Jacques Derrida and the Institution of French Philosophy 9781905981878, 9781351194914

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Acronyms and Abbreviations
1 Situating GREPH
2 Politics and Reform: Radicals and Conservatives
3 The Double Strategy
4 'Reine ou rien': The Extension of Philosophy
5 The Insistence on Philosophy
Concluding Remarks
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Jacques Derrida and the Institution of French Philosophy

legenDa leenda , founded in 1995 by the european Humanities Research Centre of the University of Oxford, is now a joint imprint of the Modern Humanities Research association and Routledge. Titles range from medieval texts to contemporary cinema and form a widely comparative view of the modern humanities, including works on arabic, Catalan, english, French, german, greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish literature. an editorial Board of distinguished academic specialists works in collaboration with leading scholarly bodies such as the Society for French Studies and the British Comparative literature association.

The Modern Humanities Research Association ( ) encourages and promotes advanced study and research in the field of the modern humanities, especially modern European languages and literature, including English, and also cinema. It also aims to break down the barriers between scholars working in different disciplines and to maintain the unity of humanistic scholarship in the face of increasing specialization. The Association fulfils this purpose primarily through the publication of journals, bibliographies, monographs and other aids to research.

Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences. Founded in 1836, it has published many of the greatest thinkers and scholars of the last hundred years, including Adorno, Einstein, Russell, Popper, Wittgenstein, Jung, Bohm, Hayek, McLuhan, Marcuse and Sartre. Today Routledge is one of the world’s leading academic publishers in the Humanities and Social Sciences. It publishes thousands of books and journals each year, serving scholars, instructors, and professional communities worldwide. www.routledge.com

Editorial Board Chairman Professor Colin Davis, Royal Holloway, University of London Professor Malcolm Cook, University of Exeter (French) Professor Robin Fiddian, Wadham College, Oxford (Spanish) Professor Paul Garner, University of Leeds (Spanish) Professor Andrew Hadfield, University of Sussex (English) Professor Marian Hobson Jeanneret, Queen Mary University of London (French) Professor Catriona Kelly, New College, Oxford (Russian) Professor Martin McLaughlin, Magdalen College, Oxford (Italian) Professor Martin Maiden, Trinity College, Oxford (Linguistics) Professor Peter Matthews, St John’s College, Cambridge (Linguistics) Dr Stephen Parkinson, Linacre College, Oxford (Portuguese) Professor Suzanne Raitt, William and Mary College, Virginia (English) Professor Ritchie Robertson, The Queen’s College, Oxford (German) Professor Lesley Sharpe, University of Exeter (German) Professor David Shepherd, Keele University (Russian) Professor Michael Sheringham, All Souls College, Oxford (French) Professor Alison Sinclair, Clare College, Cambridge (Spanish) Professor David Treece, King’s College London (Portuguese) Managing Editor Dr Graham Nelson 41 Wellington Square, Oxford ox1 2jf, UK [email protected] www.legenda.mhra.org.uk

Jacques Derrida and the Institution of French Philosophy ❖ Vivienne Orchard

Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge 2011

First published 2011 Published by the Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA LEGENDA is an imprint of the Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © Modern Humanities Research Association and Taylor & Francis 2011 ISBN 978-1-905981-87-8 (hbk) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopying, recordings, fax or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher. Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Contents ❖

1 2 3 4 5

Acknowledgements Acronyms and Abbreviations Situating GREPH Politics and Reform: Radicals and Conservatives The Double Strategy ‘Reine ou rien’: The Extension of Philosophy The Insistence on Philosophy Concluding Remarks Bibliography Index

ix x 1 46 79 108 140 179 180 204

To IAO, GWO, RMO, S K and C and, with thanks, to MHJ

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ❖

I would like to record my thanks to Dr Graham Nelson for his support and encouragement throughout the editing of this book and to Dr Amanda Wrigley for her help with copy-editing, and my thanks to colleagues and friends at the University of Southampton and beyond. Most of all, I would like to thank Professor Marian Hobson Jeanneret. V. O.

Acronyms and Abbreviations v

Acronyms ACIREPH Association pour la Création d’Instituts de Recherche sur l’Enseignement de la Philosophie APHG Association des professeurs d’histoire et de géographie APPEP Association des professeurs de philosophie de l’enseignement public CAPES Certificat d’aptitude au professorat de l’enseignement du second degree CCCS Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies CIPh Collège International de Philosophie CNDP Centre national de documentation pédagogique CNRS Centre national de la recherche scientifique CRDP Centre régional de documentation pédagogique EHESS École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales EG États-Généraux de la Philosophie EN École normale d’instituteurs ou d’institutrices ENS École Normale Supérieure GREPH Groupe de recherches sur l’enseignement philosophique PCF Parti Communiste français

Abbreviations Full bibliographical information can be found in the bibliography for the works listed below. Dates refer to the edition used. Works by Jacques Derrida DP MO OC PR

Du droit à la philosophie, 1990 ‘Mochlos; or, The Conflict of the Faculties’, 1992 ‘Où commence et comment finit un corps enseignant’, in DP, 1990 ‘The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils’, 1983

Works by GREPH AP QP

‘Avant-projet pour la constitution d’un groupe de recherches sur l’enseignement philosophique’, in QP, 1977 Qui a peur de la philosophie?, 1977

Works by Jean-François Lyotard PMC

La Condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir, 1979

Other works EG GP

États-Généraux de la philosophie (16 et 17 juin 1979), 1979 La Grève des philosophes: école et philosophie, 1986

Chapter 1

v

Situating GREPH Introduction French theory, so-called, is dead and it is now time to call in the historians, according to one recent commentator.1 At the same time the question of legacies in the wake of the death of Jacques Derrida has come to the fore in a cluster of publications in response to this and to the heralded ‘death of theory’ or to a ‘posttheory’ jurisdiction. That the historicizing of theory is the mark of death — but not mourning — is a crucial distillation of the supposed incompatibility of the two modes. The ‘story’ of theory as a kind of mourning — both loss and dismay — has been in force since the extant narrative summary of ‘Derrida in America’ came into play in the early 1980s. But it has become a kind of blank counter to be played in particular theory wars and in certain games, and what is at stake remains almost out of sight. If ‘at least one definition of deconstruction might be that it involves a rethinking and readjustment of context’, as Christopher Johnson remarks in relation to the question of technology,2 then the negotiation of thought and its determinations, of historicity and the transcendental, is in part what underlies this glibly posited incompatibility which cannot be equated simplistically with theory’s dying moment.3 This study takes on these questions through an engagement with Derrida’s work on institutional questions, and most specifically his involvement with GREPH, the Groupe de recherches sur l’enseignement philosophique. As is well known, the initial institutional moment of ‘deconstruction in America’ is 1975, when Derrida began teaching at Yale University for a few weeks each year, alongside Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller, who were known afterwards as ‘Yale deconstructionists’. A year previously, GREPH was founded in Paris. In the period in which the inf luence of Derrida’s work became an institutional phenomenon outside France, Derrida was engaged in a distinctively French institutional struggle and context. The group which he helped to found campaigned on behalf of what had until very recently been known as the ‘classe de philosophie’, the unique French arrangement of teaching philosophy in secondary schools. As its name suggests, GREPH was a collective movement. The campaign which it organized in 1975 and the collection of texts which it published two years later, Qui a peur de la philosophie? (QP), remain obscure. GREPH survives, if at all, in relation to the work of Jacques Derrida, and only as a codicil there. At the time when, beyond France, Derrida’s work became part of first ‘literary theory’ and then ‘theory’ tout court — a body of work which was marked by its productivity, internationality, self-conscious

2

Situating GREPH

eclecticism, and interdisciplinarity — Derrida was involved in a campaign about the school timetable and philosophy as a school subject, the most traditional and conservative of humanities school subjects which was zealously guarded by its ultratraditionalist and conservative practitioners and upholders. These simultaneously unfolding arenas are paradoxical in relation to one another. That of ‘theory’, a literary critical and then multidisciplinary zone, produced in English, principally in the United States, with an expanding clientele within university teaching and research, and that of ‘philosophy’, a compulsory school subject throughout France, of interest primarily to those whose future employment was at stake. Those who allied themselves with GREPH and took part in its activities included philosophers who were already well known or subsequently became so, such as JeanLuc Nancy and Michèle Le Dœuff, and also unknown lycée teachers of philosophy. The group was a collective enterprise formed as a result of dissatisfaction with the way philosophy was being taught, overseen, and managed in schools. The impetus was institutional and political in the first instance. GREPH was not a band of disciples, nor a work-group engaged in projects closely linked to the half dozen or so works published by Derrida over the preceding decade which had brought him to increasing prominence from 1967 onwards. Derrida was, however, the key founder of the group, its public figure-head — ‘l’âme du GREPH’, in the words of one sympathizer.4 In 1990, Derrida published a large collection of writings from the previous fifteen years entitled Du droit à la philosophie (DP). This collection brought together all of Derrida’s previously scattered writings on institutional questions. This included the collectively agreed documents which drew up GREPH’s foundation. When originally published, Derrida’s essays had also appeared with these same documents. GREPH cannot simply be subsumed into Derrida’s oeuvre without remainder. However, his role and involvement was crucial, and his participation is significant within the trajectory of his work in general. Derrida himself consistently draws attention to it as part of an ongoing concern with institutions, manifested in his involvement with GREPH, with the Sorbonne assembly of 1979, the ‘ÉtatsGénéraux de la Philosophie’, and with the creation of the Collège International de la Philosophie in Paris in 1983. This strand of his activities has received little attention from ‘theory’. The nature and kinds of attention which it has received are themselves significant to the ‘translation’ of Derrida’s work across disciplinary and national borders. Mostly, it has been awarded a particular status within arguments about the political relevance and potential of Derrida’s work, where it is cited as ‘proof ’ of engagement by Derrida. The approach of Derrida’s non-French interlocutors, both sympathetic and hostile to his work, forms part of the overall frame of this study. In the preface to Du droit à la philosophie, Derrida states that: Ce qu’on a appelé la ‘déconstruction’, c’est aussi l’exposition de cette identité institutionelle de la philosophie. (p. 22)

Derrida here refers to the threatened ‘specificity’ of philosophy in France. He is careful to place the term within quotation marks. Nonetheless, for ‘theory’, these are surprising declarations on behalf of philosophy as a particular discipline. What these interlocutors miss out is any sense of the substantive concerns of Derrida

Situating GREPH

3

and GREPH, which would enable the elucidation of this statement. Derrida’s ‘deconstruction’ is primarily associated with a particular, recognizable kind of literary, textual criticism, one which resists traditional disciplinary ties and is selfconsciously radical and avant-garde. The disruptive force to which the latter lays claim sets out to undermine all kinds of academic norms and practices, including disciplinary boundaries. Most of all, it undermines philosophy’s self-understanding as a mode of enquiry characterized by, and striving for, objectivity, lucidity, universalism, and rationality. Literature becomes the superior term in opposition to philosophy in ‘theory’s’ understanding of Derrida’s work, able to dismantle, through close reading, the transcendental ground of philosophy. Derrida’s concern with ‘institutional questions’, however, focuses pre-eminently on philosophy. This is barely acknowledged by those who eagerly take up this area of his work, who are themselves located in literature departments. The specificity of the context in which Derrida and GREPH were operating is thereby lost — both its national, cultural, and political reference-points and determinations, and its philosophical ones. The rest of this chapter ‘situates’ GREPH in order to uncover its significance in relation first to some of the issues around Derrida’s American context of reception, and secondly to the history of philosophy in French education from the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards. Neither segment attempts a full account nor even a full overview of these areas which in themselves each require a separate study, merely attempting the work of situating. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 examine the educational reforms which GREPH opposed, and the nature of their campaign, Derrida’s work on the relationship between philosophy and education, and the aims and demands of the group. The final chapter turns to Derrida’s involvement in the creation of the Collège International de Philosophie after the change of government in 1981, and the continuation of the underlying question of the relationship of his work to the ‘institutional identity’ of philosophy. Most of the work by Derrida discussed here is to be found in Du droit à la philosophie, and of GREPH in Qui a peur de la philosophie? Although I will refer to other works by Derrida, I take the best-known texts, the expositions of them, and the endless precautionary gestures habitually produced in relation to the term ‘deconstruction’ to some extent for granted, as already amply and ably dealt with elsewhere.5 Neither ‘deconstruction’ nor ‘philosophy’ are monolithic, self-evident ‘methods’ or bodies of work. However both are used as terms within the debates and the problematics opened up by GREPH, and are employed by them and by Derrida in relation to this area. A consideration of this work cannot, therefore, function without them. The work of GREPH has itself become part of a distinctively French tradition of ‘petits écrits’ on the teaching of philosophy in France from the nineteenth century onwards, which has been exhumed and republished by former GREPH affiliates. This degree of relative obscurity conceals the significance of the group in relation to Derrida’s own celebrated oeuvre, to the recent context of philosophy in France, and to the relationship of philosophy to its own practice. This book does not aim to produce a ‘total history’ of GREPH. Such a history could only be undertaken by a former participant since parts of its activities were not fully documented, and many of its publications are no longer extant, having only ever appeared

4

Situating GREPH

ephemerally and for internal purposes. Rather, it examines GREPH in the light of these problematics and the relations between them, in order to situate and engage with the group’s concerns and modes of activities, and to understand the nature of their campaign ‘pour la philosophie’. The kinds of attention which GREPH has received outside of France have been in relation to Derrida’s work, rather than to philosophy in France more generally. A particular strand of American commentators have appropriated the group as a useful instance of the political dimension of that work: a kind of ‘applied’ deconstruction, or ‘political translation’ of his work.6 As such, it acts as a crucial reference point in that other ‘translation’ of Derrida’s work: the institutional and intellectual transfers and displacements of it within the Anglophone context of ‘theory’. The theorist Samuel Weber remarks suggestively in passing that: I have long been convinced that one of the decisive institutional conditions responsible for the emergence of what has been called ‘French theory’ has been the fact that for almost two centuries philosophy has been an obligatory subject of instruction in the last year of the lycée.7

But little work has been done in unpacking this putative problematic. The relative lack of interest in (or, more accurately, ignorance of ) GREPH’s existence is strik­ ing and must be measured in relation to the massive impact of Derrida’s work in general in this domain. In the countless English-language articles and books devoted to Derrida in the last thirty years, GREPH scarcely features or is often given a glancing reference at best. In the light of this relative scarcity of reference, the effects of mediation, and thus potential distortion and realignment, can only be heightened. GREPH’s primary concern was with the institution of philosophy — with its institutionalization — within a single national and cultural context, in part due to the practical nature of their objectives. The idea of context or of philosophy as a cultural form leads to the question of determination, one which philosophy itself, as a discipline, has steadfastly disallowed, refusing to see its own material deter­ minations and history as of philosophical interest. To conceive of philosophy as being part of a particular culture, as being written in a particular language, even as having a nationality in the way that literature has been analysed, categorized and institutionalized in the last century, is viewed as not just questionable, but as impossible. I will examine this constitutive view of philosophy as not part of culture in the third section of this chapter. First of all, I address GREPH’s reception as an important frame to this problematic of philosophy as institution and as culture: that of the institutionalization of Derrida’s work, and of the passage of philosophy across national and linguistic borders. Both this, and what can initially be termed the question of the institutional frame, are notable considerations in his oeuvre. In his thesis defence presentation of 1980, published as ‘The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations’, Derrida comments on how, over the course of his early years teaching philosophy, he came to see deconstruction as unavoidably caught up in this question of the institution: I came to understand better to what extent the necessity of deconstruction [...] was not primarily a matter of philosophical contents, themes or theses,

Situating GREPH

5

philosophemes, poems, theologemes or ideologemes, but especially and inseparably meaningful frames, institutional structures.8

How this passage and this institutionalization in turn affect that oeuvre is therefore a significant question. Situating GREPH entails first of all understanding how this passage has taken place, in order then to locate it within the context in which its own imperatives and objectives were formed. Most strikingly, accounts of Derrida’s work which declare an interest in its institutional dimension offer references to, and readings of, his work on the uni­ versity, but have only just started to pay attention to GREPH with the publication of Jan Plug’s two-volume translation of Du droit à la philosophie in 2002 and 2004.9 The Anglophone mode of address of this body of work still does not engage with the 1977 collection of GREPH’s material, Qui a peur de la philosophie? which, unlike Derrida’s articles on the university which appeared first in English, has never been published in English. GREPH remains still largely a citation reference for commentators who do not go much beyond echoing the references to its centrality in Derrida’s interviews.10 The single greatest factor in the discussion of deconstruction’s interest in, and relevance to, the question of institutions has been the availability of certain texts in English for long periods. Michael Thomas’s recent work, The Reception of Derrida: Translation and Transformation admits a central place to GREPH and gives essentially a brief description of its activities based on what is available in English.11 What is noticeable here is not so much the effects of belatedness which gaps between the first appearance of texts and their subsequent translation produce, and the important intellectual consequences of these delays, as seen in the translation at certain points of particular strands of German philosophy into French in the twentieth century, distinctively mediated by certain individuals.12 Rather, it is the construction of theories under the labels of ‘deconstruction’, ‘poststructuralism’, and ‘postmodernism’, in terms of what is available in English at certain points of time, but without showing any awareness of this crucial factor. Within these accounts recurs the failure to pursue GREPH in terms of their own concerns, mentioned as an ‘answer’ to the presumed question of ‘deconstruction and politics’ but not examined in detail. Theory and Politics At work in the ‘story’ of Derrida’s reception as constitutive of ‘theory’, ‘decon­ struction’, and ‘French theory’, though partially submerged, is the recurrent idea that there is somehow an ‘American’ Derrida and a ‘French’ Derrida, and that the former can only traduce, dilute, and appropriate the latter for its own, blunter ends.13 This type of foregrounding of a ‘good’ version as against a ‘bad’ version represents a kind of interpretive cliché of Derrida studies. Its other well-known variants include, notably, the idea of an early versus a late Derrida: rigorous and philosophical versus literary and wilfully difficult or playful. According to Derrida’s two best-known Anglophone defenders, these versions are good versus bad in Christopher Norris’s long-running exegesis, or bad versus good in Richard Rorty’s equally inf luential series of critical presentations.14 The presentation of the two versions as related to

6

Situating GREPH

a particular institutionalization (i.e. within theory not philosophy) and a particular national, cultural, and linguistic context (American rather than French) is what is of interest in terms of understanding GREPH. The critics discussed in the next two sections fall into two groupings. Firstly, those who are interested in GREPH as an example of Derrida’s political involvement, and hence as ‘proof ’ of his political credibility. This grouping includes a variety of American critics who use GREPH for citational purposes. Here, GREPH becomes a borrowed footnote circulating unexplained in the attempt to prove or disprove the connection between deconstruction and politics. These include the critics Jonathan Culler and Michael Ryan, who do make some attempt to engage with this area more substantively, but who for different reasons nonetheless fail to engage with GREPH at all. The question of American versus French, of whether this is a misunderstanding arising from the passage of ideas across national and linguistic boundaries, gains purchase here. The second grouping of critics do engage directly with GREPH, rather than as a brief mention appended to accounts of Derrida’s work, and do raise this question of context. They situate themselves as American onlookers of a French context. Stephen Heath comments, with regard to the question of ‘deconstruction in America’: It is regularly said in this context that Derrida is not responsible for his North American inf luence [...] and that things are different in France.15

The first grouping of critics are broadly concerned with the first half of this state­ ment, aiming to separate Derrida’s work from its American reception; the second are more involved in the implications of the latter part of the statement, with noticing and pointing out that in some sense ‘context’ matters, though very partially and without engagement with the problematic of ‘context’ itself. To take the first aspect of this problematic, then: ‘deconstruction in America’.16 The institutionalization of what became known, institutionally, as ‘poststructuralism’ or ‘post-structuralism’ within American comparative literature departments (rather than philosophy departments) and in English and Modern Languages departments in Britain from the mid-1970s onwards has been much emphasized, and the enthusiastic annexation of deconstruction as part of literary critical methodologies has been widely remarked upon — always adversely. Derrida’s work was used as what Edward Saïd termed ‘a new interpretive opportunity’, an approach embodied in the work of celebrated Yale Critics such as Geoffrey Hartman, as well as a swathe of epigones, and the critical energies stimulated by this ‘opportunity’ became increasingly entrenched in refining their own orthodoxy.17 Two counter-responses to this critical appropriation of Derrida ensued. The first is Christopher Norris’s prolonged rescue-mission of Derrida’s work from the misappropriations of his freewheeling literary captors, which I have already referred to, which reclaims Derrida as ‘serious’, ‘rigorous’, and ‘philosophical’. The second is the posing of the question of political significance, most robustly by Terry Eagleton.18 Both the enthusiastic annexation of Derrida’s work as providing a literary critical method and the approach inf lected by the concern for political effects generated countless imitators and an unstoppable f low of new readings. The comments made by critics less well known than Norris and Eagleton give a clear sense of

Situating GREPH

7

what became habitual gestures, in terms of the rhetoric of ‘radicalism’ in relation to theory and politics. A typical example from the latter sub-discourse of less well known figures can be found in Malcolm K. Read’s explanation of why the question of political impact should in fact be posed. He frames the question bluntly as that of demanding of an approach or critical method, ‘what does your criticism contribute to our liberation?’. According to Read, this question must be addressed to deconstruction since it ‘poses as a radical, subversive discourse’.19 In other words, the kind of radical subversion which the Yale Critics annexed to a literary critical methodology foregrounding textual ‘free play’ and unreliability was seen as what Eagleton himself termed ‘a promissory note to deliver some political goods’.20 This subversive posture could then be examined — and found wanting — in terms of an assumed opposition between ‘real issues’ and what Eagleton characterizes in the same passage as the ‘finespun obliquity’ of deconstructive writing. In this way, Derrida and deconstruction became habitually stigmatized as politically ineffi­ cacious at best, or disabling and nihilistic at worst, ‘ruining the categories’, as one deconstructive critic put it, of subjectivity and agency on which the discourse of political action has founded itself.21 The examples which follow are all taken from this critical discourse which refers to GREPH in order to prove that Derrida’s work is in fact ‘political’. GREPH functions as an entirely indispensable yet wholly unelaborated reference-point. The American literature professor, Susan R. Horton, approvingly notes that Eagleton is concerned with the institution of criticism, and that, in his terms, this can only attain due significance when it engages in extra-literary issues. She endorses this herself, and then goes on to mention GREPH in France and the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in England as worthy examples of ‘crossing the frontier between the academic institution and the political society at large’.22 Perhaps the most notable thing about these two examples is that neither the CCCS nor GREPH were in fact engaged in literary issues at any point, but popular culture and media, and philosophy, respectively. The real point of her validation of GREPH is an implicit notion of the practical as opposed to the theoretical. This is the thrust of an attack on Derrida made in 1985, by Barbara Foley, from an avowedly Leninist position: that deconstruction is ‘separated from practice’, and consequently cannot avoid being politically bankrupt, since it has opted for formalism as its focus, rather than the ‘real relations of class and power’ (my emphasis).23 The coupling of theory with politics entails chastisement of the former in direct proportion to a dread of admitting its lack of political effects. Later hostile evaluations of the passage of French thinkers into an institutional hybrid known vaguely as ‘academic postmodernism’ claim that the only distinctive shared feature holding this entity together is the ‘conviction that promoting these very different thinkers somehow contributes to a shared emancipatory political end, which remains conveniently illdefined’.24 According to this view, claims made on behalf of poststructuralism and postmodernism (the two are deliberately elided with dismissive unconcern), and their possible contribution to politics, are as wrongheaded and illusory as castigating such works for their lack of any such contribution. Both approaches can be derided for their collective misapprehension.

