans., p.9]

I wonder if anyone has ever done the study that Le Doeuff proposes — a study of the moment of sexism’s maximum efficacy in a larger sequence of social exclusions.

But I was more intrigued by Plato’s remarkable, zany account of the origins of ambivalence, which I don’t think has gotten so much recognition. We have to be a bit anachronistic to read “ambivalence” into this text, to be sure, since the term in its modern psychological sense was coined by Eugen Bleuler in 1911. Nevertheless, I want to explore here how Plato comes up with something that really seems like a concept of ambivalence avant la lettre. It emerges in the text from his long meditation on the nature of a guardian, which is premised on the initial assumption that the guardian’s nature (or anyone’s nature) has to be singular and coherent.

SOCRATES: Do you think that there is any difference, when it comes to the job of guarding, between the nature of a noble hound and that of a well-bred youth?

GLAUCON: What do you mean?

SOCRATES: I mean that both of them have to be sharp-eyed, quick to catch what they see, and strong, too, in case they have to fight what they capture.

GLAUCON: Yes, they need all these things.

Hilariously, the dog is being set up from the outset as the being that cumulates vision and muscle, and therefore gets to be the founding image of a human guardian class. These two facilities are also something like the two branches of what we now call the national security services —  “sight” metaphorically gets us the “intelligence services,” and muscular strength stands in for the “armed forces.” That is, the guardian is a miniature state apparatus. Of course, it also needs some moral virtues:

SOCRATES: And they must be courageous, surely, if indeed they are to fight well.

GLAUCON: Of course.

SOCRATES: Now, will a horse, a dog, or any other animal be courageous if it is not spirited? Or haven’t you noticed just how invincible and unbeatable spirit is, so that its presence makes the whole soul fearless and unconquerable in any situation?

GLAUCON: I have noticed that.

SOCRATES: Then it is clear what physical qualities the guardians should have.

GLAUCON: Yes.

SOCRATES: And as far as their souls are concerned, they must, at any rate, be spirited.

GLAUCON: That too.

So the guardians are also supposed to have coherence between mental and physical characteristics. Their spirited and invincible “souls” go along with their finely honed physical faculties. And yet a problem occurs to Socrates: who would want to live alongside these fighting machines?

SOCRATES: But with natures like that, Glaucon, how will they avoid behaving like savages to one another and to the other citizens?

GLAUCON: By Zeus, it won’t be easy for them.

SOCRATES: But surely they must be gentle to their own people and harsh to their enemies. Otherwise, they will not wait around for others to destroy them, but will do it themselves first.

GLAUCON: That’s true.

SOCRATES: What are we to do, then? Where are we to find a character that is both gentle and high-spirited at the same time? For, of course, a gentle nature is the opposite of the spirited kind.

GLAUCON: Apparently.

SOCRATES: But surely if someone lacks either of these qualities, he cannot be a good guardian. Yet the combination of them seems to be impossible. And so it follows, then, that a good guardian is impossible.

GLAUCON: I am afraid so.

I don’t think it’s far-fetched to construe this image of “a character that is both gentle and high-spirited” as an image of ambivalence, in two senses. (1) Affectively, the guardian should be able to inhabit mixed affect. (2) Sociologically, the guardian is supposed to inhabit a tense double role, solicitous towards the in-group and “harsh” towards the outside. Of course, it now seems obvious to social researchers that people can occupy ambivalent, contradictory roles. But that only makes it more entertaining to see Socrates state that role ambivalence is outright impossible (because it contradicts the intrinsic coherence of one’s nature).

It goes without saying that Plato’s equation of someone’s “nature” with their personal characteristics belongs to a social metaphysics of virtue and character that has become archaic, though certainly not altogether incomprehensible to us. Nevertheless, we see that curiously, ambivalence comes across here as a sort of upper-class virtue, one of the things that gives the guardians their exceptional and necessary qualities. Fortunately for the argument, Socrates soon finds his way out of his initial view that ambivalent natures are impossible:

SOCRATES: We deserve to be stuck, my dear Glaucon. For we have lost track of the analogy we put forward.

GLAUCON: How do you mean?

SOCRATES: We have overlooked the fact that there are natures of the sort we thought impossible, ones that include these opposite qualities.

GLAUCON: Where?

SOCRATES: You can see the combination in other animals, too, but especially in the one to which we compared the guardian. For you know, of course, that noble hounds naturally have a character of that sort. They are as gentle as can be to those they are familiar with and know, but the opposite to those they do not know.

GLAUCON: Yes, I do know that.

SOCRATES: So the combination we want is possible, after all, and what we are seeking in a good guardian is not contrary to nature.

GLAUCON: No, I suppose not.

Oh good — the philosophical project of designing a race of supreme but benevolent overseers can continue after all! Now back to the dog analogies.

SOCRATES: Now, don’t you think that our future guardian, besides being spirited, must also be, by nature, philosophical?

GLAUCON: How do you mean? I don’t understand.

SOCRATES: It too is something you see in dogs, and it should make us wonder at the merit of the beast.

GLAUCON: In what way?

SOCRATES: In that when a dog sees someone it does not know, it gets angry even before anything bad happens to it. But when it knows someone, it welcomes him, even if it has never received anything good from him. Have you never wondered at that?

GLAUCON: I have never paid it any mind until now. But it is clear that a dog does do that sort of thing.

SOCRATES: Well, that seems to be a naturally refined quality, and one that is truly philosophical.

One has to love the easy slippage from behavioral dispositions to characterological qualities. Argument was easier in these days.

GLAUCON: In what way?

SOCRATES: In that it judges anything it sees to be either a friend or an enemy on no other basis than that it knows the one and does not know the other. And how could it be anything besides a lover of learning if it defines what is its own and what is alien to it in terms of knowledge and ignorance?

GLAUCON: It surely could not be anything but.

SOCRATES: But surely the love of learning and philosophy are the same, aren’t they?

A charming assertion, unsubstantiated by social analysis of “philosophy” (as a modern academic discipline) but no doubt presumptively justified here by the Greek definition of philosophy as “love of wisdom.”

GLAUCON: Yes, they are the same.

SOCRATES: Then can’t we confidently assume that the same holds for a human being too—that if he is going to be gentle to his own and those he knows, he must be, by nature, a lover of learning and a philosopher?

GLAUCON: We can.

I think the reasoning here is something like: If species A does behavior X and has nature Y, then it follows that if species B does behavior X, it must also have nature Y. The unargued premise being: a being’s behaviors follow transparently from its nature.

In any event, we can now “conclude” (at least if we accept the rest of the argument) that the guardian class needs to have this ambivalent nature in order to fulfill its function:

SOCRATES: Philosophy, then, and spirit, speed, and strength as well, must all be combined in the nature of anyone who is going to be a really fine and good guardian of our city.

GLAUCON: Absolutely.

SOCRATES: Then that is what he would have to be like at the outset. But how are we to bring these people up and educate them?

So ambivalence here emerges as the necessary dispositional structure of a good “guardian of a city.” The guardians must be contradictory by nature and ambivalent in behavior: oscillating between philosophy and brute force, kindness and brutality depending on context. What becomes interesting — but what I don’t have time to explore in any more detail here — is that this nature is not entirely innate, but also has to be produced and reinforced by education. So ambivalence is both a functional necessity and an educational product.

I just find that a bit fascinating: that one of the markers of the ruling class, for Plato, is their structural ambivalence. To be sure, this ambivalence is as much a bivalence of virtue as a flexibility of affect, so in that sense it is far from a strictly psychological account of ambivalence, but one can, I think, see the germ of ambivalence as a potential badge of class distinction. In a world where everyone fulfills a social function preordained by their natural capacities and aptitudes, it becomes a curious marker of superiority to have multiple capacities, multiple affective dispositions.

In 1992, Jacques Derrida gave Osvaldo Muñoz an interview which concluded with a traditional ‘Proust questionnaire’. If this text, meant for the daily El País, was in the end not published, this is perhaps because Derrida deemed it a bit too revealing:

What are the depths of misery for you?: To lose my memory.

Where would you like to live?: In a place to which I can always return, in other words from which I can leave.

For what fault do you have the most indulgence?: Keeping a secret which one should not keep.

Favourite hero in a novel: Bartleby.

Your favourite heroines in real life?: I’m keeping that a secret.

Your favourite quality in a man?: To be able to confess that he is afraid.

Your favourite quality in a woman?: Thought.

Your favourite virtue?: Faithfulness.

Your favourite occupation: Listening.

Who would you like to have been?: Another who would remember me a bit.

My main character trait?: A certain lack of seriousness.

My dream of happiness?: To continue dreaming.

What would be my greatest misfortune?: Dying after the people I love.

What I would like to be: A poet.

