Why Philosophize?

Jean-Francois Lyotard

• Éditeur: Polity
• Année: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745679976
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Philosophy
• Sous-sujet: Social Philosophy

Why Philosophize? is a series of lectures given by Jean-François Lyotard to students at the Sorbonne embarking on their university studies. The circumstances obliged him to be both clear and concise: at the same time, his lectures offer a profound and far-reaching meditation on how essential it is to philosophize in a world where philosophy often seems irrelevant, outdated, or inconclusive. Lyotard begins by drawing on Plato, Proust and Lacan to show that philosophy is a never-ending desire - for wisdom, for the 'other'. In the second lecture he draws on Heraclitus and Hegel to explore the close relation between philosophy and history: the same restlessness, the same longing for a precarious unity, drives both. In his third lecture, Lyotard examines how philosophy is a form of utterance, both communicative and indirect. Finally, he turns to Marx, exploring the extent to which philosophy can be a transformative action within the world. These wonderfully accessible lectures by one of the most influential philosophers of the last 50 years will attract a wide readership, since, as Lyotard says, 'How can one not philosophize?' They are also an excellent introduction to Lyotard's mature thought, with its emphasis on the need for philosophy to bear witness, however obliquely, to a recalcitrant reality.

1

Why desire?

As you know, philosophers are in the habit of starting their courses with an examination of the question ‘what is philosophy?’ Every year, in all the institutions where it is taught as an established subject, the people responsible for philosophy ask themselves ‘well, where is it? what kind of thing is it?’

Among the class of actes manqués, Freud includes not being able to put your hands on something that you know you have put away somewhere. The opening lecture of philosophers, a lecture they give again and again, is just like an acte manqué. Philosophy misses itself (la philosophie se manque elle-même), it is out of order, we set off to look for it from scratch, we are forever forgetting it, forgetting where it is. It appears and it disappears; it conceals itself. An acte manqué, too, is the concealment of an object or a situation from consciousness, an interruption in the weft of everyday life, a discontinuity.

When we ask ourselves not ‘what is philosophy?’ but ‘why philosophize?’, we are emphasizing how discontinuous with itself philosophy is – how it is possible for philosophy to be absent. For most people, for most of you, philosophy is absent from their preoccupations, their studies, their lives. And for the philosopher himself, even if philosophy constantly needs to be recalled and re-established, this is because it sinks, because it slips between his fingers, because it goes under. So why philosophize rather than not philosophize? The interrogative adverb pourquoi? (why?) at least designates in the word pour (for) from which it is made a number of nuances of complement or attribute; but these nuances are all engulfed in the same hole, the hole drilled by the interrogative value of the adverb. This endows the thing under question with a surprising status: this thing might not be what it is, or might not be tout court. ‘Pourquoi’ bears within itself the annihilation of what it is questioning. In this question we find the real presence of the thing that is being questioned (we take philosophy to be a fact, a reality) and its possible absence, we find both the life and death of philosophy, we have it and we do not have it.

Well, perhaps the secret of philosophy’s existence lies precisely in this contradictory, contrasting situation. To grasp this potential relationship between the act of philosophizing and the ‘presence–absence’ structure, it will be useful to examine, even if only rapidly, what desire is. After all, in philosophy there is philein, to love, to be in love, to desire.

I would like to suggest just two themes that concern desire:

(1) We have fallen into the habit – as has philosophy itself, insofar as it accepts a certain way of asking questions – of examining a problem such as desire from the point of view of subject and object, the point of view of the duality between what desires and what is desired. As a result, the question of desire soon becomes the question of knowing whether it is the desirable that arouses desire or the complete opposite, with desire creating the desirable – whether you fall in love with a woman because she is lovable, or whether she is lovable because you have fallen in love with her. We need to realize that this way of asking the question falls within the category of causality (the desirable would be the cause of desire, or vice versa), that it belongs to a dualist vision of things (on the one side there is the subject, and on the other the object, each endowed with its respective properties), and that it thereby makes any serious approach to the question impossible. Desire does not establish a relationship between a cause and an effect, of whatever kind they may be; desire, rather, is the movement of something that goes out toward the other as toward something that it itself lacks. This means that the other (the object, if you like – but is it the apparently desired object that is actually desired?) is present to what desires, and is present in the form of absence. That which desires has got what it lacks, without which it would not desire it, and yet it does not have it, it does not know it, otherwise it would not desire it either. So, going back to the concepts of subject and object, the movement of desire makes the apparent object appear as something that is already there in desire without however being there ‘in flesh and blood’, and the apparent subject appears as something indefinite, to complete it, something that is defined by the other, by absence. So on both sides there is the same contradictory but symmetrical structure: in the ‘subject’, the absence of what is desired, its lack, at the centre of its own presence, a certain non-being in the being which desires, and in the ‘object’ a presence, the presence to the desirer (memory, hope) against a background of absence, since the object is there as desired and ipso facto as possessed.