8

Situating GREPH

So is the question of theory-and-politics one of mere window-dressing, of trying to seem politically respectable? The next important move to be noticed here is that from politics as being somehow exterior to intellectual enquiry to an enlarged conception of the political as such. It is no longer a matter of ‘putting deconstruction to work in the service of left-wing aims’, as the Australian critic Kevin Hart put it.25 Such an approach entailed appropriating deconstruction as a method, a way of reading, as in its most dominant Anglophone institutionalization, then using this putative method for the analysis of non-literary objects. Barbara Johnson terms this a translation to a distinct ‘realm of historical and political action’.26 The difference lies in the objects of attention which are categorized as either literary or non-literary. Kevin Hart reiterates this opposition between two separate ‘uses’ of deconstruction: a political, ‘engaged’ one and what he terms ‘angelic’ decon­struction, that is to say, a ‘formalist mode of literary criticism’ (p. 148), in order to valorize a third option which would combine both. As he puts it, the difference would then not be between ‘a set of ways of rereading the canon’, and ‘questioning the uses to which the canon is put’, but a hybrid, which ‘takes formal and social questions in tandem’. Despite this proposed ‘third way’, Hart then instantiates the specifically political uses of deconstruction by citing Derrida’s work on apartheid, on nuclear arms, and GREPH, falling back into the literary versus non-literary opposition he set out to overcome. The expositor of Habermas, Thomas McCarthy, recites exactly the same list of ‘causes’ which, taken together, are ‘recognisably political’ and demonstrate that Derrida is ‘generally on the pro­ gressive side’, although in general terms, unlike Hart, he regrets what he calls Derrida’s ‘evasiveness’ about politics, his ‘unwillingness or inability to “decide” ’ the debate concerning ‘deconstructionist politics’.27 Hart makes a distinction between ‘engaged’ and ‘formalist’ modes of deconstruction in terms of the object of study, non-literary versus literary. It is noticeable, then, that in his preferred combined option — the combination of formal and social questions — both examples are literary/institutional, pertaining to questions of canon. This kind of enquiry, into a particular discipline, both its contents and its institutional structures, is precisely what GREPH was in fact engaged in. Hart’s use of GREPH as an example of political engagement only, within his terms, is therefore as reductive as those who remained content to stay within the ‘literary’ versus ‘real issues’ opposition. As seen already in the quotation from Derrida’s thesis presentation which remarked on the evolution of his interest in institutional questions, Derrida did not conceive of this as a new and separate kind of activity, entirely unrelated to other aspects of his work. Both Hart and McCarthy cite GREPH as if to ‘prove’ Derrida’s political credentials, but no knowledge of GREPH itself is shown. ‘GREPH’ merely appears as an unexplored footnote, which can be deployed in response to an assumed charge-sheet of sceptical formalism and hence reactionary and politically paralyzing effects. Another attempt to move from this conception of the politics half of the theoryand-politics couplet as ‘real issues’ versus formalism is seen in the claim that decon­ struction is helpful in the need to reformulate the category of ‘politics’, which is to be dismantled as a foundational term and extended into the political as such. Such a

Situating GREPH

9

move dismantles the opposition between the real and the textual in order to assert that: every act is necessarily inscribed within the domain of the political, presupposing political institutions and producing political effects.28

The rhetoric of ‘using’ deconstruction, of ‘putting it into service’ is disowned: its con­tri­bution is that of questioning the category of politics, and its restriction to a series of ‘real’ or ‘practical’ issues. It is no longer a question of ‘applying’ de­con­struction, as Christopher Norris proposes.29 The work of the Centre for Philo­sophical Research on the Political, which was founded in the wake of the 1980 conference in Cérisy, ‘Les fins de l’homme: à partir du travail de Jacques Derrida’, sought to pursue this approach of deconstructing ‘the political’ rather than producing a politics of deconstruction.30 As Christopher Fynsk stated in his contribution to the conference: that politics forms the horizon of every practice is perhaps, for modernity, obviousness itself — hence our difficulty in assigning a proper meaning to the term ‘politics’.31

Significantly, just before he makes this remark, Fynsk comments on what he sees as another inescapably obvious point, that ‘philosophy does not exist outside of the system of power and knowledge which structures our institutions’. The ground is shifted to that of the politics of knowledge and of institutions, and specifically philosophy — i.e. precisely the terrain inhabited by GREPH. Fynsk is one of the few American commentators who have made some attempt to engage with GREPH as more than an obligatory footnote reference adduced to ‘prove’ Derrida’s political/ progressive credentials, and his presentation of their activities will therefore merit further examination.32 With regard to ‘politics’ as opposed to ‘the political’, it is worth adding the caveat entered by Gayatri Spivak in her retrospective version of her own contribution to the same conference.33 As Spivak points out, distinguishing between le politique and la politique, is not an unproblematic solution: It seems to me that such a distinction too easily excludes LA politique as the other as such. On the side of LE politique, we mobilise the most generous and most philosophical principles, and on the side of LA politique we stockpile national and situational examples. (p. 98)

‘Politics’, in the functioning of this opposition becomes simply a unitary Marxism, to be complicated and moved beyond. What is most interesting in the various examples so far is where the theoryand-politics question is displaced by a more direct engagement with institutional questions and with the politics of knowledge. Instead of analyses which attempt to offer justifications of deconstruction’s emancipatory role and demystificatory usefulness — more political than the approaches of its Marxist critics who arrogate the term exclusively to themselves, because more radical — the ground is shifted to a more helpful starting-point, that of educational institutions. The charge that this debate merely ref lects the impotence and insularity of the academic left, and a self-defeatingly narcissistic quest for ‘correct’ rhetorical gestures, loses purchase if the ‘politics’ in question are those of knowledge, and the ‘institutions’ those

10

Situating GREPH

of education.34 Instead of the term ‘political’ functioning as an empty honorific which is produced in order to answer the charge-sheet of nihilism, theoreticism, or lack of rigour and seriousness (according to Christopher Norris), the terms of the debate can then have an immediate purpose. As Robert Young remarks, in terms of the institutionalization of theory in the Anglophone academy of the 1980s, ‘the traditional critic’s “crisis” became the theorist’s “the politics of ” ’.35 That is to say, where theory was first perceived by its non-adherents as a threat and a problem, this conf lict or debate became reconfigured as itself part of the problematic and processes of institutionalization, and as a way of ref lecting upon them. Instead of this being seen as an embarrassment, when really critics should be attending to more important matters outside education, it can then be taken seriously, as an area of contentiousness and significance. At this point, the pretence that literary critical methodologies are directly linked to current sweatshop exploitation can be left to one side. Specific texts can cease to be invoked as badges of honour, proof of engagement, and can in fact themselves be engaged with and analysed in the light of their concerns.36 Reviewing how GREPH surfaces as a recurring unanalysed reference-point in these kind of ‘deconstruction-and-politics’ accounts thus suggests not just how GREPH’s work, and Derrida’s involvement with the group, are effectively travestied, but also how the content and context of this body of work is not even used to attempt to ‘prove’ what is assumed to require proving. This point can be grasped fully if we consider for a moment the reception and appropriations of Michel Foucault’s work. Foucault is everywhere acknowledged as pre-eminent in the area of institutions and the analysis of power.37 This work is therefore politically approved and gratefully annexed for the purposes of theory-and-politics. But it is very rarely remarked upon that, amongst the different institutions which Foucault examines, ranging from hospitals to prisons, he never analyses the institutions of education. The historian of ideas, Peter Ghosh, has been one of the few to comment on what he terms this ‘astonishing but revealing lacuna’.38 As Ghosh remarks, the French educational system was surely a ‘sitting target’, but is one which does not so much as feature in his lists of possible future projects. Instead of castigating Derrida for his lack of political radicality, or ‘proving’ the latter by merely citing his involvement with something ‘practical’, the case for attending in detail to what this questioning of educational institutions and these texts in fact represented is clear. Deconstruction and Institutions The first example of an American theorist who pays more than lip service to the relationship between deconstruction and institutions, and who has an awareness of GREPH’s relevance in this area, is the Marxist critic Michael Ryan, in his 1982 book Marxism and Deconstruction. A Critical Articulation. The title of Ryan’s book promises an articulation of the two together, ‘deconstruction as a mode of Marxist political criticism’ (p. xvi), rather than an annexation of deconstruction for political purposes. His book was greeted with extreme enthusiasm by Eagleton, and a more cautious response by Bennington.39 As Bennington, p. 91 comments in his assessment of Ryan’s project, the book is marked by a tone of impatience which acts

Situating GREPH

11

as an index of political urgency, conveying the impression that ‘the political is in a hurry compared with philosophy’. This impatience results in a tendency to fall into the habit of differentiating between an earlier, important and serious Derrida, and a later, ‘self-referential, esoteric’ one (p. xiv) — or a useful and a less useful brand of deconstruction for Ryan’s purposes. What is most surprising in the context of Derrida’s own work on institutions and with GREPH is that Ryan, in the ‘Reason and Counterrevolution’ chapter of the book, produces an analysis of the university in relation to capitalism and commercial interests without mentioning this aspect of Derrida’s work. This is puzzling not just because of the obvious relevance, but also because, unlike the monoglot exponents of American deconstruction, Ryan himself worked with GREPH whilst studying with Derrida at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in the late 1970s and wrote contributions in QP himself, and is therefore certainly not unaware of the substantive concerns of their project. He acknowledges his thanks for this period in his introduction (p. xvi), but does not refer to GREPH directly in the book at all. He mentions the attempt to reduce the number of hours of philosophy taught in schools by the French government in his introduction (pp. xiv-xv), but only in order to say that the ‘real target’ of the reforms was Marxism. No analysis of GREPH is undertaken as part of the book, even though the author undertakes an insightful evaluation of one part of their work in his essay ‘Mise en cause’ in QP.40 For Ryan, who worked with GREPH a few years earlier, to examine the question of deconstruction and politics in relation to the university in particular and not to relate the two or indeed to include any discussion of GREPH in the main body of his text is a striking omission. Jonathan Culler suggests that there is ‘a risk of bathos’ in Ryan’s work, and asks whether Derrida is really ‘need[ed] to unravel the contradictions of right-wing political rhetoric’.41 Culler himself devotes some time to the area of deconstruction and institutions, and his treatment of this area is significant in that it occurs within a ‘mainstream’ general account in his 1983 book On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism, where he mentions GREPH brief ly.42 On Deconstruction is part of a series which Culler produced from the mid-1970s onwards which rapidly attained a kind of textbook status as ‘usable guides’ to the theories discussed.43 Accord­ing to Culler’s account, the search for a programme of deconstructive poli­ tics is misconceived: the relationship between the two, as he construes it, is one of constitutive excess. The ‘radical potential [of deconstructive analyses] may depend on the surprising resources they reveal in an excessive, uncalculating theoretical pursuit’ (p. 159). His criticism of Ryan’s aim of articulating deconstruction with Marxism is that this is too programmatic and will curb this ‘excess’, thereby limiting its unpre­ dictable potential. Hence, according to Culler, the risk of ‘bathos’, of seeming disproportionate. The contrast made is between the untrammelled subversive excess of theory, and the limited, specific objectives of the ‘critique of current institutions’. He comments on this combination with regard to GREPH (p. 158), and quotes Derrida’s own remark regarding ‘[les] écarts [...] entre les discours ou les pratiques de cette déconstruction immédiatement politique et une déconstruction d’allure théorique ou philosophique’.44 Culler rigidifies this gap into a permanent

12

Situating GREPH

divide between the more basic demands of the practical and the sophistication of theory, which Culler sees as the radical potential of Derrida’s work which must be conserved. In his brief presentation of GREPH — albeit significantly fuller than the copied footnote approach of the critics mentioned above — Culler is interested only in a cursory explanation of the group, before resetting the problematic within his own, locally-specific conception of the relationships between theory and institutions. His account of deconstruction and politics is entitled ‘Institutions and Inversions’. The political potential, in his account, resides in transferring the activity of ‘the deconstruction of philosophical opposites’ onto ‘the critique of current institutions’ (p. 159). According to this logic, discursive structures and systems of signification, and therefore what he terms ‘the realities with which politics is concerned’, rely on traditional oppositions, and they will therefore be ‘affected by inversions and displacements of those hierarchies’ (p. 157, my emphasis). This is Culler’s attempt to bridge the gap diagnosed between theory (or the radical) and ‘real issues’ (or the institutional). Culler’s own preoccupation with institutionalization is in relation to theory rather than philosophy and it is chief ly concerned with the threat of ‘domestication’ which institutionalization poses to radical modes of criticism such as deconstruction. He argues that, If the force of theory depends upon possibilities of institutionalisation — it becomes politically effective insofar as it can inform the practices by which we constitute, administer, and transmit a world — its most radical aspects are threatened by institutionalisation and emerge precisely in a theoretical re­f lection that contests particular institutionalisations of a theoretical dis­course. (p. 159)

He makes an analogy between deconstruction and psychoanalysis. Where Freudian theory is radical, the institutions of psychoanalysis are conservative, but Freudian theory provides ‘resources’ for the critique of ‘institutions and assumptions, including those of psychoanalytic practices’ (p. 159). The dynamic is one of unassimilable excess, in itself subversive and disruptive, followed by assimilation by the institution which inevitably involves ‘domestication’. The ‘taming’ of this radical potential is thus akin to the fear of ‘falsification’ which Culler had earlier identified in his first sustained attempt (Structuralist Poetics, 1975) to engage with Derrida’s work. Before embarking on such an attempt, he argues there, we must ‘grasp that any attempt to give an account of what Derrida says is a falsification of his project, but that such falsification is unavoidable’.45 This idea of the fundamental inadequacy of commentary subsequently became an inescapable humility topos inserted at the beginning of all commentaries on Derrida. What is interesting is the adequation between commentary, pedagogy, and politics, all of which are understood as part of a secondary, dependent realm of cruder, more practical concerns. All must necessarily traduce Derrida’s work, limiting and over-simplifying it. The taming of ‘theory’ in terms of the institution means, for Culler, its reduction in terms of what is teachable, transmissible — in other words, the constraints of what is pedagogically fruitful and possible. The rel­ation­ship of a ‘lag’ or ‘gap’ between pedagogy and knowledge is one of the

Situating GREPH

13

main concerns of Derrida’s 1976 essay ‘Où commence et comment finit un corps enseignant’ (henceforth OC), which was written as part of his involvement with GREPH.46 Although Culler refers to this question of a gap in terms of remarks made by Derrida in his 1975 interview ‘Entre Crochets’ and in the OC essay, he does not draw on the latter.47 Thus, I would argue, he fails to engage with the ‘political’ nature of Derrida’s engagement with GREPH. The political, for Culler, remains the realm of the practical, however much he registers his recognition that this was an opposition which GREPH and Derrida were concerned to challenge. According to his account, deconstruction remains too sophisticated, and too radical to be, as he puts it, ‘subjected to a teleology of political gain’ (p. 159). Culler took up this question again a few years later in an article for the collection Post-Structuralism and the Question of History and in Framing the Sign: Criticism and its Institutions, the next volume of his series.48 Here he is rather more sanguine about institutionalization. Rather than theory, or particular theories, posing a radical challenge to the institution, he states that it is the process of institutionalization and professionalization which provide the motor for producing new thought, through its unending demand for new readings, methods, and questions under the guise of the university as the site for the production of knowledge. It then assimilates these, ‘reducing forceful claims of a theoretical perspective to usable insights’.49 This ceaseless production of questions, norms to be questioned in their turn, and continuing debate proves, according to Culler, that ‘professionalisation makes thought possible’.50 Institutionalization becomes the generator of novelty, which can then, optimistically, be understood as ‘new thought’. The priority is reversed, from the radical, excessive potential of theory disrupting and subverting institutional norms, to those very norms acting as the generative structure of thought. Domestication is part of an enabling dialectic and no longer needs to cause concern. As an explanation of the effects of accelerated production within the university, Culler’s comments are uncontroversial. But to claim that these effects equate to no less than the enabling conditions of new thinking seems unwarrantedly optimistic.51 Even though Culler’s presentation of the institutional aspect of Derrida’s work is less glancing than the previous examples, it ultimately subsumes Derrida’s commitment to GREPH and involvement with political and institutional struggles under the problematic of theory’s institutionalization. This is not an unfruitful or unimportant line of approach but the possible relationships between philosophy in France and theory in America are not discussed explicitly. Derrida’s work is understood only as part of American theory. Perhaps most significantly, the key difference of institutionalization is not registered: Culler discusses theory within the American university, but GREPH was engaged in a struggle within schools, and therefore mass education. I return to this wider problematic in the last chapter. The last grouping of American critics to bring in at this juncture have in common that they have all written on GREPH more centrally. Instead of adducing GREPH as a mention in a list or unexplained footnote, they have all addressed its activities in some detail. Their portrayals differ in approach and stance taken, but they can be grouped together in terms of a more substantive interest in GREPH in contrast to the merely symptomatic mentions given to GREPH in relation to

14

Situating GREPH

Derrida in the critics mentioned thus far. The first two of these critics, Vincent B. Leitch and Gregory L. Ulmer, are both avowedly ‘deconstructionist’, sympathetic expositors of Derrida who situate their own work in a direct line with his. They have both produced works on deconstruction which include GREPH within their purview. Leitch addresses GREPH in his 1985 essay ‘Teaching Deconstructively’ which is reprinted in his 1996 collection Postmodernism: Local Effects, Global Flows, and Ulmer writes on the group in his 1985 monograph Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys.52 Both are interested in GREPH in a more sustained and detailed way than the critics mentioned so far: they have both moved the ground of the debate to the question of pedagogy, and of theory and pedagogy. This is the question which, as I indicated above, Culler has in mind when he raises issues of institutions and institutionalization, although he does not explicitly pose it as such. Both Leitch and Ulmer explain GREPH’s political nature in terms of the group’s response to an attack on philosophy by the state. This is correct, but it does not also explain the importance of the situation of philosophy within state education as GREPH’s operative context. Since these critics show no awareness of the place of philosophy in French education, and of the history of this institution, they create an opposition between ‘philosophy’ (under threat) and ‘power’ (as external attack through the agency of the state). As the next chapter will demonstrate, GREPH took as a starting-point the vacuity of such an opposition. Ulmer uses GREPH not to demonstrate Derrida’s political, activist credentials, but to weight his claims on behalf of a radical, poststructuralist mode of pedagogy. This usage is part of the distinctive sub-topic within American theory of ‘theory and pedagogy’ which poses the question of teaching deconstructively, again applying Derrida’s work, and presupposing the possibility of such an ‘application’. The resistance to such a possibility as it is manifested in Derrida’s own consideration of pedagogy will be explored in due course.53 In 1996 Leitch wrote another article on Derrida’s work with philosophical institutions which examined the founding of the Collège International de Philo­ sophie (CIPh).54 Here, the problematic is taken to be theory and politics and it therefore fits in to the pattern found in the critics mentioned already. Derrida’s involvement with the Collège is showcased as an effective riposte, and an un­answerable answer to the presumed question of theory and institutions, abstract versus concrete. Leitch states: For two decades critics have asked how poststructuralist theory relates to institutional practice and cultural transformation. The emergence of the Inter­ national Collège constitutes an answer: a new state institution. (p. 114)

Leitch analyses the CIPh as a kind of culmination and institutionalization of post­structuralism (p. 101), and goes on to hail it as a ‘postmodern institution’ (p. 113). I return to Leitch’s account of the Collège again in Chapter 5, in relation to the equation of theory with an iconoclastic movement towards interdisciplinarity, and how this fits with philosophy. For the moment, it is worth including here as another variation of the same pattern, even though it occurs within a fuller account of this aspect of Derrida’s work. Leitch sees GREPH as ‘characteristically poststructuralist’ because the group ‘starts with a local issue’ and then goes on to