What I hate more than anything?: Complacency and vulgarity.

The reform I most admire: Everything to do with the difference between the sexes.

The natural gift I would like to have: Musical genius.

How I would like to die: Taken completely by surprise.

My motto: Prefer to say yes.

[From Derrida: A Biography, p. 418]

One could say many things about this. But for now, I mainly want to observe that I am struck by the open sexism of admiring “thought” as a woman’s virtue while singling out “vulnerability” (in essence) as his preferred “quality in a man.” Of course, one of Peeters’ interviewees remarks that “In spite of his love of women and his closeness to feminism, he still had a bit of a misogynistic side, like many men of his generation.”

– Normalement j’aurais dû faire ma thèse avec XYZ, car c’était lui qui m’avait le plus inspiré, mais je connaissais suffisamment XYZ pour savoir que je ne réussirais jamais à faire une thèse avec XYZ.

– C’est-à-dire ?

– C’est-à-dire que c’est quelqu’un dont la moindre remarque m’aurait blessé au profond, et comme c’est quelqu’un qui ne menage pas ses critiques, je pense que, euh, j’aurais pas pu, quoi. Bon, je vais pas raconter ça, parce que c’est un peu intime, mais c’était pas possible, quoi. Voilà.

In English, here’s how that comes out:

“Normally I should have done my thesis with XYZ, because he was the person who had inspired me the most. But I knew him well enough to be sure that I would never manage to do a thesis with him.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that he’s someone whose tiniest comment would have hurt me so deeply, and as he’s someone who doesn’t hold back his criticism, I think that, uh, I couldn’t do it. Well, I’m not going to tell you about that, because it’s sort of personal. But it wasn’t possible, eh? Voilà.”

The cruelty of criticism can shape an academic career,  we see. Personal acquaintance with academics can trigger revulsion. And pure intellectual commonality (“inspiration”) is no guarantee of human solidarity.

That’s what I learn from this little moment. That, and the sheer sense of blockage that can set in when academics stop to retell their lives. You’re reminded of moments of impossibility, of those structural dead ends that are as much subjective as institutional. “It wasn’t possible, eh?” he summed up. As if that was the whole story (even though he also told me he wasn’t going to tell me the whole story).

(On a more positive note, this interview does remind me of one piece of practical advice. If you are interviewing in French, and are otherwise at a loss for words, c’est-à-dire? — “meaning?” — is almost always a good way to get people to keep talking.)

It’s a strange, intense experience to relive conversations that took place five, six or seven years ago. All the anxieties of fieldwork come back to me; I’m annoyed by my own vague, poorly structured questions, and by the imperfections in my French accent. Often I’m amazed by the richness of my interlocutors’ experience, and their impressive ability to recount things to me, in spite of my limits as an interviewer.

One thing that becomes inescapably clear from these interviews is that the structure of a narrative is a shared accomplishment. I was quite entertained today by a moment where my interviewer took more responsibility for narrative continuity than I did:

Student: [after a long, fast-paced narrative] I dunno if I answered your question.
Me: Uh…
Me: What was my question?
Person: [partly concealed laughsmiles] Uh, the question was about my political history [parcours politique].
Me: Oh yeah.
Person: Voilà.

It’s a bit embarrassing to see that I had forgotten my own question, but what I liked was that, with a bit of smiling at my expense, my incompetence was quickly patched up. In essence, my interlocutor took over my role, established agreement with me (“Oh yeah!”) and then ratified the whole exchange as finished. (“Voilà” is a standard end-of-sequence discourse marker, like English “there you are.”)

Ethnographers are always so dependent on the small kindnesses of others.

Professor: “I don’t think I’m giving you any scoop in saying that, on the material level, the Philosophy Department is the poorest one in the country. It’s clear — it’s very clear, even. When, for instance, young colleagues were arriving after I got here — at the moment I’m thinking of Renée Duval who sent me a message asking, so, where was her office [Laughter] although she didn’t have an office. And, you know, even at Paris 7, if you want to meet, I don’t know, Frédéric Gauthier, I say Frédéric Gauthier because we know each other pretty well, so, indeed, he will make an appointment with you in his office.”

A department secretary interrupts: “Still, they don’t have their own offices, they have a shared office for teachers.”

Professor: “Non non non non non non non. Gauthier, he has an office, and there are other offices. At most, they’re two to an office. Of course! No, here, it’s on the edge.”

Secretary: “Yes, it’s on the edge.”

Professor: “Yes, here, it’s borderline scandalous. Meaning that, for example, we wouldn’t have to be meeting here [in the staff office space].”

Secretary: “Mais non, I agree with you.”

Professor: “Mais oui. And, well, there’ll be an office, we would be in the office, indeed, we could both of us shut the door. So for example, the master’s thesis exams happen here [in the staff office space].”

Me: “Really, they’re here?”

Professor: “Yes, it happens — and so people who show up, we can’t prevent them, it’s the office — where they turn in their homework, where they come for information, but, still, it’s scandalous. The first year, when I came, throughout practically the whole first year, I spent the first twenty minutes of class with the students looking for a room. It’s since been stabilized, but—“

I’m struck by the descriptor “the poorest philosophy department in the country.” And by the massively comparative nature of the moral order at work here. To be scandalous, to be on the edge (“à la limite“): these are, precisely, descriptions of a work environment that contrasts with what one has a right to expect, or with what would be typical of a workplace in one’s profession. The aspiration to a dignified workplace, then, is grounded in an epistemology of comparison. Normative in the most banal sense.

What is more interesting, perhaps, is how moral comparison becomes strategic in some circumstances and not in others, how workplace norms are useful at certain times but inconvenient at others. It’s so typical of academic institutions to want to seem incomparable or sui generis when they need to legitimate themselves, isn’t it?

(N.B.: All the proper names in the interview are pseudonyms.)

The long version:

Coming back to my research about philosophy departments in France, I was recently reading an institutional document describing the (highly-rated) research laboratory for philosophers at the University of Paris-8. Apparently it was a bureaucratic requirement to write a section describing the “infrastructures” available to the laboratory. But since Paris-8 is a typically underfunded public university, operating in cramped quarters on a small campus in the Parisian banlieue, the sad reality is that their infrastructure was quite limited. To the point of comedy.

I quote:

Infrastructures

L’unité dispose d’une salle de 35 m2, équipée d’un téléphone, de deux ordinateurs fixes et d’une connexion par WIFI. Elle est meublée de tables, chaises, et bibliothèques. Elle est située dans un bâtiment neuf de moins de deux ans. La surface disponible par chercheur membre de l’équipe à titre principal est de 1,5 m2.

The unit possesses a room of 35 m², equipped with a telephone, two desktop computers and WiFi access. It is furnished with tables, chairs and bookshelves. It is situated in a new building less than two years old. The available surface per principle laboratory researcher is 1.5 m².

One and a half square meters per researcher is just about enough to cram a chair into, and clearly not enough for any sort of individual workspace. Accordingly, there were none; the room in question was purely used to hold small seminars. The whole laboratory staff would never have fit inside it, and when they did have meetings, they took place elsewhere.

There is, of course, something charming about the plaintive note that at least the tiny room is “situated in a new building less than two years old” (the building pictured above). It’s as if the author felt obliged to put only the most positive spin on a clearly inadequate situation. Nevertheless, there is something to learn here about what counts as infrastructure for philosophers at Parisian public universities: in short, all the productive infrastructure (the books, the libraries, the computers, the desks) is elsewhere, generally at home, and the campus becomes purely a place of knowledge exchange, not of knowledge production. Which is why it it is possible to have a philosophy lab with practically no facilities.

Philosopher: But I don’t know — you aren’t interested in the solutions to problems?

Ethnographer: The solutions to philosophical problems for example?

Philosopher: Problems! Real ones! For example do you consider that the word “being” has several senses? Or not? Fundamental ontological question. Do you accept that there are several senses or one? It changes everything. And what are your arguments one way or the other?

Ethnographer: Well me personally I’m not an expert—

Philosopher: But it’s a really important question. Do you accept a category like for instance the possible?

Ethnographer: Yes OK—

Philosopher: Between non-being and being? Do you grant an ontological existence to the notion of the possible? Me, no. Others, yes. And one tries to say why and why not. If you grant something like human dispositions, do you grant a distinction between for instance what one calls the faculties— understanding, imagining, dreaming, are these the same things or not? Do you grant something like freedom? Do you not know how to answer these questions? And do you say yes or no or something else? The response to these questions isn’t of the order of metanarratives. It’s of the order of the truth, pure and simple.

Ethnographer: Sure, I can agree.

Philosopher: But it’s really important. This is what philosophy is!

