Reading French Contemporary Philosophy for the First Time

French Contemporary Philosophy

Author

Philosophy Academy written by

Publisher

Dongnyok | 2013-07-10 published

Category

Humanities

Book description

From Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas to Derrida, Deleuze, and Badiou...

When it came to European philosophy, I had thought 'Germany' was the best. That's because weighty figures like Kant and Hegel were mostly 'German' people. But while reading this book, I've come to feel that 'French' philosophy is also extremely important philosophy. That's because thinking about the 'Other' through philosophers like Sartre and Levinas can be picked out as one of the most important currents in contemporary philosophy. To put thinking about the 'Other'—which is connected to postmodernism—simply, you could say that whereas the subject of philosophy in Descartes's time was precisely the 'I (ego),' it now begins from a situation in which it is not me but someone else -> the 'Other.' On top of that, with even 'Lacan' unpacking the 'Other' through the theme of the 'letter,' I think I've begun to gain a very positive effect regarding French philosophy.

Lacan's concept of the Other was rather easy to understand. When it's said that the 'letter' does not move but that letter moves other people, that means, in short, that the gaze of the Other itself is something very 'fixed,' so the 'self' that comes to be seen through the gaze of the Other is very busy. Moreover, no matter how much I feel I possess my own desire (the letter), that can never be perfect. That's why he said that if I understand and merely regulate the impulse well, I can instead digest it as positive energy for myself. It may be a very everyday story, but I understood that the 'desire' Lacan looked at is something with two sides.

Next is Foucault. I didn't know that Foucault diligently left records even in his final years when he had AIDS. The Michel Foucault I knew was merely a 'name,' but I can't think of him as anything other than a scholar and intellectual who truly lived a remarkable life. People who analyzed Foucault studied him as a person with various ideas—postmodernism, post-structuralism, and so on—but through this book I think it'd be right to describe Foucault as a person with a structuralist inclination who dealt with 'subjectivation.' The thoughts I usually hold feel like they follow Foucault's ideas, and those ideas go like this. The so-called 'normal' that people speak of is, to Foucault, 'something that has pushed out the existing normal and newly ascended to the position of normal'; to Foucault, there is no such thing as 'the normal.' To him, everything that is historically and politically constructed is normal. In other words, what divides normal and abnormal is so because of the historically and politically constructed standards of that time.

In ethics class, we have a somewhat negative view of acknowledging the Other's thought, saying that excessive relativism can cause an absence of ethics. The example always cited is a ritual like the 'circumcision' of a primitive tribe on the African continent. But Foucault is not speaking of 'relativism.' All thought is 'subjective.' Foucault's research theme was 'How did I become the I of today?' His paper written in his final years, <What Is Enlightenment>, seems like something I must read.

As for Deleuze, I'd only heard the name and had no idea at all what kind of person he was. I'd simply never thought of the fact that he's a figure recent enough to be introduced in contemporary philosophy. He researched the thing called the 'unconscious.' The unconscious he speaks of refers to the complement of consciousness, collectively designating the non-human elements that are not the consciousness constituting a human. That's why he is one of the people who lamented that, when Freud spoke of the 'unconscious,' it became a pronoun pointing to things like 'dreams.' And he said that 'the exploration of the unconscious' lies at the core of anti-humanism.

Another important point of Deleuze's thought is precisely his idea about 'circulation.' He did not believe in creationism, which holds that 'God' created everything. He said that there is simply no beginning (it cannot be known), and that because something exists now (the present), we can only know that what came before it exists. I can't immediately understand what implications this kind of thought of his gives me. That's because it's a very ontological consideration. The ontological thoughts I often had in my first year of university could not help but be excessively detached from reality. But it's necessary to recognize that philosophy is not something done by looking out at some immediate thing right before one's eyes. Ontological pondering always seemed closer to giving an answer about the value of humanity.

There were also stories of people like Derrida, Kristeva, Lacan, and Roland Barthes, but Kristeva's writing on abjection I simply couldn't make sense of (since I have almost no knowledge of the thought that forms her foundation), and Lacan's analytical psychology and Roland Barthes's ideas, too, were things I could read but found hard to accept. Still, I have no regrets about reading this book. To that extent, it feels like a book that organized well for me what kinds of ideas 'French contemporary philosophy' remains based on, and what is in progress. Of course I understand the writers' feelings, who couldn't have organized it properly in such short pieces, but this much is more than enough to be grateful for.