Situating GREPH

15

examine ‘the system of hierarchical relations underlying the institutions involved in the issue’.55 This is not an unfounded characterization, but it is inadequate as a presentation of the group’s work since it lacks a substantive dimension. This kind of commentary is merely formalistic ‘motif-spotting’, locating particular intellectual patterns only and reducing Derrida’s work to a transportable method. This is not combined with any consideration of GREPH’s arguments or activities, or the context in which they were operating. The third critic in this grouping, Steven Ungar, published in 1984 an account of philosophy’s public profile and activities in France since 1968; a year earlier, he had also referred to the group when considering the topic of institutions in relation to Barthes.56 The institutional context and trajectory which Ungar examines in the 1984 article is not that of American theory but rather of political radicalism and educational reform within France. Ungar’s comments on Derrida’s work with GREPH and with the CIPh thus appear as part of an account of French philosophical activity in the fifteen years or so since 1968. He argues that this activity occurred in relation to a raised public profile for philosophy in France, which has become a ‘prime field of contention and institutional reform’ (p. 13). His reference points are exclusively French, unlike any of the other critics mentioned so far; the remarks cited by Kevin Hart earlier occurred in a collection with the sub-title Recent French Theory in a Local Context, supposedly introducing French thinking to an Australian audience, but, as indicated above, Hart’s comments did not in fact offer any such contextualization. Unlike Culler, Ungar does situate himself in relation to both the French and the American contexts, and he does introduce the question of their significant differences. Ungar makes the point that American critical responses to French ‘imports’ fail to take into theoretical account both their own and the French contexts of intellectual production. He positions himself as, unavoidably, an external onlooker to the French context, but aims to address this context, broaching the question of ‘the specificity of cultural practices’ (p. 15). The American context is only brief ly represented in terms of the hostility aroused by the recent importation of what he terms ‘Continental literary theory and criticism’ (p. 15). This hostility is manifested in the resistance to texts, in particular those of Derrida and Foucault, which are seen as ‘foreign’, unassimilable either stylistically or in terms of existing disciplinary categories and hence unnecessarily difficult, and which are unfavourably opposed to ‘home grown values of common sense’. This is a familiar argument about the reception of theory from this period, although it is worth noting the designation of ‘Continental literary theory’, even in an account purportedly of French philosophy in context. No further points about the passage across linguistic, cultural, and disci­ plinary borders are made by Ungar in terms of the American side. His account of the public profile of philosophy in France takes a contextualized understanding of philosophy as unproblematic, glossed as follows: a cultural doctrine tied to a specific time and place and the effects which that doctrine produces as a discourse set in the contexts of everyday life. (p. 15)

He links the possibility of seeing philosophy as a form of intellectual production which is embodied in a set of cultural practices to a ‘crisis of legitimation’ after

16

Situating GREPH

1968 in France. To instantiate this view, he refers to Henri Lefebvre’s opposition of philosophy to everyday life and ‘the materiality of cultural practices’ (p. 16) to encapsulate the prior view of philosophy as the idealizing other of everyday life. To evoke the subsequent perception of a need to account for philosophy as part of those practices, he uses Vincent Descombes’s phrase, ‘the domain in which philosophy circulates’.57 The chief evidence he produces for this shift is the changing role assigned to the intellectual. Once the universalizing pretensions of the latter had been ‘exploded’ by May 1968, philosophy becomes ‘increasingly localised’ (pp. 16–17). However, he then goes on to claim a neo-Sartrean profile for Derrida, as a result of his engagement with GREPH and the CIPh (p. 22). This assertion runs counter to the aspirations and spirit of GREPH’s campaign, which were postSartrean. Their starting-point, sketched out at the time of their campaigning, was far closer to Foucault’s idea of the ‘specific intellectual’.58 Fynsk makes this point in relation to ‘Le Doctrinal de Sapience’, a group closely linked to GREPH which shared its aims and objectives, and it is equally pertinent to GREPH.59 Foucault’s conception of the specific intellectual contrasted those who were ‘merely competent instances in the service of the state’ with the figure of the uni­versal intellectual, typically a writer — and pre-eminently embodied in the figure of Sartre (although Foucault pointedly does not name him) — who stands or purports to stand as ‘universal consciousness, free subject’ (p. 12). Instead of writing being the ‘sacralising mark’ of the individual intellectual, a networking process of ‘politicisation’ occurs within social institutions, the penal system, or — most relevantly here — education. This politicization, Foucault states, occurs ‘on the basis of each individual’s specific activity’. The privileged figure of the ‘writer as figurehead’ disappears to make way for networks of exchange and Foucault sees the university as a key place for this kind of exchange and intersection. Certainly this type of localized and micro-strategic mode of formation and action is true of GREPH, and it more accurately conveys Derrida’s involvement with the group than the Sartrian analogy employed by Ungar. However, Foucault cites as an example of the ‘specific intellectual’ the figure of Oppenheimer (p. 12), and his argument at this point seems to become, in effect, the intellectual as expert as opposed to the intellectual as purveyor of a distinctively non-expert discourse. The intellectual as expert is then the corollary of what he designates as the increasingly ‘techno-scientific’ nature of society (p. 13). Foucault’s characterization of the networks of institutional power which cannot be stood outside of, but must be continuously contested from within, is very much part of GREPH’s view of the educational system. However, as will be seen in the course of the next chapter, the group envisaged the role of philosophy within education as part of a collective, mass critical activity. Its own activities remained more institutionally embedded, as part of the practice of philosophy, and they did not seek to appear publicly in the guise of ‘experts’. Neither the group as a whole, nor Derrida, therefore functioned publicly as ‘intellectuals’ in either sense, universal or specific. Ungar’s account is worthy of attention since he does seek to account for GREPH in some detail and in context. This is because he is not writing ‘theory’, and is therefore not starting out from the need to justify Derrida as political or from the

Situating GREPH

17

desire to dismiss his work as apolitical. The view that philosophy became, at a stroke, part of a set of localized, pluralized ‘practices’ as a result of the 1968 events is, however, too simplistic. This is relevant in accounting for militancy on its behalf in the 1970s (which will be discussed in the following chapter), but it does not allow for the philosophical problems, which engaged GREPH, of philosophy’s relation to its own history and material practice. The final pair of articles to be mentioned here are both by Christopher Fynsk, who was referred to above with regard to his contribution to the 1980 ‘Les fins de l’homme’ conference in Cérisy. The articles, both published in 1978, serve as introductions to GREPH and ‘Le Doctrinal’ in American journals: the first, ‘A De­cele­bration of Philosophy’ is a presentation of GREPH and a not uncritical review of Qui a peur de la philosophie?; the second is entitled ‘Legacies of May: On the Work of Le Doctrinal de Sapience’. In the first, Fynsk comments on GREPH in relation to ‘deconstruction in America’ (pp. 85 ff.), but does not merely claim its utility in proving the political potential of deconstruction. He notes the diffi­ culties in his own coinage, referred to above, of seeing the group as a ‘political translation’ of Derrida’s work, since this still suggests an absolute division between, and movement from, theory to practice. I will return to other specific comments on the group when relevant in due course. For the moment, Fynsk is the only commentator of GREPH to engage with their work at all, and it is not by chance that he was fully aware of the detailed context of French philosophy at the time, and did not therefore rely solely on the version of Derrida subsequently circulating in American theory. All of these critics frame their accounts in terms of the reception of ‘French thought’ in America. Only Ungar does not introduce the problematic of decon­ struction and politics, chief ly because he is not writing primarily about Derrida’s work. The question of a national context was explicitly raised by him, and is present in his terminology of ‘theoretical imports’. The use of GREPH as a brief mention or footnote in accounts of Derrida, or as a piece of unexamined ‘evidence’ in the case for and against the political potential of his work, pays scant or no attention to this problem. The problem of not allowing for context is made clear by Heath’s largely hostile account, referred to already, of the attempts of Culler and Ryan to attest to deconstruction’s political possibility.60 Separating Derrida from the reception of his work in America involves playing off two very loosely evoked national contexts. Heath argues, convincingly enough, that this is not sufficient: it is not enough to point out, in the remark quoted above, that ‘things are different in France’. This must be elaborated and demonstrated. Ungar’s account is significant here, not only in that it makes some attempt to contextualize, but that it does at least recognize this question as a theoretical problem, particularly in relation to philosophy. However, his idea of a shift from philosophy viewed as abstract and idealized up until 1968, to an interest in it as embodied in material practices after 1968, does not, and cannot, adequately address, let alone account for, the difficult relationship between philosophy and its practice, and philosophy and its history, and nor does it exhaust the range of institutional and intellectual positions held in terms of this problematic.

18

Situating GREPH

Although Heath’s criticisms of Culler are justified, (pp. 293 ff.), he himself is too caustic about Derrida’s involvement with GREPH. Heath’s scepticism about this hangs on an equivocation in the use of the terms ‘institutional’ and ‘political’. As pointed out above, Culler ultimately argues for deconstruction, and subsequently ‘theory’ in general, as an institutional possibility. As Heath infers (p. 305), this ‘institutional possibility’ becomes simply ‘what is interesting for literary studies’. Heath argues that deconstruction cannot be labelled as politically significant, other than in entire­ ly academic terms. (p. 303)

This is the sense used by Culler — theory radicalizes the practice of literary studies, in part through politicizing what was previously conceived of as ‘neutral’ or the institutional dimension understood as the context of interpretation. As we have seen, in Culler’s later arguments, this politicized awareness collapses into the complacent idea that institutional constraints are, on the face of it, simply enabling — the bathetic claim that productivity quotas cause greater productivity, which can only be a good thing, since it enforces a rubric of critical innovation. Against Heath, however, and as will be seen when exploring GREPH’s project and activities in detail, the politics of knowledge, of disciplines, of philosophy, and of teaching are not somehow less political than other issues. GREPH does represent a specific engagement with the ‘definite analyses and aims, activities and ends’ which Heath demands (p. 305). Heath is right to suggest that Culler’s account of deconstructionand-politics is merely wishful, but castigating him for reducing the category of ‘the political’ into no more than the institution of American literary theory does not in fact lead to the dismissal of GREPH, as his account implies. This in itself disallows the specificity of the institutional and cultural context in which they were engaged. Equally, to criticize Derrida for not addressing the ‘actuality of institutions’ (p. 303) is clearly wrong, since this was exactly what he engaged in with GREPH. In the ‘reception’ of GREPH, therefore, with the exception of Fynsk, the place and significance given to it and the position it has been assigned in relation to Derrida’s work fail to grasp the specificity of its educational, political, and historical context. As a result of this, the question of deconstruction and institutions cannot be adequately posed. The importance of a contextualized understanding is raised by Ungar, but it is not itself sufficiently problematized. The next section now turns to the question of a French context for philosophy. A French Context for Philosophy? The passage of ‘French thought’ into American literary theory forms the wider problematic of how GREPH has attracted attention outside the immediate circum­ stances in which it operated in France, both for the first group of examples, critics who use it as a list-mention example of the extra-literary and therefore political concerns of Derrida and deconstruction, and as the frame for accounts published by American critics more substantively interested in the group. The critical cliché of ‘dilution’ of Derrida’s work as the key to this contextual transfer does not address the question of context. In addressing the ‘institutional’ context, critics such as

Situating GREPH

19

Culler are concerned only with the norms and conventions of the American academy. The concern for the institutional dimension is asymmetrical, one-sided only, and exacerbates the habitual teaching situation of ‘theory’ in America where it is taught free of linguistic, cultural, and historical considerations. The view, referred to above, that French philosophy represents the ‘importation and transposition’ of German philosophy is usually construed in terms of intellectual rather than institutional transpositions.61 In comparison, considerations of the French thoughtAmerican theory configuration display an overt concern with the institutional and social dimension, and the nature of its mediation, but one-sidedly. The problematic nature of attributing nationality to philosophy, which sees itself as universalist and therefore transcending such constraints, is also not considered here: ‘French’ acts as an importation label, with particular connotations of foreignness attributed to it — it is radical, difficult, fashionable. The multiplicity inherent in such exchanges, both linguistic and cultural, is not entered into — the ‘Germanness’ of so-called French philosophy, for example. The other, more general problematic which underlies the institutional and cultural translations and appropriations of French philosophy again relates importantly to the question of philosophy and nationality, but again it does not confront it as a possibility. This is the problematic of the putative divide between ‘Analytic’, Anglophone philosophy and ‘Continental’, non-Anglophone philosophy in the twentieth century, a divide characterized by one-sided hostility and suspicion on the part of Anglophone philosophers, and widespread, though now decreasing, ignorance of Anglophone work in philosophy on the French side. Analytic philosophers entirely disallow questions of linguistic, cultural or national determinations in philosophy. For them, philosophy, like science, can only be international and universal. Again, as in the Franco-American nexus, Derrida’s work is used as the chief example and embodiment of a particular tradition and/or way of doing philosophy by those characterizing French philosophy and thought from the outside. Here, Derrida is taken as the key instance of all that is specious and without rigour. Most famously, in the ‘Cambridge affair’, when strong opposition was mounted to Derrida’s nomination for an honorary degree at the University of Cambridge in March 1992, British philosophers refused to allow his work to be deemed ‘philosophical’.62 This disallowance typified the wilful non-comprehension, and refusal of engage­ ment, by upholders of one ‘tradition’ of another one. In ‘La crise de l’enseignement philosophique’, an address to a 1978 conference for Francophone and Anglophone African philosophers in Benin in which Derrida presented the situation of philo­ sophy in France in terms of its institutionalized practice and the problems associated with that, he framed his discussion in terms of these kinds of ‘philosophical differ­ ences’.63 As he remarked there, philosophical differences correspond to national and linguistic differences not by an exact coincidence of boundaries, but via multiple overlapping (DP, p. 161). Philosophical differences can start to be broadly characterized in terms of questions of style, of method, and of the ‘champ problém­ atique’ (pp. 161–62). In the case of so-called Continental and ‘anglo-saxonne’ philosophy, the differences or the effects of difference created can become so intractable that, Derrida comments, the minimal conditions of communication and

20

Situating GREPH

co-operation are absent. This was certainly the case at Cambridge in 1992. The question of ‘tradition’ itself divides the two in terms of their regulative self-understanding. Anglophone analytic philosophy has been characterized as, precisely, a tradition which refuses to conceive of itself in terms of the constitutive hold of a specific intellectual tradition. In the formulation of the philosopher Peter Dews Analytic philosophy is ‘a tradition whose identity paradoxically consist[s] in its inability to grasp itself as a tradition’.64 Simon Critchley, who is, like Dews, a British Continental philosopher, provides the counterpart characterization of Continental philosophy as self-consciously grappling with its own historicity. He comments that this is its net ‘gain’: it allows one to focus on the essential historicity of philosophy as a practice and the essential historicity of the philosopher who engages in this practice.65

The importance of the question of tradition for Derrida can scarcely be overstated, and it is a question which will surface in relation to his consideration of deconstruction as a critique of the institution of philosophy in ‘Où commence et comment finit un corps enseignant’ in 1976, in the Benin presentation of 1978, and in his work on the university and philosophy from 1980 onwards. However, there is an initial obstacle to this opposition. Dews’s and Critchley’s comments only purport to be broad-scale characterizations. Even so, it is important to notice that Critchley brings in the additional problematic of philosophy as a practice. Philosophy as a practice includes pre-eminently, if not exclusively nor always, how it is taught. On this contrastive characterization, therefore, one kind of philosophy, Analytic, would be typically taught ahistorically, while the other, Continental, textually and historically. As Critchley states, borrowing Richard Rorty’s distinction, it is a case of problems versus proper names.66 As will become evident when considering GREPH, the way philosophy was taught in France included no such orientation towards the problem of philosophy in relation to its own history, nor in relation to itself as a practice. What the group sought to oppose was the teaching of philosophy as neutral, apolitical, and ahistorical. As will be seen in due course, uncovering its history as institutionalized practice represented a new orientation for them also. Equally significantly, Derrida’s recurring remarks on philosophy’s resistance to translation as a philosophical problematic — in other words, as intellectually significant rather than a mere practical impediment — are not addressed to Analytic philosophy, but to philosophy in general, including so-called Continental philosophy. Derrida specifically links what he designates as a principle of linguistic effacement to teaching.67 Teaching is conceived of in terms of transmissibility of contents, just as philosophy conceives of itself as communication of arguments. In both, language is reduced to an instrumental role only and meaning is before or beyond language.68 In a 1983 essay which has rarely been commented on, ‘La langue et le discours de la méthode’, Derrida places the relationship between philosophy and translation — and thereby, historicity, cultural and linguistic contexts, and material practice — as simultaneously a scandal and a resource. The fact of linguistic multiplicity is a ressource parce qu’il n’y a pas de philosophie, depuis l’origine, qui ne se soit confondue avec l’inscription d’une langue naturelle, à commencer par le grec;

Situating GREPH

21

scandale parce que l’idée philosophique, l’idée précisément, à l’origine du project philosophique, se confondait avec l’idée d’une traductibilité transparente et d’une univocité absolue devenant finalement indifférence à la langue et en tous cas à la multiplicité des langues.69

The relationship between philosophy and these different kinds of determinations — linguistic, historical, and material — is not simply analogical of course, with a resultant view of context as all-determining, but it rather entails a multiple over­ lap­ping of forces. ‘Context’ itself is a term which Derrida is wary of because of its connotations with totalizability and saturability. What is crucial to note for the moment is that these intensely difficult problematics all intersect for Derrida and form the terrain of his work with GREPH on the institution of French philosophy. At the time of Derrida’s involvement with GREPH, 1974–81, initiatives were made by Alan Montefiore, an Oxford philosophy fellow unusual in his refusal to dismiss non-Anglophone philosophy out of hand, to introduce contemporary French philosophers to an English audience in an effort to break down such unproductive ignorance and contempt. These resulted in Vincent Descombes’s overview account of current French philosophy (simultaneously published in French and English) and in the collection Philosophy in France Today, edited by Montefiore.70 Both of these initiatives aimed at encouraging the crossing of philosophical frontiers by introducing French philosophy to a new audience. In the introduction to the latter, Montefiore addresses the origins and objectives of the collection. He is cautious in his claims for the constitutive role of cultural context, and stresses that texts cannot simply be ‘read off ’ from their context of production, cultural and institutional (p. xxv).71 He is duly cognisant of the importance of allowing for, and of making explicit, such contextual differences, but most importantly he points out that such differences may in fact work to determine neither simply text nor context, but rather the extent and nature of the relationship between the two. As he says: these very differences may play a part in determining how relatively close or remote may be the relations between text and context from one case to another. (p. xxv)

In the French case, the prominence and complexity of philosophy’s place within broader culture is immediately striking. But within this, and in answer to the kinds of questions which Montefiore refers to in his introduction, it is noticeable how many of the contributions refer to the educational context of philosophy in France — not only Bourdieu and Derrida, but also Descombes (in his contribution to the volume), Louis Marin, and Pierre Macherey. Both Descombes, in his book-length survey of French philosophy, and Macherey, in various articles of the last two decades, raise the importance of philosophy’s place within education in France. Macherey, in a consideration of the possibility of designating a particular body of thought as ‘French’, broaches the question in terms of a consideration of philosophy as a practice, one which is both culturally located and historically conditioned.72 For Macherey, ‘French philosophy’ can only be made sense of as a shorthand designation for philosophical activities occurring in French today and in the past. These activities are to be understood as socialized

22

Situating GREPH

— in other words, arising out of a determined system of social relations.73 To understand philosophy’s position is therefore to disentangle a very closely linked and over-determined set of relations. The ‘relative closeness’, or not, of the relations, in Montefiore’s terms, is the starting-point for this understanding. In Macherey’s account, this relation is one of striking proximity. The paradox of universalist mission and geographical and cultural location is merely apparent, for Macherey: Ce qui est universel dans la philosophie considérée comme activité, c’est pré­ cisé­ment cette aptitude à se transformer, aussi bien dans sa forme que dans ses contenus. (p. 114)

Such transformations are not strictly delimited by the possibilities of a single national culture, but take place in relation to the historical and political form of culture, elaborated in relation to other cultures, which are designated as ‘foreign’.74 These relations affect the nature of competition and exchange (p. 114). What is immediately and distinctively ‘French’ in Macherey’s account are the two features which he singles out as essential to an understanding of these relations. Having marked out the terrain as that of education since the Revolution, he picks out the relationship of philosophy to the state and to language. The first of these, education, philosophy, and the state, is an unparalleled French conjuncture, and the second, philosophy and a particular language, is a determining relationship foregrounded by non-Analytic and by French philosophy in particular. Macherey, in his first consideration of the possibility of ‘French philosophy’ published in 1990, argues for, rather, a ‘philosophie à la française’: La philosophie à la française, c’est une philosophie qui, d’une part, s’énonce en langue française, et d’autre part, se constitue et se propage dans les limites qui lui sont assignées par l’État, dans la mesure où celui-ci la reconnait comme l’une de ses charges, s’exercant sous sa garantie. (p. 9)

Philosophy is not ‘French’ because of any ‘génie national’, but through its publicly recognized form of production as a practice. He is therefore interested in how philosophy became designated in France as a state pedagogical activity. The importance of its enunciation in a particular national language is that this marks the end of language being used or deemed to be a neutral instrument for philosophy.75 Kant created a kind of philosophical German, and linguistic materiality became an important vector of philosophical exchange. Instead of being produced in the lingua franca of Latin, routes of exchange and contact were significantly cut off or established, and these different modes of expression took on ‘la forme concur­ rentielle d’une confrontation’ (p. 117). The modes of expression then became identified with national characters, exacerbating the impression of mutual opacity, and in turn creating effects of delay and incomprehension within philosophical exchanges. The topos of the ‘three philosophical nations’ thus came in to play in the nineteenth century with its determining matrix of clichés: metaphysical Germany, rationalist France, and empirical England. Ungar, in his account of philosophy in France from 1968 onwards, which was referred to in the last section, uses Descombes’s remarks on the institutional and cultural context of French philosophy to evoke the institutional forms of its cultural