Ethnographer: Well I’d say that what interests me as an ethnographer is that, being able to ask these sorts of questions, not everyone asks them in the same way, and what interests me as an ethnographer is the different ways of situating these questions, of raising them.

Philosopher: You’re not interested in the truth of the answer?

This was a relatively traditional philosopher who was invested, as you can see, in a fairly standard view of philosophy as “solving problems.” Here, he pressed me quite hard to express interest in that project. But I felt obliged to insist that adjudicating local truths is not what ethnographers are usually interested in!

It’s interesting to me that he found my refusal baffling. It’s as if at heart it was hard to imagine that other disciplines worked on profoundly different questions from those of the traditional philosophical canon.

But what goes unsaid in this interview is that I, the ethnographer, was not the only person who wasn’t trying to “solve problems.” In fact, many of the radical philosophers I studied in Saint-Denis were also quite uninterested in this problem-solving approach to philosophy. More often than not, they sought to produce new concepts, to re-reading classic texts, to reflect on the present, to “intervene” critically in debates — and all of this could happen without necessarily solving any of the classic philosophical questions.

I expect my interlocutor here would have dismissed some of his colleagues, as well, as not being interested in real philosophy.

But if I learned anything in my research on philosophers, it’s that there can be interesting disputes over what philosophy is. (Every orthodoxy involves heterodoxy, after all.) To claim that philosophy is a well-defined field would seem, in that light, somewhat fraught.

« Nicolas n’est pas quelqu’un qui se complaît dans l’intellect, assure le préfet Claude Guéant, directeur de cabinet place Beauvau, puis à Bercy. J’ai beaucoup côtoyé Jean-Pierre Chevènement. Il lisait de la philosophie jusqu’à 2 heures du matin, c’était toute sa vie, les idées prenant parfois le pas sur l’action. Nicolas, lui, est d’abord un homme d’action. Quand il bavarde avec Lance Armstrong ou avec un jeune de banlieue, il a vraiment le sentiment d’en tirer quelque chose. Dès qu’il monte en voiture, la radio se met en marche. Il aime les choses simples, les variétés, la télévision. En cela, il exprime une certaine modernité. Les Français ne passent pas leur temps à lire de la philosophie… »

“Nicolas isn’t someone who revels in the intellect,” asserted the prefect Claude Guéant, chief of staff at the Ministry of the Interior and then at the Ministry of Finance. “I’ve spent a lot of time with [the Socialist politician] Jean-Pierre Chevènement. He read philosophy until two in the morning, all his life, ideas sometimes took precedence over action. Nicolas, on the other hand, is primarily a man of action. When he chats with Lance Armstrong or with a kid from the slums, he really feels like he’s getting something out of it. As soon as he gets in a car, the radio’s on. He loves simple things, variety, TV. In that, he expresses a certain modernity. The French don’t spend their time reading philosophy…”

A certain modernity is the opposite of time wasted on philosophy books…

Philosophizing in senior year???

1) The 2003 “official instructions” for the philosophy teaching program in senior year say: “Philosophy teaching in senior year… contributes to forming autonomous minds, warned of reality’s complexities and capable of putting to work a critical consciousness of the contemporary world.” What do you think of this?

These formulations pose two major problems.

First, it strikes me as shocking that a philosophy textbook should begin with a series of “official instructions.” An instruction, in the sense of a directive, is entirely contrary to the “autonomous minds” that we are told to “form.” Are we told to “force our students to be free”? Moreover, in the context of schools, “instruction” has a second dimension: we still talk about “public, obligatory, civic instruction” [in connection with public education]. But instructing is not educating. Instructing basically means shaping someone’s mind to fit the competences that the institution judges socially useful. Educating on the other hand means communicating a potential to a mind which, one day, will allow it to help define what is or isn’t valuable for its society. Yet according to the “official” declarations, we’re still on the model of instructing, in both senses of the term.

Second, the goal proclaimed for high school philosophy teaching is completely exorbitant. I know that many people subscribe to it. But we should be astonished by the excessive disproportion between the end and the means: they have groups of thirty pupils, a very limited range of practical exercises, lecture courses, etc. And above all, it’s impossible for philosophy teachers to “form autonomous and critical minds” if the pupils haven’t been invited to be autonomous or critical since the day they arrived in the schoolhouse. Not to mention that the art of thinking isn’t reserved for philosophy. Would one be exempted from “thinking for oneself” in history, literature or physics? It must be said that the goal [of our philosophy teaching] is, in our present circumstances, pretty disconnected from these realities; and we might therefore give up on grading students’ homework against an ideal that very few people can claim to have attained. We could, at least for starters, propose simpler exercises that would be better adapted to our students’ competences (the ones “formed” by our instruction) and to our own. At the university we do all this readily enough.

2) What should be at stake in philosophy teaching? What should be its goals?

Well, I don’t want to say that there’s nothing special to expect from philosophy teaching. To my eyes, philosophy is in essence a critique of our values and an effort to demonstrate, by one method or another, the legitimacy or pertinence of the values we hold. The philosophers who we’ve read and reread over the centuries have all undertaken an examination of the values of their times. That said, these philosophers don’t play the moral purity card [la carte de bonne conscience]. They direct their critical examination at themselves, working with their own keen perceptions of the possibilities and blockages of their epoch. Today, as in the past, many people, including our official instructors, defend some values without examination and try to impose them on others. Wondering where our values come from, going over them with a fine-toothed comb and sorting them out, creating new ones, scrutinizing the motives for our adherence to them and the mechanisms that inculcate them — that’s what a reading of the philosophers can invite us to do. And that’s a truly priceless service.

Like Zask, I’ve been struck by the official rhetoric in France about teaching people to have free and critical minds, which always seems to entail, as Zask points out, the contradictory project of “making” people free, and to presuppose the unlikely premise that educational institutions know what freedom or criticality are. But I’m most interested, here, in the part of the interview that proposes a definition of what’s essential about philosophy: a critique of values.

It’s not an easy exercise, at present, to come up with a well-defined area of inquiry that’s essentially philosophical. Many areas of inquiry that formerly “belonged” to philosophy — physics, society, politics, the nature of “man” or of language, the structure of thinking — have over time (and not without struggle) developed autonomous disciplines of their own, which contest and quite often dominate the intellectual terrain formerly occupied by philosophers. There are plenty of philosophers who still write about all this stuff, of course, but these objects are no longer exclusively philosophical, and as André Pessel has put it, “if this link with constituted knowledges [in other domains] disappears, philosophy sees its field extraordinarily limited and reduced to an exclusive study of subjectivity.”

Without going into great detail about competing conceptions of philosophy (see some American examples), it seems to me that some of the more obvious options aren’t terribly thrilling. Consider some of the most well-known: there’s philosophy as the conceptual foundation of all the other sciences, or (in an alternative version) philosophy as the conceptual handmaiden of the sciences (ie, the philosophers show up to help scientists “clarify” their theoretical ideas); there’s philosophy as a specialized conceptual inquiry into fairly narrow but autonomously philosophical domains; there’s philosophy as the history of ideas; in a more instrumental version, there’s philosophy as a place for building “skills” in critical thinking (as in the lycées).

It seems to me that there’s something to be said for most of these fairly academic projects, though I’m especially skeptical of the first one. But most of them (leaving aside the first and last) don’t afford a particularly exciting public role to the field. Of course, in France we also see more politicized conceptions of philosophy: philosophy as (in effect) the training ground for public intellectuals (always a small group), philosophy as “class struggle at the level of ideas” (via Althusser), philosophy as an emancipatory project (often cited at Paris-8). Here again, however, the latter two are extremely marginal and the first, ultimately, is fairly elitist.

Zask’s proposal for philosophy as a critique of values, in this light, has the advantage of being potentially open to all, sociopolitically interesting, and not necessarily a buttress of the status quo — without, however, necessarily becoming self-marginalizing (as so much marxist philosophy tends to). As an ethnographer of philosophers, obviously my relationship to philosophy is a bit strange, but let me just say that while I’m ambivalent about some of the field’s more grandiose claims, the idea of a field that does critique of values seems pretty compelling. A lot of anthropologists want to do work like this, but disciplinary norms of empiricism and relativism tend to prevent us from producing very well-theorized normative work.

A painted character hangs from a coat rack. He appears striped. Bald. Stretched out by the neck. Striped shoulderbag too.

My friend Emmanuel proposes that we translate this as, “At Paris VIII in the philosophy department, I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by LMD.” Alternatively, “had our minds blown by LMD”… the Law LMD being one of the first university reforms of the last decade (2003). I’m not sure who’s represented by this skeletal face: the government? the philosophers? But I note the little hint of Greek architecture in the broken columns: classical Greece often seems to be iconic of philosophy in France (more, I think, than in philosophical circles I’ve come across in the U.S.).