(2) From this stems our second theme. The essence of desire resides in this structure that combines presence and absence. The combination is not accidental. It is because what is present is absent from itself, or the absent present, that desire exists. Desire is really raised into being, set up by the absence of presence, or vice versa; something that is there is not there and wants to be there, wants to coincide with itself, to realize itself, and desire is simply that force that holds presence and absence together without mixing them up.

In the Symposium, Socrates tells of how a priestess from Mantinea, Diotima, described the birth of love, Eros, to him in these terms:

‘The tale’, she said, ‘will take time; nevertheless I will tell you. On the birthday of Aphrodite there was a feast of the gods, at which the god Poros or Plenty, who is the son of Metis or Discretion, was one of the guests. When the feast was over, Penia or Poverty, as the manner is on such occasions, came about the doors to beg. Now Plenty, who was the worse for nectar (there was no wine in those days), went into the garden of Zeus and fell into a heavy sleep; and Poverty considering her own straitened circumstances, plotted to have a child by him, and accordingly she lay down at his side and conceived Love, who partly because he is naturally a lover of the beautiful, and because Aphrodite is herself beautiful, and also because he was born on her birthday, is her follower and attendant.’

(Symposium 203 b-c, trans. Jowett)

The condition of Eros or Love, his fate, clearly results from his heredity, if we are to believe Diotima:

‘And as his parentage is, so also are his fortunes. In the first place he is always poor, and anything but tender and fair, as the many imagine him; and he is rough and squalid, and has no shoes, nor a house to dwell in; on the bare earth exposed he lies under the open heaven, in the streets, or at the doors of houses, taking his rest; and like his mother he is always in distress. Like his father too, whom he also partly resembles, he is always plotting against the fair and good; he is bold, enterprising, strong, a mighty hunter, always weaving some intrigue or other, keen in the pursuit of wisdom, fertile in resources; a philosopher at all times, terrible as an enchanter, sorcerer, sophist. He is by nature neither mortal nor immortal, but alive and flourishing at one moment when he is in plenty, and dead at another moment, and again alive by reason of his father’s nature. But that which is always flowing in is always flowing out, and so he is never in want and never in wealth […].’

(Symposium 203 c-e)

Diotima’s story, the myth of the birth of Eros, certainly generates many reflections. We can, at least, pick out the following ideas:

– first, the theme of Eros being conceived on the same day that Aphrodite or Beauty – his object, in short – comes into the world; there is a sort of knowledge of desire and the desirable;

– second, the idea that Eros has a twofold nature; he is not a god, he is not a man, he participates in the divine through his father who was at the table of the gods and was overwhelmed by (got drunk on) the divine intoxication of nectar, he is mortal on his mother’s side – she is a beggar and cannot be self-sufficient. Thus there is life and death, and Plato insists on the alternating of life and death in the life of Eros. He is like the Phoenix: ‘Die at dusk he may, but then / The Morning sees him born again’ (Apollinaire, ‘Chanson du Mal-Aimé’ (‘Song of the Unloved’), Alcools). We can even go a little further: it is because desire is in straitened circumstances that it needs to be ingenious, while its inventions always eventually fail. This means that Eros remains under the law of Death, of Poverty, he constantly needs to escape it, to reinvent his life, precisely because he bears death within him;

– finally, desire is man and woman at the same time as life and death. This means that, in Plato’s text, the contrasting pair life–death is, to at least some extent, identified with the contrasting pair male–female. The father of Eros symbolizes what, within desire, brings love closer to its object, their reunion, while his mother, poverty, embodies what keeps them apart. In this text, attraction is virile, and repulsion is feminine. We cannot go into this right now, but we at least need to remember that however much Eros may be of the male sex, he is in reality man and woman.