Situating GREPH

23

specificity (p. 17). Ungar quotes Descombes’s formulation, ‘the domain in which philosophy circulates’, in order to bring out the sense both of the wider public context and that of cultural specificity which he wishes to convey.76 Descombes’s brief account of this ‘domain’ (pp. 5–8) comprises two sectors: like Macherey, he focuses on education, and he also includes media.77 Unlike Macherey, he gives no sense of the pre-history of philosophy in French education and the highly specific nature of its institutionalization. Puzzlingly for his targeted Anglophone reader he refers to the ‘university site’ of philosophy as including secondary schools without explaining why. This history of the institutionalization of philosophy in French education forms the focus of the next section. For the moment, what is worth noting is the stress which Descombes continues to place on the educational context for an understanding of French philosophy in the 1970s. The cultural hegemony of philosophy in France, its prestige, or, in Bourdieu’s term, distinction, forms a part of an external view, triggering envy and curiosity that philosophy’s profile within French culture is unequalled.78 One example, drawn from popular culture, of this continuing wider profile, even today, is the sitcom series aimed at a French adolescent audience, La Philo selon Philippe, which has been broadcast three times a week on TF1 since September 1995. This is a spin-off from the American film Dead Poets’ Society, but where this box-office hit centred on a charismatic English teacher, the French spin-off transposed this to a prof de philo. Interestingly, in the American version, the charismatic relationship between teacher and pupils is only possible because the scene is an elite boys’ boardingschool, whereas the French philosophy teacher works in a state lycée. Outside of the area of American literary theory, the significance of philosophy’s place within the educational system, and the prestige attached to it have been commented on by diverse external onlookers, in particular as an explanation of the distinctive role of intellectuals in French public life.79 The unique presence of philosophy within the national compulsory system of education — not as an option, not just as part of higher educational choice — has been held responsible for a wide array of traits of French cultural life. In addition to the prominence of intellectuals in the public sphere, it has also been held responsible for the lamentable state of philosophy as pursued in France and the characteristic abstraction and empty formalism distinctive of the educated French. The second view, of philosophy in schools as the cause of ‘bad’ — and dis­ tinctively French — philosophy was maintained by Alfred Ayer, doyen of Oxford linguistic philosophy after World War II and one of the main creators of English ‘analytic’ philosophy. Ayer’s opinion was canvassed on the proposed introduction of philosophy into English schools in the form of an A-Level in Logic. As conclusive proof of the disastrous consequences of such an initiative, he gestured to the French example where, according to him, it could be judged not just as a curricular mistake, but as the source of everything that was wrong with ‘French philosophy’.80 Where Ayer blamed the institutional arrangements for all that was, in his view, egregious in philosophy as a whole in France, the historian of France and of Frenchness, Theodore Zeldin, instantiates the third view, holding it responsible for deplorable national traits. According to Zeldin:

24

Situating GREPH It was [in the philosophy class] that Frenchmen learned their characteristic abstract and pompous vocabulary, their skill in classification and synthesis, in solving problems by rearranging them verbally, their rationalism and scepticism — paradoxically conformist — and their ability to argue elegantly and apparently endlessly.81

This diagnosis of empty formalism and merely empty skills of argument and rhetorical f lourish is not confined to an external view point, as we will see in the critics of philosophy teaching in schools within France in the next chapter. Philosophy’s cultural prominence has been no less remarked upon by French com­men­tators, and has been subjected to attacks on the socially determined nature of its prestige by Bourdieu and those inf luenced by his work.82 This cultural prestige — or, at least, significance in the criticisms of Ayer and Zeldin — is overdetermined by the history of philosophy’s position within the French educational system. As such, this history requires some elaboration in order to understand the context within which GREPH was operating. As Derrida commented in a dis­ cussion of GREPH’s struggle against the reforms, ‘nous nous battions dans un contexte français qui a son histoire’.83 The institution of philosophy in secondary education has been defended as quint­ essentially French, a noble national tradition since Cousin, as will be seen again in the next section. Proud boasts of the uniqueness of this arrangement form a part of its justification.84 The presence of philosophy in French schools is remarked on not only as unique, but recurrently, by its defenders, as a feature of the national educational system which is both an essential part of national identity, and the focus for admiration and envy by other countries. The attention which the prestige and importance of philosophy in general in French culture attracts can thus be transferred on to l’enseignement philosophique scolaire.85 Pierre-Henri Tavoillot, a philosophy academic at Paris IV, produced an historical survey of the institution of this form of teaching for Alain Renaut and Luc Ferry’s 1999 collection Philosopher à 18 ans.86 His account forms part of a collection aimed at reconsidering, but ultimately defending and maintaining, philosophy in French schools. Ferry and Renaut stress that it is vital to take this history into consideration because it is generally so unknown and ignored (p. 20). As part of the framework of his account, Tavoillot makes the claim for the link between French national identity and philosophy in schools: la ‘classe de philosophie’ constitue indéniablement un de ces ‘lieux de mémoire’ qui définissent si bien notre rapport tout à la fois charnel et réfléchi à l’identité nationale. (p. 156)

What is striking here is not so much that such a claim should be made in relation to the cultural and intellectual history of French education, but that it forms part of a continuing, current attempt to justify that class. The institution of the classes préparatoires for the grandes écoles — an important institutional location for philosophy — was included in Pierre Nora’s ‘lieux de mémoire’ project, with an essay written by Jean-François Sirinelli on ‘la khâgne’ as a lieu de mémoire.87 Tavoillot, quite rightly, makes a claim for a similar account of la classe de philosophie. This claim has itself formed a part of the defence of philosophy teaching in France since Victor Cousin, as will be seen in the next section. Philosophy teaching

Situating GREPH

25

in schools is extolled as a quintessentially French institution: the ‘singularité exemplaire’ of the French model must not be tampered with.88 The distinctive ‘Frenchness’ of this French context is not simply, therefore, a feature attributed from the outside, but represents a distinctive internal marker of this ongoing debate. The recovery of the obscure history of philosophy’s institutionalization thus has more than a historical, informational purpose. Pierre Macherey, in his 1999 afterword to his essay of five years earlier, ‘Faire de la philosophie en France aujourd’hui’, discussed above, highlights this. He explains that he originally tried to write his account for a Chinese audience, as an introductory overview of ‘philosophy elsewhere’, showcasing and glossing it for a radically different cultural context.89 But he realized that he was in fact writing for ‘un cadre franco-français’, denaturalizing the conditions and practice of philosophy in France by producing, as it were, an account of those conditions as if written by an outsider. The classe de philosophie, that is to say, the specific arrangements of philosophy’s place in French education, are thus presented as at once neglected and forgotten, and a lieu de mémoire, feeding into French identity. Derrida and GREPH were not concerned with the institution of philosophy teaching in schools as part of a national heritage to be jealously guarded and conserved. When asked about his ‘surprising’ interest in, and activism on behalf of, such an institution in an interview for Libération in 1990, Derrida replied that the French philosophical institution appeared to him increasingly as a singular phenomenon which was both odd and fascinating.90 The philosophical and ideological implications of this unique and curious historical arrangement were significant for Derrida and GREPH. ‘Socrate fonctionnaire’: Philosophy in the Service of the State Il n’est pas de critère moins équivoque pour apprécier le degré de virulence d’une époque de réaction que l’attitude du pouvoir politique à l’égard de l’Université, et du corps enseignant dans son ensemble. Le critère des critères restant, depuis un siècle, la situation faite à la classe et aux concours de philosophie.91

These remarks by Régis Debray date from the period of the ‘battle for philosophy’ in the mid- to late 1970s. Debray is reviewing the history of the French university as part of his now widely known tripartite schema of intellectual power in France over the last century. Debray holds that this institutional sequence moves from the university, to publishing, to the media over the course of that period (pp. 63–143). Even though the university is no longer the main locus of intellectual power, Debray’s formulation of the nexus of political power and education is uncompromising. What is most startling to an outsider is that he places philosophy as the ultimate gauge of such a relation.92 To understand this positing of an essential relationship between philosophy and the state, I will now examine the history of philosophy in French schools. The broad schema necessary for tracing this institutionalization follows how its role was conceived, and how this conception switched from philosophy as official ideology used in the training of a restricted, elite segment of the population, to philosophy in schools anointed as ‘the apprenticeship of freedom’, the converse of an officially sanctioned and exploited discourse. Both of these conceptions

26

Situating GREPH

remained strongly present in the controversy over philosophy’s curtailment in French schools in the 1970s, though their provenance was only rarely made explicit. This account is needed in order to understand the French context of philosophy in which GREPH were operating and its over-determined relation to educational institutions. This over-determined relation can then be unravelled in terms of the obscured terms of reference of the debate in which they participated, their own demands for taking on board this history, and their work in relating themselves and academic philosophy to it. The frequently produced remark that French education is essentially the work of Napoleon captures several general features of the system in question. First of all — and as Descombes’s very brief series of remarks explaining ‘the university’ in his account of Modern French Philosophy indicate (p. 5) — it is a very centralized system, the University means the educational system as a whole, not just higher education (a point which Descombes fails to explain to his non-French audience), and, lastly, it is and has been highly rigid and structurally unchanging since its inception. As the historian of education, R. D. Anderson, pointed out in 1975, this kind of remark became especially frequent in the wake of May 1968, signalling impatience and frustration with such stability or stagnation.93 The Napoleonic Université was founded in 1806 and comprised the entire system of national education, schools and universities in the jurisdiction of the state, thereby wresting control from the Church. The private Catholic schools were also supervised by the state, albeit at one remove. Centralization meant control of the administrational system of education as a whole and the body of state teachers, both school and university, being conceived of very much as a corps rather than as individuals. Once the grandes écoles were founded only the professional faculties of law, medicine, and pharmacy of the universities had a consistent undergraduate student population.94 The role of the university faculties of arts, which comprised both humanities and sciences, was to set and mark the baccalauréat examination (the ‘bac’) instituted by Napoleon in 1808 as the school-leaving qualification, and the training of state secondary school teachers. Primary-school teachers were trained separately at the écoles normales d’instituteurs. University lectures were given to public audiences, and were therefore targeted at a general level of amateur interest only. The Imperial University thus included both secondary and tertiary levels of education, but the universities themselves remained as separate faculties rather than unified universities until the Third Republic. The divide between secondary and higher education was thus far less marked than in other countries. This had important consequences for how and what was taught. The classe de philosophie — the year of philosophy at the end of secondary schooling — was established by a decree of 1809. This comprised eight hours a week of philosophy classes, taught in either French or Latin. Philosophy was made a compulsory part of the bac and thus became an inescapable part of entry to the grandes écoles which were responsible for the training of elites for the service of the state. Before the Revolution, philosophy had been taught in Latin in the Jesuit collèges as part of a programme of classical humanism.95 Philosophy was taught according to the medieval methods of the Scholastic tradition, and consisted of sequences of consecrated opinions, used in question and answer schemas. Its

Situating GREPH

27

function was to act as a propaedeutics to the true knowledge of theology, and as such its role was conceived only as an auxiliary one.96 The keystone of the Napoleonic system were the lycées which were founded in 1802 to replace the écoles centrales which had been set up in 1795 to teach children aged twelve to eighteen. The emphasis of the latter had differed in two significant ways from what they replaced: the predominant emphasis of the curriculum in the écoles centrales was scientific rather than classical, and a large degree of choice was incorporated, embodying the idea that pupils’ inclinations would vary and that they should be allowed to follow these inclinations. The lycées to some extent reverted to the earlier model of the Jesuit collèges, although science remained predominant in their teaching at first. This changed after 1808, when the bias shifted back to classical languages and humanities. Within this, the teaching of philosophy resumed the Scholastic divisions of logic, metaphysics, and morality. The re-introduction of philosophy was negatively motivated: Napoleon viewed the ‘sciences morales et politiques’ class as too politically unsettling, and philosophy was brought back as a less contentious alternative.97 Most importantly for the year of philosophy, lycée education was organized as a complete education, rather than as a preparation for subsequent stages. The consequences of this were twofold: firstly, philosophy’s position in the final year placed it at the summit of a particular cursus; secondly, the forms and norms of the lycée curriculum took on a governing position in relation to those of the faculties. The work of the faculties mainly serviced the lycées and it therefore followed a pattern ordained by that sector. Philosophy, thus instituted in the form from which it would acquire a wider cultural prestige, did not immediately take hold, however. In order to become a highly uniform institution in its own right, without counterpart elsewhere, and to attain its ‘exceptional coherence’, it required the efforts of Victor Cousin (1792–1867), operating within the framework of the Université d’État created by Napoleon.98 Cousin’s own contributions as a philosopher have long been scorned, and his legacy of ‘Eclectic Philosophy’ strongly rejected by those who followed on from him — first by Taine, and then by philosophers and inf luential intellectual figures of the Third Republic such as Renouvier and Renan.99 However, his lasting inf luence on the role and organization of philosophy cannot be underestimated. In the formulation of R. R. Bolgar, he ‘found philosophers amateurs and left them professionals’.100 Cousin presided over and directed philosophy’s translation from an activity pursued privately by individual writers and thinkers, seen as fundamentally distinct from what was taught as philosophy in basic education, to a public, official activity, indissociably linked to its presence in education. Bolgar’s comment captures this dramatic transition, but the term ‘professional’ must be used with care here. Philosophy itself did not, as a result of Cousin’s administrative efforts, become fundamentally more technical or ‘professional’ in the sense in which Analytic, university-based philosophy had been professionalized over the course of the last century, geared only to a narrow audience with a particular, shared training. More accurately, it became ‘fonctionnarisée’, with each philosophy teacher employed as a civil servant by the state and overseen by the Inspection Générale created by Napoleon for this purpose.

28

Situating GREPH

The explicit conjuncture of philosophy with social and ideological purpose has haunted considerations of philosophy teaching in France ever since Cousin. The pursuit of truth and freedom in the direct service of the state and political power — or as one commentator formulates it, the ‘ “Queen of Sciences” [...] become merely the hawker of socially useful wares, and her initiates reduced to the role of professional propagandists’ — has been encapsulated for subsequent generations in Cousin’s terminology of the philosophe-fonctionnaire.101 Joseph Ferrari, a philosophy teacher and contemporary critic of Cousin, used the phrase ‘philosophe salarié’ to convey by its implied antithesis a sense of the corruption of philosophy’s true mission. According to this portrayal, being a philosopher-civil servant or a paid philosopher meant being paid not to think. Cousin’s organization of academic philosophy could therefore only entail a debasement of the untrammelled vocation of the philosopher ideal: philosophers were now merely, in Foucault’s terminology, ‘competent instances in the service of the state’. More than a century later, the phrase ‘Socrate fonctionnaire’ was coined by the disenchanted philosophy academic Pierre Thuillier to evoke the irreconcilable contradictions of such a situation in his polemical attack on French philosophy of the same name.102 At first sight, this resonant phrase is reminiscent of the governing paradox made famous by Julien Benda’s formulation of ‘la trahison des clercs’ in 1927, or the betrayal of the abstract, transcendent calling of universality of the intellectual.103 A similarly elevated notion of the true vocation of the philosopher is at stake here, but not in terms of the position of the free-f loating intellectual. Rather, the phrase incorporates both an ideal of philosophy and an ideal of education, and thus stems from the institutionalization of philosophy in education. The paradoxical formulation was used by Thuillier to evoke the hidebound nature and sterility of both philosophical education in France and the state of philosophy in France. This attack is conveyed by means of an embedded, shorthand reference to Cousin as the original villain of the narrative — the instigator of the bureaucratization of philosophy. As Jean-Louis Fabiani remarks, since the beginning of the Third Republic, Cousin has been awarded ‘le rôle du vilain dans un psychodrame à l’usage des professeurs de philosophie qui se joue encore aujourd’hui’.104 This kind of referencing does not imply any detailed or realistic attempt to understand the history of philosophy’s institutionalization, but rather acts as a repoussoir against which subsequent generations of philosophy teachers were to elect to define themselves. Cousin’s original formulation of the role of the philosophe-fonctionnaire was extremely explicit. In 1850, in his report on the agrégation, he straightforwardly laid out the role of the philosophe-fonctionnaire: Un philosophe est un fonctionnaire de l’ordre moral, préposé par l’État à la culture des esprits et des âmes au moyen des parties les plus certaines de la science philosophique.105

The philosopher’s service to the state entailed propounding socially acceptable views whilst not questioning the boundaries of morality: his stock-in-trade was certainty not questioning. This prescription has surfaced repeatedly ever since as the encapsulation of Cousin’s official philosophy. His control over philosophy covered both contents and organization, and it transformed both. He set about designating

Situating GREPH

29

a specific, approved body of knowledge which could then be taught, examined and passed on at each stage of the system: in the training of the teachers who would then transmit it in turn to their pupils. In 1832 Cousin wrote the Programme or official syllabus for philosophy in all French state schools. The programme consisted of logic, psychology, and, most of all, the history of philosophy. The latter was taught by means of a survey of available doctrines which were then reconciled, excluding the possibility of doubt. Each philosophical ‘problem’ was learnt alongside its ‘solution’, although both had to be convincingly and fully elucidated by the teacher. This methodology provoked Renan’s famous gibe against Cousin’s ‘catéchisme laïc’. As Bolgar argues (pp. 358–59), this authorization of a specific body of knowledge as the ‘contents’ of the discipline of philosophy created a closed, corporative system, with philosophical insiders and outsiders, or professionals and amateurs. The agrégation in philosophy was copied by Cousin from medicine as a means of tightly controlled selection, ensuring the reproduction of the teaching body exactly according to Cousin’s prescription, and authorizing professional status only to those sanctioned by him. His involvement with the training and recruitment of teachers was as total as possible, and they became known as ‘Cousin’s regiment’, garrisoned throughout the land to propound and transmit standardised material in uniform ways.106 As an additional element in their training, he introduced the German idea of ‘research’ for those preparing to be philosophy teachers.107 This idea of academic philosophical research was the forerunner of subsequent university specialization and qualification only properly established on the German model half a century later. By dint of this fonctionnarization, philosophy as an activity — in its new guise as a career option — thus became simultaneously more public and more obscure than it had been hitherto. As André Canivez points out, the creation of philosopher-civil servants changed the nature of this activity: La spéculation est devenue une spécialité d’hommes obscurs et de vie retirée, très attachées au didactisme, mais en même temps fort sérieux et de plus en plus cultivés. (p. 146)

This was the more humble reality of Hegel’s proclamation of a new philosophy, with an official, public existence in the service of the state, made in his inaugural lecture at the University of Berlin in 1818. But controversies over the teaching of philo­sophy took place at the same time at the highest levels. Philosophy did not disappear into the system without trace as just another curricular permutation. Rather, it remained a touchstone in the struggle between Church and state for control over education in this period, and Cousin’s own struggles on its behalf occurred within this arena, that of the politics of philosophy as ‘un véritable projet de société’.108 Cousin first rose to prominence as the purveyor of a new brand of philosophy, his own personal ‘Eclectic’ version of spiritualism, which combined elements of the Scottish common-sense philosophy of Reid and Dugald Stewart, and his own sampling of German philosophy, especially Hegel, while eliminating the Idéologues. Cousin was a notable example of those figures, mentioned above, in twentieth-century France who brought back new elements from Germany with which to renew and transform philosophy.109 Cousin then ‘naturalized’ the foreign

30

Situating GREPH

terminology and incorporated it within his own system. This blending of elements taken from a variety of sources aimed to produce a philosophy of moderation, one which eschewed revolutionary intent yet remained secular, aiming to chart a middle course between the two poles whilst outlawing the materialism of the eighteenth century as socially dangerous, above all for the bourgeois class who would be the recipients of Cousin’s Eclectic philosophy.110 Cousin’s administrative reign took hold after 1830 when he moved from being a popular and inf luential lecturer at the École Normale and the Sorbonne to a series of positions of increasing power. As a member of the Conseil royal de l’Instruction Publique from 1830 to 1845 he took part in the overseeing of the educational system as a whole, and he played a key role in the establishment of primary education by the Guizot law of 1833. Within the Conseil he was put in charge of philosophy, both secondary and university. In addition to writing the programme, he was president of the jury for the philosophy agrégation, necessary for all those seeking to become philosophy teachers, whose recruitment he also controlled. He became the minister of Instruction Publique in 1840, a Pair de France, and director of the ENS for a time. Cousin thus became, as his former disciple Jules Simon later commented, not just king of the philosophers, but an absolute monarch in his self-created kingdom.111 Cousin’s earlier formulation of his Eclectic philosophy had overtly sought to fulfil a social brief, marking its distance from the Church whilst containing social dissent and aiming to curtail radical thinking by offering the more modest alternative of restricted liberalism. Cousin now pursued these ends in his promulgation of an official philosophy, enshrined at the summit of a particular strand of education. The function of the Université was, as Cousin saw it, to promote and achieve national unity, acting as its ‘microcosm and guardian’, and to remain free of interference from the control of the Church, conserving the state monopoly over teaching.112 Schooling was planned in terms of different levels corresponding to the class origins and life-chances of different segments of the population. This led to a sharp distinction between primary and secondary schooling in contrast to the entwined sectors of secondary and higher education. Within elementary education, the lowest tier were given the rudiments of morality, which was specifically envisaged as a policy of social containment, instilling duty and a recognition of the rightness of one’s lowly place within the prevailing social order. Philosophy was for the elite only, and was intended as the crown of their education, inculcating due patriotism, an optimistic vision of the progress produced by human reason resulting from the doctrinal survey, and a synoptic recapitulation of earlier schooling re-presented and synthesized in the light of these values. As Jonathan Rée aptly remarks, these multiple aims, both synthetic and philosophical, made of the classe de philosophie ‘almost a parody of the Hegelian idea of philosophy’.113 The contradictions and disagreements of philosophy ‘as a science’ were conceived of as a separate matter, not suitable for this level. Cousin’s entire set of prescriptions for the role and curriculum of philosophy teaching was carefully aimed at treading a difficult line of moderation — serving social ends but not ceding control to the Church. Hence his doctrine of respect for Catholicism within a secular programme of teaching ‘truths admissible to all’.