The Department of Philosophy Annual Party.
Friday, June 29, 2007. Starting at 7:30pm. At Montreuil sous Bois, 6bis rue Dombasle. People’s House.
Metro: Mairie de Montreuil and Bus 121 or 102
Bus Stop: “Cemetery” and it’s to the right of Lycée Jean Jaurès.

Thanks to the hospitality of the Montreuil People’s House, the Paris 8 philo annual party will take place this friday june 29th at 7:30pm. It’s a nomadic, autonomist tradition that sees itself as a sort of philosophico-gastronomical and musical banquet where everyone can share food and drink with five other mouths, everyone presenting their own national or regional culture or their own culinary preferences. Much live music will bring out our mutual hospitality, and our pleasure in being together to share a festive moment (and to nourish the wish to see each other again next year). Students, teachers, and their family and friends are strongly invited to participate in the success of this EXCEPTIONAL ENCOUNTER.

Let me just note that, compared to the monochromatic deathscape of the last image, we see here a dramatically different style in indigenous art: more like the art of celebration than the art of nightmare political laments.

It has the nose of a bull, a mouth full of baleen stuffed with gravel, the whiskers of a bloody mop and the facial shape of a television set (complete with little feet like a dimpled chin). Don’t ask me what this face indicates, but since it was high up on the wall near the ceiling, I doubt many people look at it on a regular basis.

It’s some kind of an object with handles…

“Madness is when you keep acting the same way, expecting a new result… -Einstein.” There are similar versions of this statement in English, but I’ve never heard it was Einstein who said it. Still, it’s entertaining that a slogan that in a sense critiques repetition would be prominently displayed in a classroom, which is, after all, a place for the repetition of knowledge. It’s also entertaining that this (written) utterance of the slogan is itself a repetition of a well-known formula that has seldom been known to produce definite results — thereby also arguably performing what it criticizes.

The view out the window is obscured by bars, or anyway a sort of anti-vandalism metal grating. Is it there to keep the philosophers in? To keep the masses out? Neither, but it does seem that its function is to make sure that the only way into the room is via legitimate possession of the classroom key, thereby maintaining physical control over academic space.

Security at Paris-8 deserves more of an investigation than I’ve given it so far. Maybe later this week…

Part of the answer involves this poem I came across today, by Jean Herold Paul, a Haitian doctoral student in philosophy at Paris-8 (a department that turns out to have long-standing links with Port-au-Prince). I’ve translated it with his permission for you all.

The night that we are
(in memory of Jésula and Wilmichel)

bric-a-brac of apocalypses
bric-a-break of our utopias

and if…
and then…
but are we still?

in the night where we are
in the night that we are
a horrible night
where only our dead appear dimly
without name or register
without farewell or burial

in the night where we are
in the night that we are
what’s left of us?

bric-a-brac of apocalypses
bric-a-break of our utopias

in the night where we are
in the night that we are
it’s still night
at least our presence is reflected there
a simple sensation of being somewhere
without knowing who we are
where we are
without knowing with what or with who we are

in the night where we are
in the night that we are
when will we be able to mourn
for ourselves?

A raised table, poorly lit by a fluorescent lamp shining on the whiteboard and a dim incandescent light aimed high on the wall & accomplishing nothing. Two microphones, passed back and forth between panelists. Debris of paper and waterbottles. Notebooks. Five men, one woman. Semi-formal dress: coats and jackets, Balibar in a vast yellow scarf, collars peeking out from unbuttoned shirts. Some are leaning back, the two to the left seem to be maybe whispering to each other, a couple take notes, the man at right stares out into space hands clasped as if the audience weren’t even there. (We will come back to this point.)

If we turn to look at the audience, we see a lot of middle-aged and old folks, interspersed with a collection of philosophy students and other possibly radical youth. Many of the people I know from the Paris-8 philosophy department showed up — unsurprising, since it was partly a homage to their recently departed trostkyist colleague Daniel Ben-Said. The room was almost full; you can even see, as if in a cartoon, two people draped across the auditorium window and peeking in (at top center). It’s interesting to think about the collective bodily states of an audience. This would be easier if I’d given you a bigger image, but you can see at the same time the orchestration of the collective gaze (largely directed down at the speaker) even as many seem to be facing elsewhere, looking down at their notes, looking off into space. In terms of overall posture we can see something like an orchestrated slackness, a socially authorized moment of physical laze, with a lot of people leaning forward onto their desks, their heads extended towards the podium, the rest of their bodies left behind dangling like irrelevant appendages: in a setting like this, where you’re sitting still for long periods in an auditorium, the torso and arms become nothing but support systems for the eyes and ears, the mouth is irrelevant since you’re not talking, the hands may wiggle slightly as they take notes, the legs are doing nothing but waiting for future motion. Often the arm is propping up the chin, or the cheek, or some other part of the head, as if the burden of thinking weighed things down too much for the head to hold itself up — and though I’m sort of kidding about that, there’s no question that we can see here some excellent examples of socially authorized intellectual audience posture. The melancholy lazy attentiveness of a hand holding up a chin, little imitations of Rodin’s Thinker, would seem a lot less normative at a rugby match, I’m guessing. Note-taking too might seem out of place in a stadium or a rock concert: we notice that seemingly spontaneous intellectual engagement as an audience member is in fact done in accordance with local social norms. Local norms that differentiate the occasion from other occasions.

Just before the talk, a crowd milled around outside at the bookseller’s stand. Bookselling seems to be the kind of small commercial activity that goes best with talking about communism. That and selling coffee in the session breaks. I did hear a few interesting ideas in the talks (Balibar‘s especially), but afterwards I tended to agree with some other friends that it was a deeply academic occasion, one with no audience participation and a traditional division between the speaking intellectual luminaries and the silent receptive audience.

This sense of the event seems to have been shared, because afterwards, someone wrote a satirical email to the philosophy department listserve:

Je me permets de vous transmettre en récit un cri silencieux que j’ai entendu aujourd’hui, partagé par qques personnes

Comme dans une scène de dialogue platonicien,
qqu’un a rencontré qqu’un qui cherchais à connaître tous les détails concernant l’événement qui réunit Balibar, Rancière, Zizek, et les autres qui avec eux prirent part au banquet, et quels discours ils tinrent sur le thème du communisme.
Malheureusement, il ne pouvait rien dire de précis, sauf qu’il avait mal au ventre
des problèmes de digestion surement
Puis le récit se transforme en publicité
après le café décaféiné voici le colloque communiste décommunisé
le public n’a pas droit de prendre la parole
mais tout cela est pour le bien du communisme pour que “les débats puissent aller le plus loin possible”, “pour approfondir les problématiques” sans être dérangés par les sans-parts et sans perdre du temps…..après tout c’est une question de productivité
Ne cherchez pas pour Socrate, le récit est post-moderne, à placer sur la voie de la comédie.

ça aide devant le tragique

“I’ll allow myself to share the story of a silent cry I heard today, one shared by several people

As in a scene of platonic dialogue,
someone encountered someone who wanted to hear everything about the event with Balibar, Rancière, Zizek, and the others who took part in the symposium, and what speeches they gave on the theme of communism.
Unfortunately, he could say nothing precise, except that he had a stomach ache
surely it was digestive problems
after decaffeinated coffee, here we have the decommunized communist colloquium
the public had no right to speak
but all that is for the good of communism, so that “the debates can go as far as possible,” “to deepen the problematics” without being bothered by outsiders and without wasting time… after all it’s a matter of productivity.
Don’t look for Socrates, this story is post-modern, to file under “comedy.”

it helps in the face of tragedy.

I won’t comment much on this intriguing prose poem other than to suggest that it’s revealing of a collective appetite for new intellectual or political forms in the face of a conference that was organized in an obtrusively traditional fashion.

1. Introduction: Clashing futures in university politics
What is the future of French universities in a globalized world? According to the Magna Charta Universitatum, signed by a number of rectors of European universities in 1988, “the future of humankind depends largely on cultural, scientific and technical development; and this is built up in centers of culture, knowledge and research as represented by true universities” (Rectors 2003:6). But not everyone in Europe shares this utopian view of universities as the salvation of the human species. In the midst of French protests against university reforms in 2007, the Department of Philosophy at the University of Paris-VIII held a meeting to discuss the campus strikes. According to the minutes: “Questions were raised about concerns over finding work. That one would worry about one’s future – to say the least – doesn’t mean that one wants one’s concerns instrumentalized by and for projects that will make the future even darker still” (Paris8philo 2007). In other words, in the thick of the political fray, these philosophers viewed academic knowledge not as the future of humankind, but rather as an uncertain defense against a world of scarce employment and darkening futures.