In a paper read out to the French Society for Psychoanalysis (published in May 1965, in La Psychanalyse, 2, pp. 139 ff.), Serge Leclaire, a disciple of Dr Jacques Lacan, characterized the symptom of hysteria by the unformulated question, ‘Am I am man or a woman?’, while in his view the symptom of obsession consists rather in the question, ‘Am I dead or alive?’

So we find the same, twofold ambiguity in the modern interpretation of neuroses that Diotima scrutinized in Eros: the ambiguity of life and of sex. Illness sheds a revealing light on this uncertainty: a person who is ill does not know which side to categorize himself in, whether to place himself in life or in death, in virility or in femininity. And the revelation that illness provides is not only proof of how much Plato is still of concern to us, of how greatly Freudian investigations echo the central problems of philosophy: it shows us that the yes and no, the contrasting pair, as Leclaire puts it – a pair whose poles are kept apart in neurosis – rules our lives (and not only our love lives); that even when we are at the heart of things, of ourselves, of others, of time or of speech, their reverse side is constantly present to us: ‘All relationship to presence is achieved against a background of absence’ (Lacan). Thus desire, which essentially contains this opposition in its conjunction, is our Master.

Do we still have to ask ourselves what we need to understand by desire, and what we are talking about when we talk about desire?

You will have already realized that we still need to get rid of the current idea, the stereotype, that there is a sphere of Eros, of sexuality, which lies apart from the others – that we have an emotional life with its specific problems, an economic life with its problems, an intellectual life devoted to speculative questions, etc. This idea, to be sure, is not entirely baseless, and we’ll try to explain this issue in more detail later. But if, for example, Freud’s work has had and continues to have the impact that you are aware of, this is definitely not because he put sexuality everywhere, something which would hardly be any more illuminating than putting the economy everywhere, as certain Marxists do. It is, rather, because Freud embarked on forging a link between sexual life and emotional life, social life, and religious life, and brought sexual life out of its ghetto – not by reducing other activities to the libido, but by investigating in depth the structure of behaviour and by beginning to reveal a symbolic pattern that is perhaps common to all of them.

Staying with our theme, the relationship of desire to the contrast between attraction and repulsion, we could find many examples to illustrate it. For example, sticking very close to the theme of Eros, to begin with, and to appeal to the more literary among you, what Proust narrates in The Fugitive is desire, but with a particular spin, for desire at the moment of its waning is Eros as the son of Poverty, the weight of death in desire; what Proust describes and analyses is the paroxysm of separation, an intensified separation. There is the separation caused by the death of Albertine, and then there is the separation stemming from Marcel’s jealousy that came between him and the young woman while she was still alive. Albertine’s death gives a particular form to desire, namely mourning; but her death does not suppress desire since jealousy continues to cast its suspicion on the dead woman. And jealousy is itself a kind of putting to death of the living woman, in that it sets her presence aside. Behind the present woman, I see the same woman as other; I annihilate her presence and I forge the image of her that I do not know. The absence that was already the absence of Albertine present, because of Marcel’s suspicions, is intensified by the absence resulting from death, an absence maintained by the young woman’s persistent presence…

This, if you like, is an immediate illustration of desire, an accessible example of it. But it is clear that the whole work, the whole of In Search of Lost Time, is bathed in the same twilit glow; it is not just a woman whom you fail to possess in flesh and blood, it is also a society falling apart, other people rendered unrecognizable by age, and, first and foremost, time, which scatters its moments rather than holding them together. Let’s leave the twilight, the lesson that Proust probably wants to teach us in his book, and let’s take up one of these themes that the more historically minded of you may well find interesting: the idea that history and society also contain an alternation of attraction and repulsion, and that they thus stem from desire.

It is not too venturesome to read the history of the West at least as the contradictory movement in which the set of different social units (individuals, or groups, for example social classes), seeks and fails to find unity with itself. This history has been marked hitherto by the alternation, within societies and between them, of dispersal and unification, and this alternation is profo...