Situating GREPH

31

Philosophy was more suitable than a single religion for the purposes of national integration and social stability since it could be accepted by all Frenchmen, whilst not offending Catholics. However, despite the formidable apparatus of professionalization and control which Cousin had created, his ultimate hold remained fragile. Cousin was forced to defend the Université monopoly and respond to attacks by Catholic leaders on philosophy from 1840 onwards, culminating in his speeches to the Chambre des Pairs in April and May of 1844. His responses were published as a Défense de l’Université et de la philosophie in 1844, the original version of what was to become a recognizable genre from the Third Republic onwards, as those involved in the teaching of philosophy produced pamphlets and articles against perceived ‘threats’ from authority. Cousin’s Défense was re-edited and re-published by Danièle Rancière in 1977 as a contribution to the debate on philosophy teaching catalysed by the Haby proposals.114 It was published as a cardinal but forgotten reference point incarnating as it does the unmanageable contradictions of Cousin’s official philosophy, and the beginning of the defence of philosophy as a uniquely French institution which must therefore remain sacrosanct. Both Cousin and his ally, the Duc de Broglie, stressed the long tradition of philosophy in French schools, inaccurately claiming for it an unbroken line of continuity from the thirteenth century onwards, in an attempt to strengthen their case.115 They tried to do this by associating philosophy with stability and tradition, and by introducing the idea of philosophy in schools as a mark of French genius. Overall, Cousin protested the indispensable but non-threatening role of philosophy — innocent and invaluable. The Descartes taught by his regiment would not undermine Christian education, as his opponents claimed, but was simultaneously ‘libre et soumis, philosophe mais respectueux de l’ordre établi’.116 In addition to its ideological role, Cousin also argued for the key educational values of synthesis and coherence which only philosophy could guarantee. He stated: il faut qu’il y ait dans les collèges un enseignement qui, se liant à tous les autres et les résumant, achève dans le jeune homme l’instruction qu’il a reçue, et lui donne en quelque sorte le secret de tout ce qu’il a appris sous une autre forme.117

Philosophy represented both a necessary form of mental training and discipline, and the principle of coherence of lycée education. Within the wider educational battle, ‘freedom of teaching’ had come to mean only freedom of the Catholic educators from the State monopoly. The earlier proposals, made before 1830 by liberals such as Constant and Guizot (who changed his mind once in control himself ), of freedom of teaching within the Université in order to ward off despotism and indoctrination were no longer at issue. Cousin argued that he knew only freedom of thought, not of teaching, since ‘only the State teaches’, and the principle of the Université was that of the State itself applied to the education of the young.118 The offensive against philosophy continued despite Cousin’s defence throughout the 1840s. The Falloux law of 1850 effectively destroyed the state monopoly. Primary education was given over to the Church, with the implicit acquiescence of the liberal sections of the ruling-classes, who minded far less about the interference of the Church with the children of the lower

32

Situating GREPH

orders. Philosophy teaching came under a much greater degree of surveillance by the Catholics, and many teachers, including leading disciples of Cousin, were expelled for not showing sufficient respect for Catholic teaching in their classes.119 Cousin himself retired. The idea that the fortunes of the philosophy class act as an index of political liberali­zation or reaction, seen in the remarks of Régis Debray quoted at the beginning of this section, evokes above all the suppression of philosophy between 1852 and 1863 which followed Cousin’s reign. The new minister of public instruc­ tion, Hippolyte Fortoul, abolished the philosophy agrégation, and the classe de philosophie was stopped. Philosophy continued as ‘logic’ in the lycées, and was thus shorn of its ‘morality’ remit, which passed back to religious instruction. The introduction of ‘jeunes esprits’ to psychology, to enable them to acquire the means of self knowledge, also ceased.120 This was in part a victory for the Church, but was also due to the re-organization of education according to more scientific, positivist inf luenced models. ‘Bifurcation’ was introduced, meaning the replacement of a shared curriculum throughout by two separate streams, science and letters from the age of thirteen onwards. Within this schema, philosophy lost its ‘aura’ and was cut off from its ideological role, downgraded in importance to a mere set of logical exercises, a series of ‘safe’ syllogisms. Philosophy became entirely dogmatic and elementary.121 As Douailler and Vermeren (p. 126) comment, Cousin’s efforts to create ‘l’espace et la représentation d’une conciliation entre la raison et le religion’ were now at an end. The idea of reading off from ‘le statut de la philosophie’ a correct gauge of repression is itself part of the necessary mythologizing of philosophy within the system, as the next chapter on the 1970s reforms will make clearer. Although Fortoul saw both philosophy and history as ‘disciplines dangereuses’, his attempt to devise a more scientific and technical form of education also represented an attempt to modernize in line with the changing needs of society. In other words, he was trying to solve the problem of a system which produced ‘the classicism of the elite and the mere literacy of the people’.122 If philosophy in the grip of state power, serving an explicit, conservative ideological purpose, in the first part of the nineteenth century, is the first crucial mythomoteur of the discourse around philo­ sophy in schools in France, the second, corresponding to the period from the 1860s to the turn of the century, is that of the newly enfranchised professeur de philo, free to inculcate a love of ref lection only, and to establish charismatic relations with his pupils. Philosophy as the Apprenticeship of Freedom Today, philosophy is still the only school subject in France to have no detailed syllabus. The official programme comprises a list of concepts, problems, or topics such as ‘freedom’ or ‘truth’. On this apparently minor, technical detail of teaching arrangements rests the self-conception of the philosophy teacher as a philosophefonctionnaire — in the service of the state undoubtedly, but free to incarnate philosophy through the philosophical practice of his or her teaching. Alain Renaut, as head of the Groupe Technique Disciplinaire for philosophy in 1999 attempted

Situating GREPH

33

to make structural changes to the programme, which had not been altered since 1973, in order to ‘democratise’ the subject.123 These modifications tried to make due allowance for the massification of education, and the widespread difficulties of many pupils encountering philosophy for the first time. They reduced the number of topics and paired them together thematically to produce a more structured pro­ gramme. This was greeted as an attack on philosophical freedom. The choice, according to philosophy teachers, was between philosophy teaching as a mere catechism or true intellectual freedom.124 In other words, the choice was posed between philosophy teaching in its ‘golden age’, the Third Republic, when this freedom was established, and the dark age of official prescription of Cousin. This section will outline how the former came about, in order to understand the continuing force of this idealization. Almost as soon as he took office in 1863, the new minister of public instruction appointed by Napoleon III, Victor Duruy, restored the philosophy class and the philosophy agrégation. Philosophy teachers who had been expelled from the Université after 1850 were reinstated.125 As a result of the loi Falloux and the end of the state monopoly over schools, the educational battle led by the Catholics no longer focused on philosophy in the same way. Their attention now focused on different objects: secondary schooling for girls and the state monopoly over higher education.126 Duruy’s speech to the Conseil impérial de l’Instruction publique in July 1863 relied on appeals to philosophy as the true crown of the lycée in a secular society. He told them that: Nos écoles étaient découronnées et notre enseignement ressemblait à une route embarrassée de ronces et d’épines qui menait au désert, au vide de l’âme. Vous avez voulu remplir ce vide en y plaçant dans toute leur grandeur et leur magnificence les vérités morales qui sont le fonds commun de l’humanité et dont vivent les sociétés laïques.127

Eight hours a week of philosophy in the final year were deemed to be a vital part of character formation — ‘former des hommes’ — as opposed to rote learning and cramming for exams. Metaphysics and psychology were re-introduced, since logic could not be sufficient for this purpose. Duruy shared Cousin’s aim of instituting certain kinds of philosophy as an antidote to and protection against the ‘doctrines négatives’ of materialism to which the young male bourgeoisie might otherwise prove susceptible. Once again, this was philosophy with a clearly designated social and moral purpose.128 The classical curriculum was re-instated as suitable for elites, not just for its educational or ideological values but for the exclusive cultural distinction it would bestow. Duruy argued that the humanities would conserve the separation between classes, and thus help conserve the privileges of the higher classes, since they required a great deal of time and money for their study.129 Philo­ sophy thus became definitively associated with the ‘culture générale’ of the lycée education, a cultural marker of the elite. Cousin’s inf luence was no longer seen as admissible by philosophers. Félix Ravaisson’s report on philosophy in France in the nineteenth century, commissioned by the government for the Exposition Universelle of 1867, more or less excluded Cousin, mentioning him only to pass adverse judgement. Exactly like Cousin, however, both Ravaisson and Renouvier

34

Situating GREPH

appealed to German models — of the university, scientific advancement, and philosophical renewal.130 The Third Republic, the ‘république des professeurs’, is identified as the period of reform and expansion of the education system, and of the growing inf luence of those professionally involved in education.131 The large presence of academics and university-trained professionals in Parliament is one reason for this, including inf luential former philosophy teachers turned administrators such as Louis Liard, who became director of higher education at the period of its most intense reform from 1884 onwards.132 The other is the rise of what Theodore Zeldin has termed ‘educationism’: the hold from this period onwards of educational ‘illusions’, of unbounded faith in the transformative power of education over society as a whole, coupled with what he terms the ‘hagiographical self-esteem’ of the teachers themselves.133 As Kay Chadwick argues in her consideration of the principle of laïcité, Republican ideals of ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’ entailed not just the negative aim of fighting off the Church’s ideological domination, but the ambition of forging a positive ideological alternative based on secular freedom and a unifying notion of citizenship and patriotism as part of an egalitarian ‘projet de société’.134 The instrument of this programme was to be the national education system which was conceived of as a mass system, with primary education established as compulsory, free, and secular for all by the Ferry laws of 1881–82, and the law of 1886 which obliged all teachers in state schools to be secular (p. 50). The position and role ascribed to philosophy within this new educational order was such as to create the subsequent impression of a ‘golden age’ of philosophy teaching. In addition, as a result of the expansion of the universities, by the end of the nineteenth century, non-academic philosophers of any kind had become the exception. The changed self-conception of the philosophy teachers, from Cousin’s regiment to the guides to ref lective freedom, and their prestige in their own view and that of others, was the consequence of the 1874 reform of the baccalauréat, which recast it as two series of tests a year apart. Philosophy was in the last year, and at this point became institutionalized as the ‘crown’ of the humanities cursus, and was included in the science track also.135 Crucially, this reform meant that rhetoric was no longer in the terminale year.136 Philosophy’s place as the crowning classe de philosophie was thus assured. Philosophy in schools and in the university remained unusually interconnected, even as the universities became integrated, separate institutions in their own right, no longer subsumed entirely by the Université137. The philosophy licence was devised as a slightly more advanced repeat version of the bac syllabus, and the agrégation was tied to this curriculum. These close links increased the sense of prestige, and the sense of due, of the school professeurs de philosophie. Some lycée teachers who had passed the agrégation did advance to university posts, generally outside Paris. However, the prestige of the philosophy teachers in general, as well as their own elevated self-conception, did not rest on this possibility. The most famous ones taught in the great Paris lycées, and their inf luence and renown were increased by the introduction at the end of the nineteenth century of the preparatory classes for the grandes écoles entrance examinations, the khâgnes and hypokhâgnes which lasted from two to four years beyond the highest level

Situating GREPH

35

of secondary education. These, together with the classe de philosophie, ensured the continuance of the idea of the lycée as providing a complete education, rather than a stage prior to university studies. Philosophy was thus enshrined as the ‘couronnement des études’. Most significantly, the regulations for the philosophy syllabus of 1880 shifted from Cousin’s uniform, detailed prescriptions, to include an emphasis on the freedom of thought and teaching of the teacher. The teacher was now ‘free’ in relation to the dictatorial Programme of Cousin’s era which had provided both official questions and solutions, and was allowed to devise his own course, provided it covered the list of topics — the prefatory note to the programme retained and enshrined for the next century. This freedom meant, in the eyes of the philosophy teachers, that they were now the author of their own philosophical discourse, the oral discourse of their cours. This gave them a different status and role in their own self-conception at least: they were now philosophers, each with his own personal style.138 This newfound pedagogical freedom was enhanced by the changing relationship of teacher and pupil. This was now envisaged not in terms of indoctrination, but in terms of guiding the pupil on the course of his own ref lective capacity. Uncertainties were no longer ruled out. This freedom was unparalleled in any other discipline, and led to a strikingly different conception of pedagogy. In contrast to the enseignement d’État of the Cousin era, the teacher became a kind of embodiment of his subject. As Bruno Poucet comments, ‘le professeur doit penser devant ses élèves’.139 Philosophy was thus the crown, and the prof de philo a unique figure. Philosophy was also incorporated into general teacher training, adding another territory to its domain, in a period in which the science of pedagogy and education were institutionally ascendant. The official culmination of this period of glory was the ministerial instruc­tions produced on 2 September 1925 by Anatole de Monzie which stated that: Un des traits les plus importants qui caractérisent l’enseignement secondaire français est l’établissement au terme des études d’un enseignement philosophique élémentaire, mais ample et distinct, auquel une année est spécialement consacrée. Nous n’avons à justifier ici cette institution: elle n’est plus discutée aujourd’hui et n’a jamais été battue en brèche que par les gouvernements hostiles à toute conception libérale.140

Thus no argument against the philosophy class was to be countenanced: opposition to the classe de philo was officially deemed reactionary. These instructions were still officially in force in the 1970s, and it was this officialized freedom of liberal neutrality which GREPH was to oppose. Monzie’s instructions enshrined the classe de philosophie as the essence of the whole of education, and the particular mark of French education. It was here that the phrase ‘l’apprentissage de la liberté’ was used to incarnate the mission of philosophy within schools: c’est dans la classe de philosophie que les élèves font l’apprentissage de la liberté par l’exercice de la réf lexion, et l’on pourrait même dire que c’est là l’object propre et essentiel de cet enseignement. (Grateloup, p. 8)

The ‘freedom’ of philosophy teaching was officially instituted in terms of freedom from repression — with the implicit reference to Fortoul, and in terms of the

36

Situating GREPH

freedom of the prof de philo. These instructions were returned to again and again by the philosophy teachers as the officialised sanction for the unique mission and importance of the classe de philosophie, bearer of Enlightenment values and a Republican educational ideal. In the period of the ‘âge d’or’ of philosophy teaching, a long-running debate began on the nature and aims of teaching philosophy, and philosophy in schools became subject to attack on educational rather than political grounds. In particular, it was argued that it was not suitable for pre-university level, and that it was not suited to modern society.141 In 1899 a parliamentary commission was established to examine French secondary education as a whole, partly as a rearguard action by the state in the face of the rising popularity of the Catholic schools. This turned into a full-scale conf lict over curricular modernization. Philosophy was strongly associated with the classicist camp and hence with the cultural conservatives, who ranged themselves against modernizers such as Durkheim. Many of its leading supporters were now Catholics.142 However, prominent philosophers who were not political conservatives joined in the defence of philosophy. The philosopher and liberal Alfred Fouillée is a key example. He defended philosophy on the grounds that the Republic required an elite with a classical education. To alter philosophy’s position or lessen its importance would undermine the very basis of Republican education. He argued that: Si jamais, ce que je ne crois pas, un parlement républicain touchait aux classes de philosophie, [...] ce parlement se mettrait lui-même honteusement au-dessous de l’Empire. En décapitant l’enseignement national, en abandonnant toutes les hautes traditions ésintéressées de la France pour f latter l’utilitarisme de prétendus ‘modernes’, il se déshonorerait lui-même, il ferait naïvement le jeu des ennemis du régime actuel et compromettrait d’une manière irrémédiable cette République qu’il prétend servir.143

Philosophy in schools was plausibly defended as the cornerstone of elite Republican education. These key turning-points gave rise to an entire discourse around the teaching of philosophy, and to habitual exaltation of it as a basic defence. These debates, curricular reforms, the ritualistic defence of philosophy, and the selffuelling myth of the prof de philo are all continuing reference-points which structured the debate of the 1970s — all the more so since they were to such a large extent not made explicit as specific historical reference points. Philosophy’s role in schools as part of citizenship and democracy, Republican ideals, and freedom of ref lection was invoked repeatedly. But this was a form of mythologizing which had no interest in ideological and historical determinations. The references were repeatedly used as ahistorical claims about the unchanging essence of philosophy and philosophy teaching. This account gives the background to the context in which GREPH was located: the unique place of philosophy in French education, and the partially submerged and mythologized reference points of Cousin, Fortoul, and the Third Republic professeur de philosophie. GREPH’s aim was to uncover this history as part of the interrogation of the institutional determinations of philosophy in France.

Situating GREPH

37

Notes to Chapter 1 1. Bourg, p. 3. 2. C. Johnson, p. 55. 3. Adrian Moore, commenting on Marian Hobson’s Opening Lines, says that the ‘historicist approach to philosophy’ argued for here in Derrida’s work ‘challenges the cleanness of [the distinction between transcendental and empirical], allowing the transcendental to be viewed not as a set of timeless a priori structures that condition all we can know but as something that is “folded together” with the empirical’ (Moore, p. 124). See also Bennington, ‘Derrida and Politics’, p. 194 on ‘transcendental contraband’. On the question of legacy, see Glendinning and Eaglestone, eds.; Mitchell and Davidson, eds.; Naas, Derrida From Now On; and the obituary issues of Diacritics (2008), Radical Philosophy (2005), and SubStance (2005). On ‘post-’ theory see Rabaté; Davis, After Poststructuralism; McQuillan, ed., Deconstruction Reading Politics, and ed., The Politics of Deconstruction. On ‘living on’ and spectrality, see Derrida, Spectres de Marx, and Spivak. 4. Jankélévitch in ‘Table Ronde’, p. 64. 5. See in particular Bennington and Derrida, Jacques Derrida; Bennington, Legislations, and Interrupting Derrida; Gasché, ‘Deconstruction as Criticism’, and Inventions of Difference; and Hobson, ‘Deconstruction, Empiricism and the Postal Services’, and Jacques Derrida: Opening Lines. From an ‘analytic’ point of view, cf. Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy, and Glendinning, On Being with Others and ‘The Ethics of Exclusion’. 6. The notion of ‘applying’ Derrida’s work was the focus of an international conference at Luton University, the proceedings of which were published in Brannigan, Robbins, and Wolfreys, eds. The phrase ‘political translation’ is used in this context by Fynsk, ‘A Decelebration of Philosophy’, p. 85. 7. S. Weber, ‘Reading over a Globalised World’, p. 58 8. Derrida, ‘The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations’, pp. 44–45. On the nationality of philosophy, see, in particular, Derrida, ‘Onto-Theology of National-Humanism’, and on the passage of philosophy across national and linguistic borders, see Derrida, ‘Coups d’envoi’, and Mallet, ed. 9. Derrida, Who’s Afraid of Philosophy? Right to Philosophy I and Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy II. Jason Powell in his recent book, Jacques Derrida: A Biography, gives a brief summary (pp. 116–20). 10. See Derrida, ‘An Interview with J. Kearns and K. Newton’, reprinted in 1984, 1987, 1988, 1990, and Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971-2001 (2002). As Mark Wigley, p.47 comments: ‘whenever Derrida addresses the politics of deconstruction, he does so by identifying the centrality of its thinking about institutions’. 11. Thomas, pp. 69–74. The same is true of Simon Morgan Wortham, Counter-Institutions, pp. 5–8 and 55–56. 12. On the role of Kojève in the resurgence of Hegelian philosophy in mid-twentieth century France, see Roth; Kelly, Hegel in France; and Drury. On the role of Levinas in the introduction of phenomenology from Germany to France, see Davis, After Poststructuralism, pp. 8 ff. 13. On Derrida’s reception in America, see de Vries; Rapaport; Lotringer and Cohen; and Cusset. 14. For example, see Norris, The Contest of the Faculties, Deconstruction and the Interests of Theory, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice, ‘Home Thoughts from Abroad’, Jacques Derrida, New Idols of the Cave, and R. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, and R. Rorty, Schneewind, and Skinner, eds. On R. Rorty’s ‘domestication’ of Derrida, see Fabbri. 15. Heath, p. 303. For an example of this, see Robbins. 16. The Yale Critics. Deconstruction in America is the title of a collection, edited by Arac and Godzich (1983): see in particular Godzich’s contribution,‘The Domestication of Derrida’. The wilful misappropriation of Derrida’s work by non-rigorous ‘wild’ literary critics has been a focus of Christopher Norris’ work on Derrida throughout his career. The first, and in some ways most authoritative, account of the dilution of deconstruction in American deconstructive criticism, remains Gasché, ‘Deconstruction as Criticism’. Gasché sees American deconstruction as in fact another version of New Criticism, rather than representing the radical rupture from the latter which it promises. See Thomas, pp. 26–32.