What, then, is the relationship between academic knowledge, politics and the future in contemporary France? In the “knowledge society,” how does the future come to mediate knowledge-making and politics alike; and how do knowledge and the university come to be central to political futures in France and across Europe? Along with several other scholars (Fuller 2003; Meyer, et al. 2006; Nassehi 2004), I reject the view that the “knowledge society” constitutes a radically new society or economy. Rather, I see the “knowledge society” as a new cultural schema and political discourse, one whose cultural metamorphoses and political dynamics demand anthropological analysis. This project will thus examine the academic production and politics of knowledge via an ethnographic study of contemporary French philosophy, and of the political struggles that surround contemporary French universities. This is not the only site where knowledge society politics have become significant (cf. Rabinow 1999), but it is a good one, insofar as universities are among the knowledge society’s key institutions.

French philosophy in particular appears to be an especially good place to examine the relationship between academic life and national knowledge politics, since philosophy has long been central to the French Republican project (Douailler 1988). To gain a comparative understanding of contemporary philosophical practice, I plan to study two philosophy departments: I will spend a semester each at the University of Paris-VIII (St-Denis) and the University of Provence (Aix-en-Provence). Within these two departments, I will examine philosophical knowledge-making and political engagement. Beyond the departments, I will scrutinize policy, media and activist discourses dealing with the national university system. In particular, I will focus on the different futures that are imagined, feared, longed for, and put in question in these sites. The French university is often said to be “in crisis,” and its future has often been debated, as has the future of philosophy as a discipline. I hypothesize that, by scrutinizing the cultural production of futures, we will be better able to understand how philosophical knowledge-making is related to the politics of French universities and of the “knowledge society” at large.

The underlying theoretical agenda of this project is organized around four related questions. First, how is philosophical knowledge understood, made and learned? Second, how is philosophical knowledge-making changing in the context of French university politics? Third, how does this philosophical knowledge, in turn, find its place within its broader political situation; how does philosophy become politically or publicly engaged? And finally, what sorts of future-making projects connect or differentiate philosophical knowledge-making and university politics; what common futures bring structure to the cultural scene of universities in the “knowledge society”? I draw these questions from research traditions in anthropology and sociology of knowledge; from studies of the semiotics and politics of academic institutions, particularly from recent studies on the sociology of French philosophy and the transnational politics of the Bologna process; and from recent anthropological research on futures in other contexts. In bringing these disciplinary traditions together, I hope to contribute a new, anthropological perspective on the politics of the future to a growing interdisciplinary scholarship on knowledge and academic cultures. Such a perspective is badly needed in a moment when most scholarship on higher education, critical or not, tends to see universities as ruined or threatened institutions (Readings 1996, Slaughter and Leslie 1997). Rather than seeing universities as sites of organizational conflict and disarray (Kerr 2001) or functionalist reproduction of neoliberal capitalism (Shumar 1997), I will propose we view them as vehicles for cultural projects of “knowledge” and future-making that deserve further attention.

2. Theoretical context: Anthropology of knowledge and the future
The theoretical foundation of this project lies in anthropology and sociology of knowledge (Barth 2002; Crick 1982; Swidler and Arditi 1994), a tradition which has evolved from its Marxian, Nietzschean and Durkheimian origins to encompass studies of contested knowledge in social fields (Bourdieu 1977), of large-scale formations of knowledge and power (Foucault 1972; Foucault 1995), and of the micro-social workings of semiosis and concept formation (Silverstein 2004). Much recent ethnographic research has focused specifically on knowledge workers and expert cultures (Glaeser 2003; Knorr Cetina and Bruegger 2000; Mazzarella 2003; Riles 2000). Here, in examining how French philosophy is involved with French politics, I draw particularly on studies that demonstrate a reciprocal relationship between experts and their surrounding social orders. That is, while experts shape public knowledge and national culture, they are themselves constituted and limited by the national knowledge they help produce (Boyer 2000; Masco 2004; Verdery 1991). I am also influnced by research on what has been termed the “politics of knowledge” (cf. Pels 1997), which encompasses struggles over the state’s involvement in science and higher education (Delanty 2002; Fuller 2000; Weiler 2005), the negotiation of competing claims of expertise (Bloor 2000; Epstein 1996; Wayland 2003), and the involvement of academics and academic knowledge in the political realm (Lagasnerie 2007). All of these issues are indeed central to the analysis of my chosen ethnographic case. However, in this project, I also hope to substantiate two major critiques of this literature.

(1) It suffers from a lack of interest in epistemic structure and system, topics which were best developed methodologically by an earlier era’s cognitive and structuralist anthropology (Berlin, et al. 1968; D’Andrade and Romney 1966; Frake 1964; Lévi-Strauss 1963; Lévi-Strauss 1966; Sahlins 1976). For example, Dominic Boyer’s recent study in anthropology of knowledge (Boyer 2005) traces the tropes of “system” and “spirit” through German journalistic practice without giving more than an impressionistic sketch of the general system of everyday forms of knowing in which these tropes take their place. Karin Knorr-Cetina’s research on “epistemic cultures” (Knorr Cetina 1999), a capstone work of laboratory studies of science, never really systematizes the systems of knowing that she examines. As a corrective to this tendency for practice to displace structure in anthropology of knowledge, I will propose that we theorize knowledge not just as a semiotic outcome of social interaction and negotation (Latour 1987), but also as a system of epistemic forms, analogous to the general system of communicative forms theorized long ago by Hymes (1964) in linguistic anthropology. Of course, this system of forms is reshaped and reproduced in social practice, and, following on studies of science laboratories (Gusterson 2001; Knorr Cetina 1979; Latour and Woolgar 1986 [1979]; Sims 2005; Traweek 1988), I will also attend to the practices of knowledge making through which this knowledge system is produced.

(2) An unresolved tension lingers in this literature between theorizing knowledge as a universal aspect of human society (Barth 2002), and theorizing “knowledge” as a culturally specific phenomenon, even as an ideological project. In theorizing the “knowledge society,” Stehr comments that while knowledge is an “anthropological constant,” the knowledge society is unique because of the unprecedented degree to which knowledge becomes central to economic production (Stehr 1994:93-99). But while anthropologists of knowledge typically assume that “knowledge” is a universally applicable analytic category, the “knowledge society” affords a very clear case in which the very category of “knowledge” becomes a locally politicized symbol. To study the “knowledge society” is to study the ideological processes that constitute “knowledge” as a key stake of political struggle — which is obviously not a culturally universal scenario. I hope to shift the emphasis, that is, away from a universalistic study of knowledge and towards a particular analysis of “knowledge” as a “lexical totem” (Boyer 2005:60) of a certain European cultural and political order.

These theoretical concerns take on more specificity when brought into studies of French academic culture, which have, in fact, not always taken “knowledge” as a central theoretical object. Pierre Bourdieu has produced the most substantial and well-known body of research on French higher education, offering analyses of class reproduction among students, of professional struggle among faculty, of the types of capital displayed in academic discourse, and so on (Bourdieu 1988; Bourdieu 1990; Bourdieu 1996; Bourdieu, et al. 1994; Bourdieu and Passeron 1979). In fact, the most empirically relevant prior literature for my own project derives from a Bourdieuan school of sociologists, who have produced a detailed set of studies of French philosophy, dealing with such things as the academic book market, the representation of foreign philosophers, the reproduction of the philosophical profession, and the structural situation of the avant-garde (Boltanski 1975; Fabiani 1983; Fabiani 1988; Godechot 1999; Lepenies 1983; Pinto 1983; Pinto 1994; Pinto 2000; Pinto 2007; Soulié 1995; Soulié 1997; Soulié 2002; Verdes-Leroux 1975). But there are two problems with this literature. First, on an empirical level, the sociologists are too quick to delimit their research object, assuming prematurely that the social field of philosophy is identical to the academic discipline (cf. Lagasnerie 2007). Here, on the contrary, I hope to show that in France the social field of philosophical action goes beyond the narrow confines of the discipline, becoming substantially entangled with the field of university politics. This result, once substantiated, will also be an important corrective to the substantial literature on French university governance (Chevaillier 1998; Musselin 1997; Musselin 2004; Tavernier 2004; Weisz 1983), which tends to over-privilege the top-down policy perspective in analyzing university politics, and hence overlook less official forms of public and political engagement.

Second, I would emphasize that the ultimate result of Bourdieu’s theory of practice, in which the habitus is always more or less well adjusted to the objective social and cultural structures in which it finds itself, is one in which knowledge always ends up being ultimately instrumental to social reproduction (Sewell 1992). It seems to me that this formula could be usefully reversed: rather than viewing knowledge as an instrument of social reproduction, as in Bourdieu, we could view social reproduction as the process by which culturally given knowledge projects are realized (see Sahlins 1976). Departing from Foucauldian and Bourdieuian paradigms in which, other differences aside, knowledge-making is seen as an instrument of social reproduction and political power, I will suggest, as mentioned above that we view politics and social practice as, among other things, vehicles for culturally arbitrary knowledge projects — the “knowledge society” being the most recent. This should both invert and complement the traditional Bourdieuian and Foucauldian view.

