Brassaï, Picasso’s studio, Paris, June 16, 1944. Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Lacan standing far left, Beauvoir standing far right, Sartre seated at left, Camus kneeling at center, Picasso standing at center with arms crossed.

Years ago I lived in Australia for a couple of academic terms, my first husband having been hired to teach logic at Sydney University. Under the title of Research Affiliate, I enjoyed freedom to use the library and to join philosophical colleagues at the spirited Staff Club luncheons.

At that time, there were in fact two philosophy departments at Sydney University. We were housed in the Department of Traditional and Modern Philosophy, which emphasized Anglo-American philosophy, bounded by what could be extrapolated from sense experience and the natural sciences. The “other department” was General Philosophy, focused on feminism and Marxism – especially as practiced in France.

The women philosophers were in General Philosophy, where I gave a paper with the in-your-face title, “Getting Past Marx and Freud.” Subsequently, I went out to lunch with one of the women who had inspired the original breakaway into a second philosophy department. As we talked, woman to woman, she told me that she was being targeted in quite a nasty, gangup fashion by a male colleague. He was a former lover and had earlier teamed with her to bring about the original schism. 

I had no trouble believing her. These avant garde revolutionaries were not celebrated for their gallantry. What should she do? Well, based on my own experience, I suggested she consider the possibility of moving over to the notoriously male chauvinist precincts of Trad and Mod. “They’re not feminists,” I said, “but they can be chivalrous.”

A few years later, a few of the feminists in General Philosophy did apply for asylum at Trad and Mod. I can’t take credit for those decisions. Other circumstances precipitated them. But what I said at the luncheon might have “shot an arrow into the air”- suggesting a possibility previously unimaginable in that encompassingly French-influenced Department.

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The question of the French influence in the field of philosophy is intelligently surveyed in a book I am now reading, The Frenchmen, or my life in theory by Emily Eakin. There are about eight contenders who are deemed philosophers, though they didn’t all get degrees or teaching jobs in philosophy. There is one entry lane to philosophy jobs in France: you have to pass the great exams given by the College de France. Not everybody of philosophical influence tried, and not everybody succeeded. There are also earlier intellectual strands: Surrealists like Salvador Dalí and André Breton, also Structuralists like Claude Lévi-Strauss and Ferdinand de Saussure. These also influenced intellectual culture in the arts and literature on the Continent and they count as part of this lineage.

So far, the chapters I have read are mainly concerned with Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.

Here’s my super-thumbnail sketch of the boundaries and character of this world. Although perhaps provoked and set in orbit by the combined effects of Darwinian reductionism and World War One’s shattering of faith in progress – these movements seem to me to start “in the middle of the air.” What do I mean by that?

Well, they don’t seem to be theoretical responses to the shortcomings of previous theories, as philosophies have been traditionally. “Plato is great, but truth is greater,” said Aristotle about his immortal teacher – to whom Aristotelian thought took shape as a response. Ever since, philosophers have continued to pick up the shortcomings in the thinking of their predecessors and fill them in. But in The Frenchmen, the Q & A of philosophy, where a proposed hypothesis meets a response, looks either ultra-compressed (so that I am missing it) or else it’s really missing. 

What is more – and perhaps worse, in philosophies that claim to explain or explain-away the assumptions of everyday life – some of these thinkers are endlessly busy with sexual seductions of their protégées, or else making a sensation by daring or shocking moves, or else navigating the pathway between actual mental asylums and their own apodictic claims. They compete with each other for ascendancy in intellectual bravado, where bravado partly exempts the competitors from the dialectical criteria of consistency or adequacy to the relevant evidence. They don’t try concretely to explain or illuminate the problems of lived experience. They tend to mistake cruel criminality for creativity. 

One early example: the grotesque double murder of a lawyer’s wife and his daughter by their maids, Christine and Lea Papin. The crime drew excited empathy – even glorification – from Parisian “leftist intellectuals” like Lacan and Simone de Beauvoir. The intellectuals were quick to attribute the entire grisly horror to working class grievances. And so it would continue. The intellectuals were busy shocking the bourgeoisie, while the bourgeoisie – to keep up with the latest – got equally busy learning not to be shocked at anything. Depravity would become the new norm. 

Overall one feels the thick spirit of disillusionment. It begins grim and it gets grimmer. I would ask, what were the illusions that you personally had before you got so disillusioned – and so self-important about it? Why did you give them up? What do you think might have prevented your disillusionment? “Philosophy,” Aristotle said, “begins in wonder.”

Go back to the beginning!

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*A harmless prank where the bottom sheet is folded up to look like the top so the user can’t stretch out legs full-length.