38

Situating GREPH

17. Saïd, The World, the Text and the Critic, p. 191. 18. As Fynsk notes, Hartman himself explicitly rejects the idea that deconstruction can be harnessed for the purposes of political or sociological critique (Fynsk, ‘A Decelebration of Philosophy’, p. 87). 19. Read, p. 79. 20. Eagleton, ‘Deconstruction and Human Rights’, p. 213. 21. Keenan, pp. 25–26. Keenan comments on how deconstruction was ‘condemned’ as ‘anti-political and paralysing’ for this dislodging of foundations. He also notices the appeal by those seeking to claim political potential to parts of Derrida’s work which consider the ‘issues’ of democracy, feminism, apartheid, teaching and the university (p. 25). For an interesting discussion of the study of Classics and its link to active involvement in politics in France in the same period, cf. Leonard. 22. Horton, p. 292. Similar examples can be found in Robbins, pp. 9–10, and Naas, ‘Introduction’, p. li. 23. Foley, p. 114. 24. Lilla, p. 36. Lilla is currently professor of social thought at Chicago, and editor of a collection on French political thought. 25. Hart, p. 148. 26. B. Johnson, cited in P. Jay, p. 50. 27. McCarthy, ‘The Politics of the Ineffable’, p. 146. Norris demonstrates a more sustained interest in GREPH and in Derrida’s work on institutions, but the chapter on ‘Politics and the Principle of Reason’ in his book Jacques Derrida characterizes the relationship ultimately no differently to Hart’s analysis, even though he is far more assertive of the political importance of deconstruction. Politics is seen as a separate domain, and deconstruction as a method to be harnessed to this new object. 28. Fraser, p. 135. For a reply to Barbara Foley in this vein, cf. Readings, ‘The Deconstruction of Politics’. 29. Norris, Jacques Derrida, p. 13: ‘Derrida’s philosophical interests [...] have moved toward the wider political bearings of what might be called “applied deconstruction” ’. 30. See Fraser for an account of the Centre which operated from November 1980 to November 1984. For an unconvinced appraisal of this approach, cf. Howard, pp. 170–73. 31. Fynsk, 2001, p. 89. Fynsk’s useful articles on GREPH and the Doctrinal de Sapience are discussed below. 32. Fynsk’s two articles in this area are detailed in the next section. His comments on and criticisms of the group will be returned to in the next chapter. 33. Spivak, p. 98. Cf. Spivak’s consideration of Derrida’s Spectres de Marx: Spivak, 1994. 34. Cf. for example, R. Rorty’s approving citation of the jibe that ‘These people don’t want to take over the government; they just want to take over the English Department’ (R. Rorty, ‘Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism’, p. 15). 35. Young, Torn Halves, p. 88. 36. Cf. for example, Merod, pp. 25–31, who invokes Derrida’s essay on the principle of reason and the university of 1983 (PR) as his ‘most decisive judgement on this area’. But this engagement, as with the earlier examples where GREPH is cited in a list of topics, again shows that all that is required by these critics is thematic overtness, recognizably ‘political’. In other words, extraliterary topics can be listed, and therefore deconstruction is ‘political’. 37. Eagleton, for example, restates this approvingly, commenting that Foucault, not Derrida, ‘occupies’ this area (Eagleton, ‘Frère Jacques’, p. 79). Eagleton’s case against Derrida is not made any clearer by the fact that he manages to claim that Derrida’s work is both political, but then not at all political — unlike Foucault. 38. Ghosh, p. 120. See also Deacon, p. 121. The most famous comparison of Foucault and Derrida, where Derrida is found politically lacking in relation to Foucault, is Edward Saïd’s essay ‘The Problem of Textuality’ which is discussed in Chapter 3, below. Jan Goldstein registers surprise that Foucault failed to include the ‘disciplinary apparatus’ of philosophy as institutionalized by Victor Cousin in his consideration of the entrenchment of introspective psychology in France (Goldstein, ‘The Advent of Psychological Modernism in France’, p. 112). Neither philosophy as an institutionalized discipline nor the French educational system feature in his work. Foucault

Situating GREPH

39

and Education, edited by S. J. Ball, sets out to use Foucault to examine topics within education, but the contributors to this collection do this by analogy, extrapolating from his body of work on prisons and asylums. It does not make the point that Foucault himself did not analyse the French education system, nor does it attempt to draw any inferences from the fact. On Foucault’s appointment to Vincennes as a suitable non-subversive — a ‘safe pair of hands’, in institutional terms, who would concentrate on his work rather than on activism — see Marshall, p. 179 who comments that Foucault’s ‘emerging interest in power and knowledge was not employed in a self-ref lective and ref lexive manner at Vincennes to critique his own teaching’. 39. Eagleton, ‘Frère Jacques’, and Bennington, Legislations. 40. I discuss this essay in Chapter 4, below. 41. Culler, On Deconstruction, p. 158. 42. Ibid., pp. 157–58. This mention does amount to more than an entry in a list of extra-literary topics as appeared in the work of the critics mentioned above, but Culler draws heavily on Fynsk’s 1978 account, ‘A Decelebration of Philosophy’, for both information and quotations, to the extent that it seems plausible to suggest that he has not in fact consulted QP himself. He certainly draws nothing from it that is not already in Fynsk’s account. 43. Cf. Culler, Structuralist Poetics; The Pursuit of Signs; and Framing the Sign. 44. This remark was made in an interview, ‘Entre crochets’, in 1976, which is reprinted in Derrida, Points, 1992: see pp. 35–36. 45. Culler, Structuralist Poetics, p. 156. 46. I will analyse this essay and the idea of a lag or gap in Chapter 3, below. 47. The interview with D. Kambouchner, J. Ristat, and D. Sallenave was held in two parts in September and October 1975. 48. Both were published in 1988. 49. Culler, ‘Criticism and Institutions’, p. 85. 50. Culler, Framing the Sign, p. 54. 51. The most unabashed apologist of professionalization is the critic Stanley Fish: see his essay ‘Anti-Professionalism’, and the reply by Graff. In both Fish’s account and Culler’s 1988 views, the politics of specific knowledges is reduced to a self-congratulatory functionalist explanation, which does not allow for the actual content of that knowledge making any difference. 52. Leitch’s earlier work, Deconstructive Criticism (1983), did not venture onto this ground. 53. This will be returned to in Chapter 3. 54. Leitch, ‘Research and Education at the Crossroads’. 55. Leitch, Postmodernism, p. 70. 56. Ungar, ‘Philosophy after Philosophy’ and Roland Barthes, pp. 108–11. 57. Lefebvre in La Vie quotidienne dans le monde modern and Descombes in Modern French Philosophy are quoted by Ungar, pp. 16–17. 58. Foucault, ‘The Political Function of the Intellectual’. 59. Fynsk, ‘Legacies of May’, p. 968. 60. Heath. 61. Cf. Khilnani, p. 178: ‘from Victor Cousin to Jacques Derrida, the history of French philosophy is the history of the importation and transposition of German philosophy’. Khilnani sees this as an ‘embarrassing’ state of affairs for French philosophy. 62. Cf. Glendinning, ‘The Ethics of Exclusion: Incorporating the Continent’, and Richmond, p. 38 on the ‘dialogue de sourds’ of the Derrida-Searle ‘Analytic versus Continental’ debate on the work of J. L. Austin. On the difficulty of drawing such a watertight distinction, cf. Bennington, ‘Outside Language’. As Derrida commented a decade earlier, ‘Il est aujourd’hui aussi difficile de franchir les “douanes” et les “polices” de ces traditions philosophiques que d’en situer la ligne, le trait essentiel’ (DP, p. 614). 63. Published in DP. 64. Dews, p. 74. 65. Critchley, ‘Introduction: What is Continental Philosophy?’, p. 10. See also Glendinning, The Idea of Continental Philosophy, p. 123 on ‘Continental philosophy’ as simply the reception of certain texts; cf. Schrift, Twentieth-Century French Philosophy, p. 81. 66. Critchley, ‘Introduction: What is Continental Philosophy?’, p. 8.

40

Situating GREPH

67. Cf. Derrida, ‘Living On’, p. 9. 68. Cf. Derrida, L’Oreille de l’autre, p. 120. 69. Derrida, ‘La Langue et le discours de la méthode’, p. 38. 70. Descombes, Le Même et l’autre and Modern French Philosophy; Montefiore, ed., Philosophy in France Today. 71. An example of an extreme ‘culturalist’ view of philosophy, that it is simply another cultural artefact, can be found in Geertz. 72. Macherey first considered this question in ‘La Philosophie à la française’ in 1990, and again in 1994 in ‘Faire de la philosophie en France aujourd’hui’. The latter essay is reprinted in his 1999 collection, Histoires de dinosaur, which contains a talk given at Tunis in May 1997, ‘Y a-t-il une philosophie française?’, which additionally brings in the question of Germany and France’s philosophical international relations. Notably, Hamlyn, in his 1992 book Being a Philosopher: The History of a Practice, attempts something not dissimilar to this, in subject-area at least. But the aims are entirely different: his work is conceived as a popularizing adjunct to the ‘real work’ of philosophy, and not itself a part of philosophy. It represents less a material and philosophical history than an external and social one, albeit by a university philosophy teacher. 73. Macherey, ‘Faire de la philosophie en France aujourd’hui’, p. 114. 74. From the Analytic perspective, Glendinning gives an account of the inception of hostile incomprehension toward non-Analytic philosophy in terms of the ‘emphatic rejection of specifically foreign ideas’ in British philosophy from the 1950s onwards. This occurred as part of professionalization in this context. The self-limiting technical aridity of this kind of philosophy defined itself against French and German philosophy as an indicator of its seriousness and professionalism. The ‘Analytic’ and ‘Continental’ labels are thus themselves a function of institutionalization. See Glendinning, ‘The Ethics of Exclusion’, p. 126. 75. Macherey, ‘Faire de la philosophie en France aujourd’hui’, p. 116. Macherey showed an earlier related interest in this area when he wrote, together with Étienne Balibar, the introductory essay to the latter’s mother Renée Balibar’s work on the teaching of literature in French schools, and on the politics of French as a national language. See Balibar, Les français fictifs, and Histoire de la littérature française; also Balibar and Laporte, Le français national. Schrift has recently taken up Macherey’s formulation in order to restate the need to look at institutional contexts: see Schrift, ‘Is There Such a Thing as “French Philosophy”?’ and Twentieth-Century French Philosophy. Gutting has also started working on this: his French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century has a chapter on ‘The Professors of the Republic’. 76. Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, p. 5. 77. I return to the area of the media in Chapter 4, below. 78. I return to Bourdieu’s views on philosophy and French education in Chapter 3. 79. See, for example, Logue, pp. 80–81. Stefan Collini, comparing French and British intellectuals, attributes the preponderance of philosophers amongst the latter to philosophy’s prestige within the educational system (Collini, ‘Intellectuals in Britain and France’, p. 214). Eric Hobsbawm, in a discussion with Pierre Bourdieu at the Institut français, London, again comparing the role of intellectuals in France and Britain, ascribed the persistent anti-intellectualism of British life to the absence of philosophy in the secondary curriculum (see Hobsbawm). Toril Moi focuses on the prestige of philosophy in French education in her examination of Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘habitus’ (Moi, pp. 56 ff.) 80. These remarks are referred to in Hamlyn, p. 179. Hamlyn himself concurs with Ayer’s viewpoint, commenting that the effects of teaching philosophy in schools in France have been both profound, and generally not good (p. 121). The significance of French educational institutions and academic culture has begun to be noted in recent works by Schrift, ‘Is There Such a Thing as “French Philosophy”?’ and Twentieth-Century French Philosophy, and Gutting, French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century. 81. Zeldin, France, 1848–1945, p. 207. 82. I return to this in the third chapter, below. For a history of the use of ‘cartésianisme’ and ‘l’esprit cartésien’ as an elective marker of national identity, see Azouvi. 83. Derrida, in ‘Table Ronde’, p. 67. In another discussion a decade later, Derrida emphasizes the uniqueness of the French context in which a community of philosophers and philosophy

Situating GREPH

41

teachers ‘s’interroge régulièrement elle-même, et de cette façon, à la fois, polemisée et angoissée, sur son destin nationale’ (Derrida, ‘L’enseignement philosophique’, 1991, pp. 5–6). 84. For example, L.-M. Morfaux’s comments as president of the professional association of philosophy teachers in 1949, cited in Gerbod, p. 237. 85. All terms such as ‘classes préparatoires’ will be italicized when first introduced, but not thereafter since they are necessarily employed frequently, having no direct equivalent. 86. Cf. Tavoillot, p. 156. Alain Renaut was appointed head of the Groupe technique disciplinaire for philosophy in January 1999, responsible for reforming the philosophy programme as part of a general reform of programmes initiated by the Education minister. The collection of Ferry and Renaut, in which Tavoillot’s piece is published, includes several essays written as part of this role in addition to earlier pieces. 87. Sirinelli. 88. This is the title of an article by Carsin and Rizk. 89. Macherey, ‘Faire de la philosophie en France aujourd’hui’, p. 240. 90. Derrida, interview with Robert Maggiori, ‘Le Programme philosophique de Derrida’, 1990, reprinted in Derrida, Points de suspension: entretiens, p. 337. 91. R. Debray, Le Pouvoir intellectuel en France, p. 67. 92. Debray extends this forceful statement of the necessity of philosophy’s role within French education in Debray, 1992, p. 64, in terms of the theme of École-République, the school as the fundamental Republican project. This theme will be returned to in Chapter 4 in relation to philosophy as critique, as a functionalist defence of its role in mass education. 93. Anderson, Education in France, 1848–1870, p. 3. This section draws on the useful discussion of the framework of French education of several historians of education — in addition to Anderson, that of Moody (French Education since Napoleon), and Prost (Histoire de l’enseignement en France, 1800–1967, and the more recent Éloge des pédagogues, ‘Écoles, Collèges and Lycées in France since 1968’, and Douze leçons sur l’histoire). These works address the general history of French education. Ringer’s work on ideologies of education and academic cultures, Fields of Knowledge: French Academic Culture in Comparative Perspective, 1890–1920, is an especially rich source of information on education in the latter part of the nineteenth century in France, working within a Bourdieu-inf luenced framework of ‘fields of knowledge’. Ringer’s work is notable for its consistently comparativist approach. In the case of Fields of Knowledge, his chosen framework for comparison is chief ly France and Germany, although some English material is brought in. For an earlier extended comparison of English and French education in the first half of the nineteenth century, see Vaughan and Archer. On education and state formation within a comparative framework, see Green. Other works on specific facets such as secularism and the Church, and more particularly on philosophy and education will be introduced and commented on over the course of this section. 94. On the grandes écoles, see Verger, ed., and on the École Normale Supérieure in particular, R. J. Smith. 95. The brief outline of the changes in secondary education from the pre- to post-Revolutionary periods given here draws on the detailed account in Vaughan and Archer, pp. 134–36 in which the links between the écoles centrales and the educational ideas of Mirabeau, Talleyrand, and Condorcet are traced. On this transition, see Julia, and also A. Canivez, pp. 78–143. 96. The nature of the interest in the history of philosophy teaching in France is itself highly significant. The main sources of the contents and methods of philosophy teaching in France are the work of A. Canivez, and Gerbod (the historian of education). Canivez’s work, Jules Lagneau, professeur de philosophie: essai sur la condition du professeur de philosophie jusqu’à la fin du XIXe siècle, was initially a doctorat d’état thesis; as the title suggests, it reviews the subject in terms of the figure of the philosophy teacher, itself a highly significant chosen optic. Originally published in two volumes, Canivez’s work follows a bipartite interpretive schema: the prehistory of the philosophy teacher in France within the period, leading up to a separate volume on Jules Lagneau, prof de philo in the latter part of the nineteenth century who symbolizes the epitome of the golden age of the Third Republic for philosophy teachers. Canivez explicitly situates his work as an ethnology and archaeology of an occupation (p. 10), but this historical survey functions as a prelude, leading up to Lagneau’s life and work which is enshrined as the

42

Situating GREPH

culmination and glory of an entire system and history. I return in detail to the myth of the philosophy teacher, and to Canivez’s work in Chapter 4. Several thèses de troisième cycle, all undertaken in Lyon, have subsequently been dedicated specifically to the history of philosophy teaching in France: H. Bouchardeu, Une institution: la philosophie dans l’enseignement du second degré en France, 1900–72 (1975); André Matrat, Socrate au miroir (1975); and Gérard-Alain Mallet, L’Identité du professeur de philosophie de classe terminale, contribution à l’histoire de l’enseignement de la philosophie (1981). I have not been able to consult these directly, although some of the conclusions of Bouchardeu’s research were presented in the 1977 special issue of Cahiers pédagogiques, ‘Le Project d’instruire’. What is worth noticing is the additional marker of philosophy’s selfconscious institutionalization and particular degree of conspicuousness, as a unique French institution, which this level of interest indicates. All are cited by Poucet in the bibliography of his recent work on philosophy teaching in France, Enseigner la philosophie: histoire d’une discipline scolaire, 1860–1990. Unusually, Poucet starts off post-Cousin, the single most important figure in this history — a rather inexcusable omission. Ultimately, Poucet is more concerned to chart the relationship between Catholic and state teaching of philosophy, and differences and similarities between the two over the period. Of far greater interest are the works of those involved in GREPH and the Doctrinal de Sapience, and subsequently the CIPh. All of these, unlike Canivez, shared the aim of recovering this history in order to trace its ideological determinations, and to provide a transformative critique of the current status quo. This aim will be examined in due course. Patrice Vermeren and Stéphane Douailler, in particular, have organized seminars at the CIPh which have resulted in the edited collection of nineteenth-century ‘petits écrits’ on philosophy teaching, La Philosophie saisie par l’état (1989), as part of an attempt to transform ‘l’exercice de la pensée’ (Vermeren, p. 9). The journal Corpus, and the project of publishing a Corpus des oeuvres philosophiques de langue française, was founded in 1984 in order to encourage this kind of work on formerly obscure parts of ‘French’ philosophy, studied in relation to its history and politics. A special issue of the journal was devoted to Cousin in 1991, to which Pierre Macherey also contributed. Vermeren’s own doctoral thesis on Victor Cousin was published as Victor Cousin: le jeu de la philosophie et de l’état in 1995. Derrida formed part of the examining jury. The ‘La Philosophie et ses contextes’ section of the Encyclopédie philosophique universelle, edited by André Jacob and published in 1989, contains entries by Douailler and Vermeren, and by Roland Brunet, a leading member of GREPH who made the most sustained attempt to examine the significance of the history of philosophy in French education in QP. Their presence in this work of reference represents a kind of institutionalization of the project of GREPH in making known and examining this history. Nonetheless, it was still possible for Alain Renaut and Luc Ferry, strong critics of both GREPH and the CIPh to introduce Pierre-Henri Tavoillot’s article on the invention of the classe de philosophie in their collection, Philosopher à 18 ans (1999), referred to in the previous section, as bringing to light a hitherto entirely neglected subject (Ferry and Renaut, eds., p. 20). They thus deliberately ignored the contributions of GREPH and the CIPh to encourage research and foster critical awareness of this history. Finally, the work of Jean-Louis Fabiani should be mentioned here. His monograph, Les Philosophes de la République (1988), focuses on the Third Republic and the figure of the philosophy teacher. Fabiani is a former associate of Pierre Bourdieu, and I consider his work in Chapter 3 in the context of my discussion of Bourdieu’s approach to, and relationship with, philosophy. 97. Cf. P. Macherey, ‘Faire de la philosophie en France aujourd’hui’, p. 116. On the implications of this class as the Revolutionary form of school philosophy in which the theories of Condillac and the Encyclopédistes were taught, see Vermeren, pp. 171–72. 98. Brooks, p. 36. Brooks’s work provides a valuable study of the relationships between academic philosophy in France and the nascent social sciences, particularly sociology and psychology in the last third of the nineteenth century. 99. See Taine, and E. Renan, 1959. On Renouvier’s attacks on Cousin, see Simon, p. 57. On Renan in relation to Cousin, see M. Bel Lassen’s contribution to Qui a peur de la philosophie?, ‘Renan ou les lendemains “pédagogiques” de la Commune’. See also the account in Gutting, Chapter 1. 100. Bolgar, ‘Victor Cousin and Nineteenth-Century Education’, p. 358. On Cousin, in addition to Vermeren’s study mentioned above, see also, Brewer; D. S. Goldstein; Simon; and StockMorton, pp. 30–59.