The future, and temporality in general, become important here because knowledge-making projects, particularly those examined here, are structured centrally around differently imagined futures, hopes and expectations (Miyazaki 2004). The future has attracted much recent attention from ethnographers (Boyer 2006; Escobar 1995; Guyer 2007; Peebles 2008; Rosenberg and Harding 2005; Weiss 2004), who have explored how futures are both discursively formulated and tacitly enacted. But although a number of studies have examined the temporal structure of academic cultures (Bourdieu 1988; Goffman 1981; Millet 2003; Moffatt 1989; Sabin 2007), they have remained primarily descriptive, and aside from a few brief remarks about class reproduction and vocational orientation (Bourdieu 1979:63; Nathan 2005:151-2), the future has not come into question there. Here, I hope to advance our theoretical understanding of futures in academic contexts by drawing on Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of futurity and Nancy Munn’s analysis of intersubjective spacetime. In Sartre’s existentialist philosophy, a future is always projected as the horizon of an actor’s practical activity, and every practical project is oriented towards an implied future (Sartre 1992[1943]:180-187). In a more sociocentric version, I would argue that we can view social practice as necessarily embodying future-making projects, whether at an individual, institutional or societal level. Hence, we can analyze the implied or explicit future horizon towards which social practices are oriented. Such a perspective is essentially consistent with Munn’s more recent anthropology of time and value, which showed that, in Gawa, the processes of expanding “intersubjective spacetime” are means by which “[the] community seeks to create the value it regards as essential to its communal viability” (Munn 1986:3, my emphasis). While Munn did not specifically examine futures, I expect to find that, along these lines, the future becomes a form of value in my fieldsites. In other words, I will ultimately advance a theory of the cultural production of futures, not only as a mode of representation and experience, but as a medium of social and political value, and as a tacit dimension of knowledge-making projects.

3. Historical context and site selection: French philosophy and the European knowledge society
The national political role of French philosophy dates at least to post-revolutionary debates about education in the 1790s (Douailler 1988). By the early 19th century, philosophy was instituted as an obligatory lycée course, viewed as both the intellectual pinnacle of secondary education and as a form of political education for enlightened citizens. In this way, philosophy was at once intellectually and politically central to the French Republic. This view persists to this day: according to Mark Sherringham, currently Inspector General of National Education, “The Republic surpasses the teaching of philosophy, but its content and its conditions of possibility remain at the same time fully philosophical” (Sherringham 2006:62). In keeping with this disciplinary commitment to the Republic, a number of French philosophers have served as high government officials, notably Victor Cousin (Goldstein 1968) and Louis Liard (Greenberg 1981; Weisz 1983) in the 19th century, Alexandre Kojeve in the post-war period (Price 2000), and recently Luc Ferry (Pinto 2007:141-154) and Blandine Kriegel (Bowen 2007:13-16). At the same time, philosophy has harbored deeply oppositional political projects, notably those of twentieth-century Marxist philosophers like Kojève, Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, and unorthodox intellectuals like Sartre and Michel Foucault (Foucault 1980; Roth 1985; Schalk 1979; Sprinker 1985). In short, scholastic traditions and outright political dissent have been brought together within a discipline that has, at least at moments, also become the legitimate intellectual discourse of national, Republican ideals (Mathy 2000:ch. 3; Wolin 2000).

But the relation of academic knowledge to politics has changed in France, as Europe has become increasingly economically and institutionally integrated (Borneman and Fowler 1997), and as universities have become increasingly central to mass social reproduction (Schofer and Meyer 2005). This new “politics of knowledge” has its roots in the 1960s and ’70s, when social scientists like Daniel Bell (Bell 1973) and Alvin Gouldner (Gouldner 1979) foretold the coming of a “post-industrial” or “knowledge” society, run by a “new class” of technocrats and intellectuals and newly centered on knowledge production and management (Stehr 1994). By the end of the century, these prophecies, whatever their flaws, had moved into the political and policy arena. In the last twenty years, an extensive discourse on the “knowledge society” has developed in European higher education policy, politics, and rhetoric. From the 1988 Magna Charta Universitatum quoted above, to the European Commission’s 1997 declaration of a “Europe of Knowledge” and the international Bologna Process (1999-2010), the basic premise of university policy has been that knowledge is central to society’s existence in a new way. An accompanying series of international reforms has aimed to “harmonize,” rationalize and improve university education, under the banner of “developing European cultural dimensions, … citizens’ mobility and employability and the Continent’s overall development” (European Ministers of Education 1999:7).

In France, however, the government policies implementing these reforms have met with major opposition. As I mentioned earlier, students at dozens of universities have protested university reforms, notably in 2003 and 2007. Faculty have organized collectives like “Save the University” and “Save Research,” and produced a growing critical discourse on the Bologna Process and French university policy (Charle, et al. 2004; Charle and Soulié 2007; Faure, et al. 2006; Oblin and Vassort 2005; Schultheis, et al. 2008). Yet as I indicated above, the future figures as a central concern across all sides of these political struggles. While continental “knowledge society” discourse has its utopian faith that universities are crucial to the European future, the futures of French universities are constantly cast in question. Troubled by low funding, low prestige, and questionable vocational relevance, they are constantly described as “in crisis,” “mediocre,” “a field of ruins,” even “dead.”

Philosophy serves as a good barometer of the changing politics of the “knowledge society,” because philosophy’s status has changed in the post-war period. Philosophy, considered the “queen of the sciences” in the 19th century (Fabiani 1988), has lost its pre-eminence as natural and social sciences have become increasingly prominent, and has had long-standing rivalries with other disciplines, notably history, sociology and psychology (Bourdieu and Passeron 1967; Chimisso 2000). After 1968, the political engagements of the discipline shifted back towards a less-radicalized Republican liberalism (Mathy 2000; Pavel 1989), and today the discipline itself has an uncertain future. While some, like Sherringham, portray philosophy as a centerpiece of secondary education, others fear a world of declining resources (Bourgeois and Menasseyre 2008). While the likes of Alain Badiou (2004) and Dominique Lecourt (2001) lament the lost radicalism of the past and accuse the present of mediocrity, others, such as Pascal Engel (2004) and Luc Ferry (Ferry and Renaut 1990), reject the past to advocate a depoliticized future of “modesty” and “humanism.” These debates about the discipline’s future, crucially, have taken the form of a debate over its relationship with politics. Philosophy’s future, I suspect, is put in doubt by European knowledge politics in which science and technical advances serve to guarantee national viability in the international marketplace, and philosophy is less central to French Republican legitimacy.

The question, then, is how philosophers manage their changing political fates in practice, and how that impinges on their daily academic knowledge-making. The two field sites I have selected are designed to show two quite contrasting forms of political engagement within the discipline. Philosophy at the University of Paris-VIII (Vincennes–St.-Denis), in an unpretentious Parisian suburb, was formed in 1970 in response to the educational crisis of the ’60s, and originally the department was comprised almost entirely of Marxist philosophers (Soulié 1998). Although it later become less radical, its chief priority remains “the analysis of the historical contexts and political implications of philosophies.” Its students also remain very politically active, supporting undocumented immigrants’ right to education, and proposing a “day of reflection on the future of the university” during the blockades of 2007. On the other hand, philosophy at the University of Provence, in the small provincial city of Aix-en-Provence, is known as a center of the American-influenced, less politicized “analytic” philosophy. The department offers a master’s in “argument and social influence,” the only such program in France, which they view as relevant to public activism and private enterprise alike. Its students wrote in their first annual newsletter that they were “allergic to militantisms of all stripes” (AsPhiX 2003). In short, while Paris-VIII exhibits a more direct form of philosophical engagement with politics, Aix-en-Provence is a place where new currents within the discipline and non-politicized forms of public engagement are more prominent.

4. Methods: Comparative departmental studies in context
As indicated above, primary fieldwork for this project will be divided between the two chosen departments. I plan to spend Autumn 2009 at the University of Paris-VIII, and Spring 2010 at the University of Provence. In choosing the university department as my primary unit of analysis, I hope to move beyond studies that focus exclusively on students or on faculty and hence fail to scrutinize the general social system of the university (Bourdieu 1988; Bourdieu and Passeron 1979; Felouzis 2001; Millet 2003; Moffatt 1989; Nathan 2005). Unlike a study of a classroom or a laboratory (Latour and Woolgar 1986 [1979]; Thorkelson 2008), a study of a university department affords a site in which the functionally differentiated activities of teaching, research, extra-academic interaction and organizational work are brought together. Yet university departments per se have not often been the primary objects of social-scientific or ethnographic inquiry. The limited number of extant studies has focused on internal conflicts and the department’s relation with its broader discipline (Camic 1995; Jennings 1997; Small 1999; Tuunainen 2005), on disciplinary “moral orders” (Ylijoki 2000), on research management (Morris 2002; Walton 1986) and on the teaching-research relation (Snell 2001). These studies tend to conceptualize the department as a social and organizational unit rather than as a site of knowledge-making, and tend to be oriented inwards towards the institution or the discipline. I would argue that we need to analyze departments more rigorously as “epistemic cultures” (Knorr Cetina 1999), and that we need to expand our analysis outwards to see how departments orient themselves towards external and extra-academic publics and political circumstances.

Hence, in this project I conceive of the department as a heterogeneous site of knowledge-making and public/political engagement, oriented at once inwards around its own bureaucratic and social structures, and outwards towards its broader institutional and political contexts. To explore these multiple facets of departmental structure, I envision multiple forms of data collection. I plan to conduct (a) observation of philosophical events such as lectures, seminars, colloquia, conferences, and meetings (building on my own ethnography of literary theory classrooms, Thorkelson 2008); (b) interviews with university professors, university students, and administrators; (c) observation of normally private philosophical activities like reading and writing, particularly when informants can be persuaded to narrate these activities to me (following on Bazerman 1985); and (d) examination of official documents, published papers, website activities, and secondary sources on the departments.

I plan to select two or three classrooms for intensive semester-long observation, at both license (undergraduate) and master levels, in order to gain a cross-section of knowledge-making practices. I will choose courses on the history of philosophy, on epistemology (a speciality of Aix-en-Provence), and on politics (a speciality of Paris-VIII), since these are the courses most likely to yield metadiscourse on philosophy, knowledge-making, and political engagement. Within these classrooms, and in other public philosophical settings, I will primarily be making a record of discourse and social practice, but will take preliminary notes about how philosophical knowledge-claims are made, how metadiscourse emerges around these knowledge claims (Hyland 1998; Silverstein 2003), how disciplinary and university politics are invoked or impinge on the situation, and how futures are enacted or discursively constructed. In interviews, I plan to pursue the same sorts of questions more directly, asking more specifically for actors’ views on the mechanics of philosophical knowledge-making, the relationship between ordinary academic life and university politics, and about individual views of the future. I intend to select informants and interviewees through a general request for all students, staff and faculty to speak to me; while this will not yield a 100% response rate, it will avoid the tendencies of snowball sampling to reproduce the existing lines of social association and dissociation within the departments.

To supplement this departmental research, I plan to conduct additional fieldwork on the political life of the French university system at large. First, I will assemble an archive of media coverage, official documents, and critical commentary on the university system and the broader discourse of the European “knowledge society.” Second, I will conduct a series of interviews with university and government officials, education researchers, and journalists who are involved in public discourse on universities. I will be asking primarily about the workings of university politics, and about individual views of the university’s future. Third, I will observe the organizational practices of three recently-formed groups that focus on university politics: ARESER (Association for reflection on higher education and research), Save the university, and Save Research. I will also examine philosophical organizations, such as the French Society of Philosophy, the Society of Analytic Philosophy, and the Association of Philosophy Students in Aix-En-Provence (AsPhiX), especially inasmuch as these become engaged with changing university politics. I envision attending these organizations’ public meetings, collecting documents, and analyzing the resulting discourse for its structures of political engagement and mobilizations of academic knowledge. This additional research, which I plan to conduct alongside the more focused departmental work, will be aimed at gaining a more global view of the political and intellectual world of French universities beyond the departmental situation.

All this data collection is intended to enable four avenues of analysis, which correspond to the theoretical topics listed above and which I will elaborate below. First, I intend an analysis of the forms and practices of philosophical knowing; second, an analysis of the political organization of French university reforms as they impinge on the departments I’ve chosen; third, an analysis of the modes of political or public engagement that I observe; finally, and most importantly, an analysis of future-making projects across all these sites. I envision the first three analytical topics as necessary foundations for an analysis of futures; while I view the analysis of futures as a way of grasping the underlying cultural conditions of the other three analyses. So these are not four totally separate types of analysis, but will rather, ideally, be reciprocally informing.

My analytic approach to philosophical knowledge as such is primarily inspired by the methodology of contemporary linguistic anthropology. I am interested both in the practiced system of knowledge-making (Frake 1964; Hymes 1964) and in the system of local ideologies about knowledge that regiment this system (Silverstein 2003; Thorkelson 2007). Therefore, drawing on transcripts of my observed situations, I will begin by constructing a taxonomy of philosophical knowledge forms, such as a “dissertation,” an “argument,” a “thesis,” a “distinction,” an “oeuvre,” and any other local forms that emerge in the field. I will then expand my analysis to include the practices through which knowledge forms are created, circulated and reworked, and in which knowledge claims are introduced and negotiated. In particular, I will examine the production of knowledge in social and symbolic interaction (Goffman 1974); its use and reception; its media of transmission (Barth 2002); its affective structure (e.g., what kinds of knowledge are considered “exciting” or “interesting,” cf. Davis 1971); and its relationship to politics (politically significant? apolitical?). Drawing on semiotic studies of texts and textuality (Brenneis 1999; Mertz 2007; Silverstein and Urban 1996; Urciuoli 1999), I will particularly scrutinize the way that knowledge-making is textually mediated in books, essays, websites, lectures, and other genres, which serve technical instruments of philosophical knowledge in something of the way that particle detectors do in physics (Galison 1997). I will also examine ideologies about knowledge, noting what counts as valid or legitimate knowledge; who is a legitimate knower; what forms of knowledge are considered sound and unsound, and so on. The analytic aim is to assemble a holistic picture of departmental knowledge production systems, and to be able to compare knowledge-making across my two chosen departments.

My approach to political organization and political engagement, on the other hand, is mainly influenced by Pierre Bourdieu’s prior research on academic institutions (Bourdieu 1988; Bourdieu and Passeron 1979), and by Jacques Rancière’s research on politics (Ranciere 1992). I will begin by assembling an analysis of the social field on which the maneuvers of university politics take place. This will draw on my broader background research on public discourse and official governmental interventions on universities, as well as on focused interviews in which I hope to explore personal views and experiences of university politics. The idea is simply to assemble a map of the policy actors, governance systems, political maneuvers, and debates within French universities. I will pay particular attention to how these are affected by transnational European reforms. Having thus gained a general picture of the political situation, I will follow political events as they happen during my fieldwork, focusing on the following analytical questions: (a) what counts as “political”; (b) who is recognized as a legitimate political actor, such as politicians, officials, student organizations, unions, and the like; (c) how academic knowledge, particularly philosophy, becomes politically significant; and (d) what is recognized as valid or successful political engagement.

In tandem with these analyses of politics and knowledge-making, I hope to develop my analysis of futures and future-making projects. Drawing on the concept of the future that I derive from Sartre and Munn, as described above, I will be interested in observing tacit futures in philosophical practice; I will also inquire about people’s plans, projects, and thoughts about the future, as well as examining public rhetorics of the future. Again, I will look for these in both collected documents and transcribed social situations. (The frequent semiotic invocations of “crisis” in French universities, and of “fear of the future,” will be especially important to investigate, as they indicate a perceived lack of a stable future.) I plan to examine futures at four analytical levels: (a) the futures of individuals, particularly their career or vocational prospects; (b) the collective futures of philosophy departments and academic associations; (c) the future of philosophy in France; and (d) the mass futures of French and European universities at large. Then, having assembled this array of futures, I will attempt to ascertain which ones are unique to particular sites, which ones spread across contexts, and how this whole array of futures fits together or falls into contradiction. The aim, ultimately, will be to discern how different futures underlie the interlocking but quite different projects of philosophical knowledge-making and university political action. The choice of the two philosophy departments, moreover, should open up two different perspectives on the future of philosophy in France, since Paris-VIII and Aix-en-Provence differ greatly in their trajectories within the discipline, and can be hypothesized to have quite different future orientations. Finally, I will compare the local and institutional futures I observe with the futures projected in broader European discourses on the knowledge society, which will offer at least one datum on how the “knowledge society” is contested and lived.