Situating GREPH

43

101. D. S. Goldstein, p. 271. 102. Thuillier. See also Ferrari, at one time an adherent of Cousin, who employed the phrase ‘les philosophes salariés’ as the title of his book criticizing philosophy in French education and criticizing philosophy teachers as having become merely machines for the delivery of lessons. As part of a revolt against ‘being paid not to think’, but to inculcate an imposed ideology, the review La Liberté de penser was founded in 1847 (Gerbod, p. 291). On the attacks on Cousin for his betrayal of philosophy as vocation by the socialist philosopher of humanity and humanitarianism Pierre Leroux, see the work done on this within the framework of the Collège International de Philosophie by Abensour, ‘Philosophie politique et socialisme’. Canivez, pp. 210 and 218 judges the lasting effects of Cousin to be entirely baleful and coercive, acting as a kind of ‘mental police’ of all those engaged in philosophy, in ways which stymied the f lourishing of philosophical ref lection at the time, and whose malign inf luence continues a century later. 103. Benda. 104. Fabiani, p. 47. 105. Cousin, Rapport sur le concours d’agrégation de philosophie (1850), quoted in Vermeren, p. 342. 106. The number of philosophy teachers increased from roughly sixty to three hundred over the remainder of the nineteenth century (Zeldin, France, 1848–1945, p. 209). 107. The introduction of research, with its emphasis on topics in the history of philosophy and philological emphasis, together with the predominance of the history of philosophy in schoolteaching, is the single most concrete legacy of French academic philosophical education since Cousin. 108. Tavoillot, p. 161. 109. Cousin visited Germany in 1817–18 and 1824–25 (Macherey, ‘Faire de la philosophie en France aujourd’hui’, p. 117). He was particularly impressed by the unified University of Berlin, in comparison to the fragmented faculties of the French universities at the time, and tried repeatedly to institute similar unified universities, creating experimental versions at Rennes and at Caen. On this see Vermeren, pp. 162–64. 110. On materialism as the ‘shadow of academic philosophy’ throughout the nineteenth century in France, see Kelly, ‘Materialism in Nineteenth-Century France’, in particular pp. 37–38 on Cousin’s role in this regard. 111. ‘La Révolution de 1830 qui avait fait Louis-Philippe roi des français, avait fait M. Cousin roi des philosophes. Mais Louis-Philippe n’était qu’un roi constitutionnel, M. Cousin était un roi absolu’ (Simon quoted in Vermeren, p. 176; the quotation is taken from a private archive). 112. D. S. Goldstein, 1968, p. 269. Cousin stated that ‘l’unité de nos écoles exprime et confirme l’unité de la patrie’ (speech given to the Chambre des pairs, 2 May 1844, printed in Cousin, p. 42). 113. Rée, ‘Philosophy as an Academic Discipline’, p. 13. 114. In the Almanach du philosophe boîteux collection orchestrated by the Doctrinal de Sapience group: see Cousin, and also D. Rancière. 115. The Duc de Broglie told the Peers on 12 April 1844 that in France ‘la dernière année des classes a toujours porté, par excellence, le nom de classe de philosophie’ (speech printed in the Moniteur Universel, 13 April 1844, cited in J. Goldstein, ed., p. 27). 116. Cited by Azouvi, p. 760. 117. Speech by Cousin given to the Chambre des pairs, 2 May 1844, printed in Cousin, pp. 42–43. 118. See Vermeren, pp. 287 ff., and Brewer, pp. 9–19. On the aftermath of the Falloux law and the effects on Catholic secondary schools, see in particular Anderson, ‘The Conf lict in Education’. On Catholic teaching in counterpoint to State teaching, and the dominance of the latter over the former in the area of philosophy teaching, see Poucet. 119. Douailler et al., eds., La Philosophie saisie par l’état, p. 125. 120. On the inf luence of the Cousinien pedagogy of the unitary self in nineteenth century France, see J. Goldstein, ‘The Advent of Psychological Modernism in France’. Goldstein, p. 105 argues that the aim of Cousin’s version of psychology in the philosophy class was to encourage students ‘to make contact with a principle of efficacy within themselves’. 121. On bifurcation as an attempt to retain the dominance of the lycées over the now resurgent Catholic secondary schools, see Anderson, ‘The Conf lict in Education’, pp. 53 ff. The Catholic

44

Situating GREPH

schools, which at the time taught 25% of secondary school pupils, could not compete with the Université in this type of education, and therefore based their claims to superiority on pre-eminence in classical, literary education (pp. 84 ff.). Philosophy remained a part of this programme but, as Anderson makes clear (p. 85), its aims were entirely pastoral rather than intellectual. 122. Vaughan and Archer, p. 128. 123. See Ferry and Renaut, eds., Philosopher à 18 ans. Poucet reprints the main programmes of the last century — from 1902, 1923, and 1960 — as an appendix. All are prefaced by an official reminder that the order adopted in the programme ‘n’enchaîne pas la liberté du professeur’ (Poucet, p. 375). 124. See, for example, the article in Le Monde, 9 February 2001, by Michel Fichant and Denis Kambouchner: ‘On ne change pas une discipline par décret’. For ongoing debates see the website of the Association pour la Création d’Instituts de Recherche sur l’Enseignement de la Philosophie (ACIREPH), . 125. Douailler et al., eds., La Philosophie saisie par l’état, p. 444. The fullest account of Duruy’s ministerial actions and their guiding political motivations is Sandra Horvath-Peterson’s 1984 study, Victor Duruy and French Education: Liberal Reform in the Second Empire. See pp. 120 ff. on the reintroduction of philosophy. Duruy also introduced contemporary history as a cautionary tale to be taught to the young, although history continued to stop generally at 1789 in the Catholic schools (Anderson, ‘The Conf lict in Education’, p. 86). Duruy was also responsible for important reforms of the baccalauréat, modernizing of the teaching of modern languages in schools, and the creation of the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris in 1868, which aimed to provide an integrated research institution for the first time (Horvath-Peterson, pp. 192–94). 126. On the education of girls in this period, see Horvath-Peterson, pp. 150–73, and Mayeur, 1977. Girls only gained access to the philosophy class in 1925; before this they were taught the same basic morality as the lower classes in the primary schools (Poucet, p. 171). 127. Quoted in Gerbod, pp. 239–40. On the moral laïque of the Third Republic, see Stock-Morton, and also Ozouf; and on secularism, Charlton. 128. Derrida points this out in QP, p. 447. I return to this in the next chapter. 129. Duruy’s comments are taken from Moody, p. 61. 130. Douailler and Vermeren, pp. 813–14. On the intellectual and political rivalries with and borrowings from Germany by France in this period, Claude Digeon’s magisterial survey remains the essential reference point. On the university in particular, see Digeon, pp. 364–84. Hostility to German philosophy remained an important force, however. Zeldin gives the example of Charles Andler, who subsequently became a key mediator of Nietzsche’s work, but was failed twice in the philosophy agrégation in the 1880s by Lachelier, then Inspecteur Général, because of his sympathy for German philosophy. After that, Andler was forced to operate within the discipline of modern languages rather than philosophy, an interesting precursor of the disciplinary and national crossings made by ‘Continental’ philosophy a century later (Zeldin, France, 1848–1945, p. 211). 131. The designation was first employed by Albert Thibaudet in 1927, in his book of the same name. 132. See Charle, Les Élites de la République, 1880–1900 and La République des universitaires, 1870–1940. 133. Zeldin, France, 1848–1945, p. 206. 134. Chadwick, pp. 47 and 49. On laïcité in this context see Pena-Ruiz, Dieu et Marianne, Curtis, and McCaffrey; on ‘l’idée républicaine’, see Nicolet, and also Laborde. On this mass programme of inculcation of a sense of nationality and of citizenship, see E. Weber, and also Déloye. On the ‘école de la république’, see Ozouf and also Gaillard. 135. The bac became single-track again in 1890 (Tavoillot, p. 164). A terminale class in elementary mathematics was created in 1890, but it also included philosophy. 136. On the history of rhetoric in schools, see Genette. I return to this essay in Chapter 3. 137. On the universities, see Weisz and also Prost, 1968, not in Bib. 138. André Canivez concurs with this view, stating that only after 1880 did philosophy teachers become intellectually worthy of their subject (A. Canivez, p. 275). However, compared with academic philosophy in Germany at the same time, this freedom was still relatively

Situating GREPH

45

circumscribed. There, academic philosophers were not constrained even by the list of topics set out in a state programme: see Schneider for a survey of philosophy teaching in Germany in this period. This did not inhibit the mythologizing of this period as the ‘golden age’ of philosophy teaching, which only makes sense in terms of what had preceded it — Cousin’s total control, followed by the disappearance of philosophy altogether. 139. Tavoillot, p. 171 and Poucet, p. 133. 140. Anatole de Monzie, reprinted in Grateloup, p. 7. The instructions are also reprinted in F. Châtelet, La Philosophie des professeurs, and Poucet. Grateloup reproduces the instructions as the correct encapsulation of the mission and role of the prof de philo: great stress is placed on the individual incarnation of the role; the teacher’s cours is unreproducible, and can never stand as a model, only as an example (p. 6). 141. Gerbod, p. 253. 142. For example, the Abbé Clamadieu, who founded the journal Le Lycéen en philosophie in 1890, aimed at Catholics in non-Catholic schools, cf. B. Poucet, 1999, p. 170. 143. Fouillée (1901), reprinted in Douailler, et al., eds., La Philosophie saisie par l’état, pp. 634–35. Cf. Brooks, p. 139.

Chapter 2

v

Politics and Reform: Radicals and Conservatives To understand GREPH’s formation and the ‘battle for philosophy’ in the 1970s, the first crucial reference point is ‘May ’68’ or, rather, ‘la pensée ’68’ in terms of both philosophy and the perpetual reform of the French educational system.1 The 1970s debate has been characterized subsequently by Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, detractors of both ‘la pensée ’68’, in which they include Derrida, and of GREPH, as merely generational, the younger ’68 generation versus the conservative Inspec­ teurs Généraux, and by Louis Pinto as avant-garde philosophers versus humble, obscure school-teachers of philosophy.2 In both contrastive generalizations, the work of GREPH can be dismissed as expressive of a timeless schema of youthful radicalism, and its complex positions derided as ‘avant-garde’ without any attempt to unravel them. The lines of position-taking, alliance, and divergence of so-called ‘radicals’ and ‘conservatives’ were more contradictory than Ferry and Renaut’s characterization of two symmetrical, and by implication mutually cancelling, discourses suggests. The intervention of GREPH forms part of what was later termed by Stéphane Douailler and associates ‘l’ordinaire de la philosophie’, the discourse on and around philosophy distinctive to French education which included the voices of both provincial lycée-teachers and renowned philosophers.3 The claim made by the American theorist Steven Ungar, mentioned in the last chapter, that philosophy became politicized after 1968, conveys something of the experiential and existential aspect of this debate. To that extent, Ferry and Renaut’s opposition of the old guard and the new is borne out. However, it does not capture the full complexity of the most significant aspects of the situation of philosophy in relation to its history, cultural specificity, or politics. The commentaries of Ferry and Renaut, and also Pinto, rely on oppositions between generations, or avant-garde vs ‘lowly’, in order to dismiss the work of GREPH and that of Derrida in terms of ‘positionality’ alone. In other words, their work only ever expresses a particular position. There is therefore no room for actual engagement with that work’s aims and arguments. As will become evident in what follows, ‘positionality’ — the taking and ref lecting upon positions in relation to both opponents and allies — is a crucial consideration in understanding GREPH, but considerably more complex than these simplifying analyses allow.

Politics and Reform

47

GREPH’s Foundation Although only formally constituted on 15 January 1975, GREPH formed as an entity in 1974, the year before the Haby proposals were first announced. A small number of teachers and students met in March of that year to formulate a response to the Capès jury report on the 1973 concours, which had just appeared. This report was denounced as unacceptable because of its failure to engage with the effects of the concours, which passed only 4% of the candidates, condemning the rest to under-employment or unemployment. The number of posts in philosophy teaching made available through both concours, the Capès, and the agrégation, had been reduced by 75%.4 Underlying this protest was what was felt to be the increasingly fragile position of philosophy teaching more generally, with fewer jobs available and a weakened position in the science bac. The protest against the report charged that the jury was merely taking shelter behind a rhetoric of ‘exigences pédagogiques’ and that its so-called analyses only created deliberately misleading confusion.5 In other words, the liberal objectivity and professional detachment to which it laid claim could and should be unmasked as orthodoxies to be contested for they concealed the workings of ‘les projets actuels du pouvoir’. The initial impetus was thus very much a dispute internal to the profession of philosophy teaching. Those who had met then drew up their founding document, the ‘Avant-projet pour la constitution d’un groupe de recherches sur l’enseignement philosophique’ (AP).6 In the summary given in QP, the fact that those involved in this included non-philosophers and foreigners is stressed to dispel the impression of a very localized, internal dispute. One of the essential characteristics of the group, which they wished to stress from the outset, was its lack of ‘identité corporative ou disciplinaire’ (p. 427). The ‘Avant-projet’ itself positioned the group in relation to a broader framework of inquiry and mobilization than the response to the Capès report. The framework which it set out comprised a twofold programme of research to be undertaken by a series of work groups. This consisted of the elaboration of the question of the ‘indissociability’ of philosophy and education, and the modes of inscription of this ‘didactique-philosophique’ within the affective, historical, political, social, and economic fields of relations (pp. 433–34). The ‘indissociability’ of theoretical research from the taking of positions and from practical interventions was emphasized as the rationale for this programme (p. 428). The aim was not simply, therefore, to construct a critical theory of philosophical ‘doctrinalité ou disciplinarité’, but to do this in order to undertake a transformative analysis of the current situation of philosophy. As Martine Meskel and Michael Ryan commented in ‘Pas de deux’, their contribution to QP, ‘nous décidons — par stratégie — d’utiliser l’institution contre elle-même’ (p. 353). This ‘counter-use’ of the institution meant analysing it historically and politically, focusing specifically on it in order to undermine the claim of professional neutrality. The focus of this analysis would be the conditions of teaching philosophy in France — in other words, the practical field and operative condition of GREPH itself. The AP therefore asked: what are the historical conditions of this system of teaching, past and present, and what is at stake in the struggle for philosophy today in France

48

Politics and Reform

(pp. 434–35)? This double framework, the relationship of philosophy to its teaching, and the historical inscription of this relationship in France, constitutes GREPH’s dual concern: the philosophical and the historical. In order to determine what was at stake in philosophy teaching’s continuing existence, and how its role could be understood, they set out a programme of genealogical critique. The scope of protest and analysis was thus shifted from a one-off response to the Capès report, which expressed dissatisfaction with professional conditions of employment and recruitment, to a larger and self-ref lexive project, which questioned philosophy teaching in general.7 The AP was discussed and then adopted by a group of thirty teachers and students at a meeting held at the École Normale Supérieure on 16 April 1974, and as such represents a collectively held set of views. However, it was drafted by Derrida. An invitation to an Assemblée Générale on 15 January 1975 was then circulated not just to French lycée and university teachers, but also to pupils, students, and members of other disciplines. By the time this meeting was held, the ‘attack on philosophy’ of the Haby proposals was already known, and became the forefront of GREPH’s activities. From February onwards, meetings were being held every Saturday, and by June, GREPH had six hundred members, at a time when there were approximately two thousand school and university philosophy teachers — GREPH’s core constitutency, despite their attempts at inclusiveness.8 The meeting at Jussieu on the 19 April 1975 was reported a few days later in Le Monde, under the heading ‘Abattre la “prison-forteresse” de la classe terminale’.9 The account describes a meeting of about two hundred people, mainly young school philosophy teachers, at which the group situated themselves primarily in terms of what they were not: they were not a committee formed to defend philosophy, much less la classe de philosophie, nor were they a professional association, nor exclusively Parisian. Rather, they were a group for research ‘au sens propre’: theory and practice, critical analysis combined with practical objectives. They aimed to function in a deliberately informal, decentralized fashion, through a proliferation of work-groups operating in Paris and elsewhere. This intentional ‘formlessness’ aimed to open up a space for discussion, rather than to carry through a narrowly defined and pre-set agenda. The list of the work groups printed in QP provides an overview of the kinds of subject-matter which GREPH members saw as embodying this kind of transformative critique, or at least furnishing the materials for it. This list of about twenty work-groups deliberately states that it is not complete since there may be others of which they are not aware (p. 463), emphasizing the conscious lack of any overall control. The list is predominately of groups based in Paris, many at the Ulm branch of the ENS where Derrida was maître-assistant at the time. Despite this strong ENS presence, the projects listed focus mainly on the various constituent aspects of the material conditions of philosophy teaching within schools. Higher education as a specific institutional location for philosophy is not considered. These aspects include an analysis of the pupils’ copies in terms of the ‘ideology of the pupils’ and in terms of the ‘discourse’ of those who correct them;10 an analysis of the philosophy manuals used in schools; the role of the Inspection générale; and philosophy in the scientific preparatory classes for the grandes écoles (QP, pp.

Politics and Reform

49

463–64). Other topics mentioned include the questioning of the corps enseignant, of the defence of philosophy, of the Idéologues and the political and pedagogical projects of the Revolution. This cluster of topics was in fact the outlined subjectmatter of Derrida’s seminar at the ENS in 1974–75, or what he termed a kind of ‘contre-séminaire’ held by his own research centre, the Centre de recherches sur l’enseignement philosophique.11 The first session of this was published in 1976 as Derrida’s essay ‘Où commence et comment finit un corps enseignant?’.12 The only thinker explicitly referred to in the list is Gramsci, in terms of a consideration of Gramsci, philosophy, and the ‘educational apparatus’. This reference again suggests the theoretical preferences of the core group of members who subsequently put together QP. Gramsci is specifically invoked by Michel Bel Lassen in his essay on Renan in QP, in which he draws a parallel between the educational ‘appareil’ postrevolution of 1848, post-Commune in 1870, and post-’68. In each case, he argues, there followed a counter-reaction by the mechanisms of power. He is inf luenced by Gramsci’s view of the educational system as one of the preferred grounds of ‘une guerre de positions’ (QP, pp. 338–39). The relationship of philosophy to other disciplines appears in terms of both literature teaching and the social sciences. Finally, cultural representations of the philosophy teacher are mentioned, though in a non-interpretive way — solely in terms of an examination of the condition of current philosophy teachers as depicted in these representations.13 A meeting was held at Jussieu with both philosophers and historians on 11 January 1975, a few days before the Assemblée Générale, in which they were invited to ref lect jointly on what were seen as the growing crisis and malaise of both. Out of this came the journal, Le Doctrinal de Sapience,14 which linked GREPH to a chain of other groups working in the space of philosophy and history. Like GREPH, the Doctrinal group took as its focus the opening up of a collective space for ref lection on the material conditions of teaching philosophy. The two groups shared a common approach and interests. The topics covered in the journal are the same as those focusing on la philosophie scolaire listed by the GREPH work-groups, and contributions overlapped. Jean-Pierre Hédoin, for example, wrote an analysis of current philosophy textbooks for the journal, and of the short, formal dissertation exercise undertaken by school philosophy pupils for QP. Both groups grew out of the sense of dissatisfaction felt by younger philosophy teachers confronted with what they saw as a period of retrenchment and increasing reaction following the events of 1968. Both Patrice Vermeren and Stéphane Douailler, whose subsequent work on the history of philosophy and philosophy teaching was referred to in the first chapter, above, were instrumental in forming this group, and they were also part of Jacques Rancière’s Centre de Recherches sur les Idéologies de la Révolte, which in turn had its associate group and journal, Les Révoltes logiques, which was in existence from 1975 to 1983.15 The main concern of the latter derived from Rancière’s previous collective grouping, Révoltes ouvrières, and consisted of archival research into oral history, coupled with an intensely philosophical approach and self-ref lexiveness to problems of popular history — ‘l’autre récit de l’histoire contemporaine de la France’.16 The ‘official’ discourse which they were interested in overturning was

50

Politics and Reform

that of the established left’s history of revolt. Rancière had just published his La Leçon d’Althusser the previous year, in which he strongly disowned his former allegiance to Althusserian Marxism. The positioning of the Doctrinal group is nonetheless described retrospectively by Vermeren in recognizably Althusserian terminology — ‘entre la science et la révolte’. In this description, which is in the introduction to the book version of his doctorat d’état thesis on Victor Cousin and the politics of philosophy in France, Vermeren traces the genesis of his interest in the subject matter by reference to this period. This historical work which he undertook formed part of a political project and represents the culmination, two decades later, of one line of the programme of research laid out in GREPH’s ‘Avant-projet’. Vermeren’s explanation and account of these groupings, written at a distance of twenty years, evokes the generational and existential aspects of these groupings, but not of course in order to circumscribe their efforts as predictable youthful discontent. Vermeren comments that: Ma génération de professeurs de philosophie n’a jamais vécu dans l’évidence son rapport à l’exercice de la réf lexion ni à la pratique de l’enseignement. Partagée dès ses premiers pas entre la science et la révolte, elle a toujours revendiqué une impureté nécessaire de la philosophie. Elle a obstinément affirmé le rapport boiteux que celle-ci entretient (même et surtout dans son exigence critique) avec ce qui n’est pas elle, singulièrement avec le politique.17 (p. 5)

These groupings included already famous figures in philosophy — Rancière, and in the case of GREPH, Derrida — and were subsequently predominantly associated with them. But Vermeren’s description suggests the political and intellectual mood of the youngest and lowliest members of the profession of philosophy teaching in the run-up to and at the time of Haby’s proposals. This generational interpretation is itself a product of the 1960s youth movements and the idea of understanding intellectual and political currents in terms of the collective experience and outlook of ‘youth’ seen in terms of the notion of a ‘generation’. Having been students and graduate students in the late 1960s, they were now lycée philosophy teachers — both he and Douailler taught outside Paris — and they were concerned to find the means of ref lecting on their activity as philosophy teachers in ways which would impact upon that practice, undermining its claim to apolitical, professional neutrality, in order to become what Althusser had termed the ‘heroic’ teachers, those few who taught against prevailing ideologies.18 Their relationship to their practice was no longer self-evident, and as such, it became the subject-matter for ref lection and critique. Althusser’s formulation of his concept of the ideological state apparatus in 1970, after his initial failure to engage with May ’68, is an undeniable strand in the questioning of the system of national education, as were Bourdieu and Passeron’s analyses of the reproduction of social inequality which the egalitarian discourse of the Republican school of Jules Ferry masked. Althusser’s insistence on ideology as constitutive practice or series of practices, and on education as the dominant Ideological State Apparatus (ISA) and normative practice,19 led to research projects on school textbooks by his disciples Christian Baudelot and Roger Establet, in their L’école capitaliste en France of 1971, and to the work on literature teaching

Politics and Reform

51

of Renée Balibar (already referred to in Chapter 1, above in relation to Pierre Macherey’s subsequent interest in philosophy education as a material practice).20 The unmasking of the operations of power in the workings of the educational institution and in the official administrative discourse which regulated that institution, which both GREPH and Le Doctrinal members saw as their task, fit within this political background. However, the shared object of concern of both GREPH and Le Doctrinal members was specifically philosophy and its place within the educational system, rather than the educational system as a whole.21 Although they acknowledged the need to analyse the reforms ‘as a whole’ and the workings of the system of education more generally, their concern was the relationship between philosophy and politics, and the contestatory role which they envisaged for philosophy. The philosopher was no longer seen in terms of the model of the Sartrian universal intellectual — speaking for, and in the service of, the people --but in terms of ‘la contestation du savoir lui-même’, as Vermeren comments (p. 5). This, then, was the project of unmasking philosophy within a particular, ideologically and historically determined system, but also a radically different understanding of philosophy’s potential role within that system — no longer as official ideology for the elite, its first incarnation under Cousin, nor as the apprenticeship of freedom of the Republican ideal, but as the place within a system of mass education for contestation and subversion. The Réforme Haby The main aims of the reforms which René Haby, appointed as Giscard d’Estaing’s Education minister in 1974, devised were ostensibly democratization and moderni­ zation of the secondary school system. The system was struggling with the perceived need for enhanced scientific training, and with the effects of mass expansion: the number of those obtaining the bac had tripled in the space of fifteen years, from 50,000 in 1959 to 97,000 in 1965, and then more than 150,000 from 1973 onwards.22 The far greater number of pupils staying on at school changed the nature of upper secondary education and put increasing pressure on the policy of non-selection (entry to university by right on passing the bac) of the universities. The resultant inability of higher education to cope with its accelerating population was one of the main triggers of the beginnings of student discontent in 1968. René Haby had held an initial colloque in July 1974, having already worked on a series of initial proposals for Pompidou, published in December 1971. His ‘Propositions pour une modernisation du système éducationnel’ were approved on 12 February 1975 by the Conseil des Ministres, passed by the Assemblée Nationale, and signed by the President on 11 July 1975.23 The law came into force from the rentrée of 1977 onwards. This law was seen as a ‘watershed’ for secondary education, as far-reaching as that of 1968 for higher education. The main change, which was instituted in order to achieve the aims of modernization and democratization, was to establish a common curriculum for all pupils up to the age of fourteen. Haby thus created a form of comprehensive education for this age-group, who would be taught in collèges d’enseignement secondaires, with mixed-ability classes, and classes de