6. Broader impacts for anthropology of universities
I envision a number of broader impacts for this project. First, the very process of doing the research, by virtue of its choice of ethnographic object, should contribute to especially rich international collaboration with French colleagues who are both analysts and participants in the university system. As mentioned above, I have already been invited to affiliate with a laboratory (LAHIC) studying the history and anthropology of cultural institutions, and I expect the project to yield long-lasting possibilities for trans-Atlantic intellectual exchange. Second, the research, when appropriately summarized and popularized, should afford eventual opportunities for anthropological participation in current debates over U.S. higher education and academic politics. All too often, U.S. debates on universities are not informed by an international, cross-cultural perspective, and anthropology offers great potential for offering more culturally sensitive analysis of university cultures. I have already been involved in several projects aiming to make social research relevant to university governance and reform, and plan to actively report this research in these extra-scientific forums. Third, the focus on the classroom and departmental setting will hope to contribute to engaged scholarship on teaching and learning in academic settings, a field which has suffered from a lack of basic research (Thorkelson 2008; Wisniewski 2000). Fourth, the focus on the discipline of philosophy and its engagement in politics may offer new empirical support for the social function and utility of humanistic disciplines, which are all too often overlooked by research that sees only natural and social sciences as having social benefits. Finally, by examining futures, perceived crises in the future, and fears about the future, I hope to shed some light on the contemporary hopes and anxieties that the image of the “knowledge society” at once condenses and obscures.

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Table 1: The Origins of Philosophical Positions in Projects of Social Legitimation
Philosophical Position / Legitimatory Origins

• Kantianism (in ethics) / How to legislate so as to respect individual integrity
• Utilitarianism (in ethics) / How to legislate so as to advance society as a whole
• Rationalism (in epistemology) / How to preempt an irresolvable religious dispute
• Empiricism (in epistemology) / How to secure minimum agreement in an irresolvable religious dispute
• Realism (in philosophy of science) / What replaces religion in secular society
• Instrumentalism (in philosophy of science) / Why secular society does not need a replacement for religion
• Objectivism (in philosophy of social science) / What enables ultimate success of the imperialist project
• Relativism (in philosophy of social science) / What enables resistance to the imperialist project.

Table 2: List of sociological studies of French philosophy

• Bourdieu, Pierre, and Jean-Claude Passeron. “Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945: Death and Resurrection of a Philosophy without Subject.” Social Research 45, no. 1 (1967): 162-212.
• Boltanski, Luc. “Notes Sur Les Échanges Philosophiques Internationaux.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 5-6 (1975): 191-99.
• Verdes-Leroux, Jeannine. “Le Patronage Philosophique.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 1, no. 1 (1975): 88-97.
• Bourdieu, Pierre. “Les Sciences Sociales Et La Philosophie.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 47, no. 1 (1983): 45-52.
• Fabiani, Jean-Louis. “Les Programmes, Les Hommes Et Les Oeuvres: Professeurs De Philosophie En Classe Et En Ville Au Tournant Du Siècle.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 47, no. 1 (1983): 3-20.
• Lepenies, Wolf. “Contribution À Une Histoire Des Rapports Entre Sociologie Et La Philosophie.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 47-48 (1983): 37-44.
• Pinto, Louis. “L’école Des Philosophes?” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 47-48, no. 21-36 (1983).
• —. Les Philosophes Entre Le Lycée Et L’avant-Garde : Les Métamorphoses De La Philosophie Dans La France D’aujourd’hui. Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 1987.
• Fabiani, Jean-Louis. Les Philosophes De La République. Paris: Minuit, 1988.
• Pinto, Louis. “Le Journalisme Philosophique.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 101-102 (1994): 25-38.
• —. “La Dénégation De L’origine.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 109, no. 1 (1995): 41-59.
• Soulié, Charles. “Anatomie Du Goût Philosophique.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 109, no. 1 (1995): 3-28.
• —. “Profession Philosophe.” Gèneses 26 (1997): 103-22.
• Godechot, Olivier. “Le Marché Du Livre Philosophique.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 130 (1999): 11-28.
• Pinto, Louis. “L’inconscient Scolaire Des Philosophes.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 135 (2000): 48-57.
• Soulié, Charles. “L’enseignement De La Philosophie À L’université : Une Pratique Sous Contrainte Structurale. La Crise De 1986 À L’u.F.R De Philosophie De Paris I.” Les Cahiers du GERME 22-24 (2002).
• Pinto, Louis. La Vocation Et Le Métier De Philosophe: Pour Une Sociologie De La Philosophie Dans La France Contemporaine. Paris: Seuil, 2007.

So in other words, the justification for philosophy is partly “fun” and intrinsic interest (the metaphysics of the Matrix figure in a photograph), but largely and perhaps predominantly economic necessity and marketable skills. Insofar as philosophy is, well, sold this way, it’s suggestive of Bonnie Urciuoli‘s work on the empty terms of liberal arts marketing rhetoric, of what Don Brenneis calls “the consequentiality of the semantically vacuous.” Certainly in this article, it’s unclear that philosophy really teaches skills; and if it does, it’s also unclear that they are particularly vocationally useful.

Careerism in philosophy, incidentally, has been condemned at least since Francis Bacon, who argued in the Advancement of Learning that the urge for “lustre and profession” was exemplary of the error of “the mistaking or misplacing of the last or furthest end of knowledge.” This article, as far as one can judge from the journalist’s choice of quotes and interview topics, takes precisely the opposite position. Here, philosophy is all about its instrumental value for individual advancement. The journalist emphasizes, with an eye to her reader’s probable doubts about the discipline, that philosophy needn’t be “luxury,” be “frou-frou,” be “people sitting under trees and talking about stupid stuff” (said Onejame about her preconceptions of her major).

Unsurprisingly, the one person who does take a more traditional view of philosophy, as the master discipline that founds all others, is not a student but rather the Chancellor of CUNY, Matthew Goldstein. Goldstein comments that philosophy “is really at the core of just about everything we do. If you study humanities or political systems or sciences in general, philosophy is really the mother ship from which all of these disciplines grow.”

Luckily, the journalist manages to discover a less academic function for philosophy: that of reproducing heteronormative sexuality.

Jenna Schaal-O’Connor, a 20-year-old sophomore who is majoring in cognitive science and linguistics, said philosophy had other perks. She said she found many male philosophy majors interesting and sensitive.

“That whole deep existential torment,” she said. “It’s good for getting girlfriends.”

So even existential torment turns out to be yet another skill, ready to be put to use on the dating market. And the student in question seems quite aware of the fact: content with her instrumentalism.

• La 3ème étape du marxisme-leninisme: le maoïsme (Judith Miller)
• Problèmes concernant l’idéologie I (Judith Miller)
• Problèmes concernant l’idéologie II (Jacques Rancière)
• Théorie de la 2ème étape du marxisme léninisme: le concept du stalinisme (Jacques Rancière)
• Introduction aux marxistes du XXème siècle: (1) Lenine, Trotsky, et le courant bolchévique (Henri Weber)
• (2) Les écrits de Mao Tsé Toung (Henri Weber)
• La dialectique marxiste (Alain Badiou)
• La science dans la lutte des classes (Alain Badiou)
• Problèmes de la pratique révolutionnaire (Jeannette Colombel)
• L’idéologie pédagogique (René Scherrer)
• Logique (Houria Sinaceur)
• Epistémologie des sciences exactes et des mathématiques (Houria Sinaceur)
• Epistémologies des sciences de la vie (Michel Foucault)
• Pb. épistemologiques des sciences historiques (François Chatelet)
• Critique de la pensée spéculative grecque (François Chatelet)
• Nietzsche (histoire et genéalogie) (Michel Foucault)
• Les idéologies morales d’aujourd’hui (Françoise Regnault)
• A propos de la littérature et del’art (François Regnault)
• Le signe chez Nietzsche (François Rey)

I emphasize that there are two courses on Maoism, a course not on Stalinism but on the concept of Stalinism, two courses on Nietzsche, a class on “today’s moral ideologies,” and a class on the problems of revolutionary practice. Hélène Cixous, one of the initial administrators of the university (which was an educational experiment that began in January 1969), is quoted as having said the following about her selection of personnel:

I knew many of them, especially psychoanalysts and philosophers — people like Lacan and Derrida. Manyn of them were teaching outside the universities. They were excluded because they were leftists, though the political criteria were never made explicit. They were delighted to be offered an audience. Michel Foucault, for instance, I stopped on his way to America…

What’s being said here in passing is that the French university system did in fact exclude teachers based on their political stance. In fact, the Ministry of Education refused to grant degrees to graduates of this philosophy department, citing differences with its “pedagogical philosophy.” No American university, surely, has ever offered a list of philosophy courses quite like this one. The best comparison might be the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell, or perhaps History of Consciousness at Santa Cruz, where courses include “French Hegel,” “Critical Theory in the Marxist Tradition,” and the like. A real history of the institutionalization of leftist politics and theory – not nearly so hegemonic as the right wing makes it out to be, but not without its well-built enclaves – remains to be written.