52

Politics and Reform

soutien designed to help accommodate the more and less able pupils. Haby attempted to buy off the most qualified segments of the teaching population, exempting agrégés and certifiés from this kind of integrated classroom experience by promising that they would be allowed to refuse to teach any but the cleverest pupils. These groups of teachers were not swayed, however, fearing that the system of ranks could only ultimately be dismantled by such integrationist policies. The teaching hierarchy of agrégés and certifiés was linked both to pay differentials and classroom hours. Agrégés taught fifteen hours a week, and twelve if these classes included teaching in the classes préparatoires; the certifié teacher — who had passed the Capès — taught nineteen; the non-graduate twenty-one; and the instituteur twenty-eight. Agrégés earned 25% more than certifiés, and twice as much as instituteurs.24 This stratification meant that solidarity across the school-teaching sector was rare. The agrégés did not see themselves as sharing the professional outlook or destiny of their far less privileged counterparts in primary education. They represented the most prestigious part of teaching, and one of the most vocal lobbies, through the associations de spécialistes. Philosophy, taught only in terminale and only by agrégés or certifiés, was therefore at the elite end of this professional spectrum. Despite Haby’s cynical attempts at conciliation, the reforms were extremely unpopular with both parent and teacher groups, and this led to Giscard in 1978 replacing him with Christian Beullac, the former head of Renault. Beullac was instructed not to impose the reforms too rigidly for fear of provoking further opposition from these lobbies in the build-up to the election. Meanwhile many schools had simply refused to make any attempt to implement the changes, and streaming of all kinds had continued unchecked. The reforms continued to be the focus of controversy and dissent up until Mitterrand’s victory in 1981. At this level then, and pace GREPH’S denunciation of the machinations of power, the reforms were broadly progressive in intent — the ‘Leftish reforms of a Rightish government’.25 They were viewed by some moderate journalists as importing an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ inf luence in the model of comprehensive teaching, and in the new emphasis on individual development through non-academic subjects such as art and sport, which was also an attempt to make secondary education less regimented and old-fashioned in the wake of the lycéens’s protests in 1968.26 The same writer in Le Monde, Frédéric Gaussen, who was subsequently to become editor of Le Monde de l’éducation, pointed to the press reaction from either end of the political spectrum to illustrate the difficulties faced by Haby’s modernizing intentions. From the left, Libération mocked the continuance of the misplaced belief in the power of educational structures to enable equality of opportunity, since an alienated society of exploitation was not and could not be in any position to produce liberating forms of education. Le Figaro, on the other hand, warned that the f light of bourgeois children to private schools could only undermine the aims of ‘nivellement et uniformité’.27 Naturally, the very real problems which had surfaced in the preceding decade of a system which was simply not adapted to the huge increase in numbers, and extremely old-fashioned and hierarchical in its attitude to students and pupils as individuals, were not acknowledged as the reason for change by Haby. However,

Politics and Reform

53

the demystifying effects of ’68 had irreversibly focused attention on the failure of education as a ‘projet de société’ in the Republican sense of the place where all were treated equally, despite the manifest inequalities of society — the ‘lieu de justice et de générosité au milieu d’un monde d’intérêts et de privilèges’.28 The ‘comprehensivation’ of the new reform did, as Guy Coq argued at the time, attempt to take this critique on board, although it did not explicitly admit to the inf luence of 1968.29 Nonetheless, Frédéric Gaussen’s idea of an increasing inf luence of English models was optimistic: teachers in the French system still remained unable to innovate at an individual level in their classroom practice, in ways which their English counterparts took for granted. The degree of centralized control was still immense, and was maintained as a matter of principle: rigid uniformity represented egalitarianism in action, and equal opportunity was interpreted as identical treatment for all in a very literal way. Instead, the mantras adopted to justify such unpopular modifications were of the need for education to adapt to the requirements of a modern society, and thus they laid stress on the importance of vocational training, attempting to increase its prestige and popularity. GREPH’s concern with the reform was not then, centred on its main and extremely significant legislative changes. Their concern with it as a whole translated into attention to its rhetoric of modernization. Their principal target was, what was termed in the contemporary press coverage ‘la querelle des programmes’, the changes to the final years of secondary schooling.30 The Réforme Haby and Philosophy As part of the avowed programme of modernization, of fitting education to society’s needs, Haby set out plans for the ‘culture moderne’ which education must now guarantee its pupils. He planned to introduce economics and social sciences within the première cycle to replace history and geography, but these subjects were to be taught by history and geography teachers. He argued that this was a ‘practical’ measure in a changing society, since the social sciences could incorporate elements of history and geography as part of a more modern approach. Pupils needed not just knowledge of the past but also habits of ‘objective observation’ of social and economic facts.31 He then added a core curriculum for seconde and première levels, (15–17 year olds), with terminale changed to a series of options, both specialized and supplementary ‘outils de base’ subjects — maths, expression française, languages, art, and music for non-specialists. Three hours a week of philosophy were to be included within a proposed core curriculum at première level, in comparison with the eight hours a week which had been devoted to it in terminale up until this point. Specialist teaching associations greeted this plan with concerted outrage, as André Robert, himself a former philosophy teacher, comments: ‘une mise en cause inadmissible de la discipline et comme une atteinte à une formation équilibrée des jeunes’; this was a worse truncation and reduction of philosophy than that implemented by Fortoul in 1851.32 The Association des professeurs d’histoire et de géographie (APHG) launched a campaign to protest against this ‘optionalisation’, as did the Association des professeurs de philosophie de l’enseignement public

54

Politics and Reform

(APPEP).33 Broadly, these measures were a direct continuation of the Fouchet reforms of a decade earlier. The role of humanities subjects within the nonhumanities versions of the bac was being dramatically downgraded. The key role and status which both history and philosophy had acquired from their Third Republic incarnations was publicly being withdrawn in ways which they could no longer ignore.34 From both official organizations for history and philosophy teachers were heard cries of ‘atteinte à la démocratie’ and ‘grave atteinte à la formation des citoyens’.35 The focus on optionalization within the terminale year was, however, focused on above all by the philosophy teachers who took it as a direct attack on philosophy itself. To understand this reaction, and the fierce opposition to philosophy becoming part of a programme of choice rather than compulsion, it is necessary to return to the Fouchet reforms of 1965. Christian Fouchet’s reforms have become synonymous with the failed attempt to adapt the university sector to change, and to confront the question of selection for university entry in the face of tripled enrolments. In a parallel which will be returned to below, Jean-François Lyotard savaged their ‘modernizing’ intentions as a sham democratization, a means by which the Right could subject education to the needs of the capitalist system.36 As James Marshall comments, this was seen by Lyotard as a way of ‘inserting the themes and practices of modernisation into social and working life’, and thus a right-wing ideological manoeuvre which made no attempt to deal with the real structural and educational crises of the university system.37 Lyotard’s diatribe against the reforms is thus identical to the opposition made by GREPH to the school reforms a decade later — against technocratic barbarism and for radical change within education on their own terms. In the school sector, Fouchet dismantled the system which had enabled students to study any bac variant and then enrol on any degree course. Pupils were no longer to be allowed to take a humanities bac and then a science degree. The bac was divided into five sections, each of which led to a particular faculty. The role of the humanities was hugely diminished as part of a general education. In other words, his reforms represented the first tacit admission of the need for prior specialization of a limited kind, and for a far greater emphasis on science education. Instead of ‘culture générale’, the attempt at encyclopaedic breadth in the final years of the lycée, this part of schooling would be organized as preparation for particular courses within higher education, meaning an earlier degree of career-orientation. As a result of this reorganization of the bac, the classe de philosophie disappeared, becoming the Série A or humanities bac. This defeat was mourned by the philo­ sophy teachers as the end of philosophy’s glory and importance, even though its real importance as the crown of secondary education had been in decline for sixty years, and diminishing sharply for the past twenty. The removal of its name was most of all a symbolic defeat: its practitioners could no longer revel in their selfconception of the cardinal discipline, unifying both arts and science subjects for its pupils, and still bathing in the nineteenth-century associations of purveyor of morality to the children of the elite. The children of cadres were now pushed into science subjects, and philosophy was placed permanently on the defensive. In Bruno Poucet’s account of a century of l’enseignement philosophique scolaire, this point is the

Politics and Reform

55

culmination of philosophy’s irreversible decline, the point at which it became ‘une discipline parmi d’autres’.38 A colloquium was organised on the fate of philosophy in the wake of ’68, at Sèvres in March 1970, by Roger Tric, then head of the Inspection générale.39 Despite the broad remit and the representative nature of the gathering, the focus remained resolutely on minute alterations to the curriculum and a consensus that, despite the ‘particularités’ of the previous academic year, the philosophy class remained ‘un lieu où on lit des textes’ (pp. 97–98). The official representatives of philosophy did not feel the need to discuss the significance of the protests for the education system and their place within it. The question of ‘philosophy after ’68’, was for them a question of protectionism and of dismay at the loss of the classe de philosophie title. The changes to philosophy proposed by Haby’s reform engendered fierce hostility from official upholders of the status quo, the APPEP and the Inspection Générale, and from conservative sections of the press. The common cause which they shared with the philosophy radicals, of whom some at least represented a younger generation full of scorn for the state of philosophy teaching, was the attack on philosophy’s compulsory place within education. This would of course hugely affect employment, but it would effectively transform philosophy’s status even further than had the Fouchet reforms. Their rhetoric now harked back less overtly to philosophy’s vital role for elites, and it shaped itself in relation to the minister’s demands for viable modern forms of mass education. Philosophy was now threatened with becoming not just one discipline amongst others, but one option amongst others, and mass exposure to it would therefore be lost. It would sink without trace as an esoteric option, taken within humanities only by those thinking of pursuing it at university. Their pupils would thus be restricted to a self-selecting minority of apprentice philosophy-teachers. Their fate would be that of Classics, which had lost its compulsory place in the premier cycle in the Fouchet reforms after a struggle by its upholders, who finally gave in to the idea of teaching only willing pupils. The battle-lines were thus drawn: the official defendce of philosophy was in place, and it zealously argued for the status quo, and produced ever more inf lationary claims for philosophy’s indispensable role. GREPH’s key problem within this, and the cause of its complex attempts at self-situation within this debate, was that of defence and attack: arguing against the reform, but also against philosophy as understood by its conservative colleagues. This caused a fundamental tension within their project which they turned into a deliberate, overt strategy. Their manoeuvring involved the attempt to differentiate themselves from those colleagues who had adopted a ‘sacralizing’ defence of philosophy, a defence which dated back to the ‘golden age’ of philosophy teaching at the end of the previous century. In order to do this, in November 1975 they added to their programme of theoretical and practical research and action the questioning of the ‘discours de la “défense-de-la-philosophie” (extrême glorification de la Philosophie, souveraine couronnée et couronnante de tous les savoirs’ (QP, p. 428). This was to be examined as an ideological discourse and analysed alongside that of the government. Situating itself in opposition to this, GREPH also resisted the facile assumption

56

Politics and Reform

of their opponents that those inf luenced by the work of Heidegger on the end of metaphysics were in fact now engaged in translating this problematic into institutional terms by dispersing and diluting philosophy.40 Derrida comments that the false pathos of the official defence of philosophy, of a discipline which is ‘aussi vulnérable que préeminente’, is ultimately the same as the pathos of ‘les tenants de la mort-de-la-philosophie’ (p. 454). Ferry and Renaut accused him and GREPH of forming a part of this constituency in ways which were merely characteristic of the ‘generation of 1960’ which was the purveyor of ‘French Heideggerianism’.41 Their account is completely free of nuance in their presentation of GREPH’s stance. The complex relations between Derrida’s philosophy and Heidegger’s work clearly did not lead him to view philosophy as a superseded discipline. Ferry and Renaut’s highly simplistic opposition between structuralism on the one hand and speculative metaphysics on the other does not allow for Derrida’s role in GREPH, nor his continuing ‘insistence on philosophy’ as an irreplaceable designation. This would situate Derrida within structuralism and therefore on the side of the social sciences and somehow ‘against’ philosophy. This is the characterization given by the historian of structuralism, François Dosse, who argues that Derrida looked towards the social sciences for innovatory potential, in preference to philosophy.42 GREPH’s specific positive campaign to enable the renewal of philosophy in and through its teaching was the argument to extend their teaching to younger pupils. This would liberate it from the impregnable ‘prison-fortress’ of terminale. They demanded that it be taught progressively, like other subjects, and not just in a single block at the very end of school (QP, p. 429). A note of caution was entered with regard to the connotations of a ‘progressive’ teaching of philosophy, leading to the preferred use of the term ‘extension’ for their plan (p. 430). This, they argued would transform not just the position and status of philosophy as a discipline, but its contents and modes of teaching. The ‘bataille de la presse’ now began, between educational and political radicals and conservatives who found themselves, uneasily and for the first time, on the same side of the struggle against the reforms. The ‘Bataille de la Presse’: Defence and Attack The defence of philosophy occasioned by the Haby reform was always couched in terms of a defence and never a justification. This is in striking contrast to arguments about philosophy’s survival outside France. The latter, when seeking to eschew impassioned accounts of the one, true relationship between a liberal arts education based on philosophy and ‘high’ culture and the embryonic elite of the kind made in Allan Bloom’s polemical bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind, at the height of the 1987 Culture Wars in American universities, tend to fall back on ‘transferable skills’ arguments, as an answer to the perceived ‘uselessness’ of philosophy.43 This argument for philosophy as a form of mental training was already in use by Cousin in the 1840s, but he was merely being resourceful and adding additional f lourishes to his main principles. Beyond France, philosophy has found itself forced in to this kind of argument in order to appear to earn its keep as part of vague notions of education as ‘training’. Despite what may appear as the ludicrous, self-defeatingly

Politics and Reform

57

inf lated claims made by philosophy’s upholders in France, it was nonetheless a battle unashamed to have recourse to fundamental principles — of Republican ideals, of Enlightenment values, and of philosophy as instrumentally a part of both. Both sides saw the debate in terms of a battle for philosophy itself, and for certain social outcomes, rather than simply a matter of pedagogical disagreements.44 At times, and despite the very real differences between radicals and conservatives, represented by GREPH and the APPEP within this debate, their rhetoric and arguments coincided. They both argued against the reforms as a kind of technocratic onslaught — ‘cette brutale mise au pas (techno-économique et idéologique) de l’école et de l’université’ (QP, p. 471), which, Derrida wrote, for all its vaunted modernizing intent, in fact merely returned to the repression of the Second Empire, the ‘sombre précédent’ of a reactionary regime’s fear of philosophy. Their single clear point of agreement in terms of the defence of philosophy was that philosophy must remain compulsory. At the time, 90% of those who stayed on to take the bac studied philosophy, albeit in varying amounts: only 23% studied the maximum of eight hours per week, the requisite amount of philosophy originally stipulated by the Napoleonic Université. Philosophy was, and still is, on this level a part of mass education; this is not deluded self-f lattery on the part of its practitioners. As secondary education expanded, so the numbers involved, both teachers and pupils, increased hugely as the figures mentioned so far illustrate.45 This compulsory aspect of philosophy has certainly been the cause for much self-congratulation by philosophy teachers — ‘ce dispositif unique au monde’ — and emphasis on its unique place and role within French culture has been part of its justification.46 The only other country which has even attempted anything similar is Scotland, in the nineteenth-century institutionalization of its university foundation courses which meant that all students were forced to study philosophy in their first year, a stage of roughly the same educational level as terminale in the lycées. Historical accounts of its demise there have argued that its very compulsory nature was what made it uniquely vulnerable, rather then the reverse.47 The fate of classics haunted the philosophy teachers, and the idea of arguing not from the basis of compulsion, or even considering the educational advantages for their pupils of a degree of choice, were seen only as counsels of defeat.48 The ‘freedom to choose’ which Haby presented as an educational advance was decried as a false liberalism. Philosophy was not ‘une spécialité parmi d’autres’, but a cornerstone of true education which had to remain within the compulsory part of schooling.49 This remains the case even now in France. The fact that philosophy remains compulsory in schools means that it is still argued for in terms of its relationship to education and knowledge as a whole and not as a specific area of knowledge, which is the starting point for considerations of philosophy’s position in other countries.50 Admittedly, philosophy no longer struggles for recognition as the supreme discipline, having already ceded curricular defeat on this, but in terms of its self-definition and place in education the same forms of arguments occur now which were forged in the 1970s, at the time when education was undergoing a process of fundamental questioning enforced by its vastly increased cost.51 The ‘discourse of the defence of philosophy’ which GREPH had cast within

58

Politics and Reform

their analytical net in fact comprised a series of encoded references to the ‘golden age’ of the Third Republic: the ‘golden age’ itself as an era of ‘honorabilité perdue’, a period of f lourishing for philosophy teaching as the ‘apprentissage de la liberté’ practised by the mythical prof de philo, and officially enshrined in the 1925 Ministerial Instructions of Anatole de Monzie.52 They relied on these allusions directly without reference to their historical determinations. Moreover, the narrative rehearsed by those in charge of philosophy within education eliminated 1968 as a reference point: first, there was the ‘dark’ period of Cousin’s ‘official’ philosophy; then authoritarian suppression; then the ‘golden’ age of the Republic and the free formation of citizens; now there was only an ever-increasing technocracy exercising ‘une contrainte monopolistique chaque jour plus pesante’.53 It became a key aspect of GREPH’s programme to bring to light again the ideological determinations of these terms and references. This was the starting-point of GREPH’s self-definition in opposition to the upholders of the status quo. To the threat of specialization, the APPEP and the inspecteurs généraux opposed the claim for ‘culture générale’, another form of harking back to a more glorious past which did not address the intellectual context of the term. ‘Culture générale’, as Fritz Ringer argues, had acted as a kind of ‘code term’ for the exclusive education of the latter part of the nineteenth century in France.54 Originally, it designated a very intellectual form of culture concerned with the training of the intellectual faculties, rather than the processes of individual self-enrichment signified by its German equivalent Bildung. ‘General culture’ thus initially emphasized a common training for an elite, rather than the creation of shared forms of culture in the English Arnoldian sense of familiarity with ‘the best that has been thought and said’. Alfred Fouillée, the philosopher whose remarks on philosophy’s fittingness for this elite were quoted in the last chapter, and who was one of the central educationally conservative, but politically liberal, voices in the debates, argued for this type of education as suitable for preserving the elite from ‘the mercantile spirit’. Philosophy, according to this defence, was part of the disinterested ‘useless’ pursuits of the superior classes, and a mark of their separation from those requiring more useful forms of training. This kind of defence of philosophy was also based on its unificatory role, as a principle of coherence for education as a whole, and the guarantor of ‘values’ which only it could ensure. In the seventy years between the curricular reforms of 1902 which began the decline of the putative golden age of philosophy in schools and those drawn up by Haby, philosophy shifted ground institutionally, still attempting to claim its links with non-humanities subjects, but principally fighting for dominion over the other humanities and striving to keep the ‘new’ social science subjects at bay. In invoking ‘culture générale’ the APPEP was still trying to fend off the idea that secondary education could be organized in terms of career paths alone and to re-emphasize the idea of the transmission of a core culture. They thus tried to divorce the term of general culture from its past ideological determinations as an elite strand of a very particular kind of education, merely trading on it as a vague allusion. This highly symbolic kind of defence — philosophy as the touchstone of a particular kind of culture — was produced repeatedly and unapologetically.55 Henri Duméry,

Politics and Reform

59

president of the philosophy section of the CNRS, wrote that: Si donc nous estimons que la classe de philo est un symbole et qu’y toucher brûle les doigts, ce n’est ni manie, ni parti pris.56

The Catholic poet Pierre Emmanuel joined in this chorus in an article dramatically entitled ‘Mort de la philosophie’, claiming that if philosophy were reduced to première only, thought itself would shrivel away, unable to withstand such an attack: Le laisser dépérir comme une religion morte dont les ultimes fidèles s’éteindraient loin du verbiage universel comme les derniers indiens dans leurs réserves, c’est bientôt vouer au désert l’ensemble de la pensée.57

The official defence of philosophy as the ‘sacralization’ of philosophy, of which GREPH warned in the AP, is excessively clear in these reactions. The chief complaints of this impassioned f low of articles in both the press and the Revue de l’enseignement philosophique, the house-journal of the APPEP, were soon crystallized by the intervention of Maurice Duverger, professor of public law and political science at the Sorbonne and an advocate of sociological methods in research. Writing in Le Monde on 13 February 1975, Duverger launched an appeal for what he termed ‘les nouvelles humanités’.58 He argued that the role played by philosophy during the Third Republic should now be undertaken by ‘la con­ naissance des structures économiques, politiques et administratives du monde con­tem­porain’. In other words, the ‘new humanities’ appropriate for this level of education would be social sciences, or a version of them at least. These would effectively replace the now outmoded humanities, and philosophy in particular, in a techno-democratic society. Duverger accused the associations de spécialistes of unmitigated conservatism and a refusal to countenance change of any kind. He argued that the reform could only be beneficial for the pursuit of philosophy, rescuing it from its current form, in which its imperialist hold over terminale was responsible only for the ‘verbalisme’ of students arriving at university. This charge mirrors exactly that made by Durkheim in his article on the philosophy agrégation written in 1895 at the start of the battle between conservatives and modernizers.59 Durkheim had also charged philosophy in schools with seducing the young with its empty formalism. According to him, it was in the philosophy class that the young were taught to use ideas as part of rhetorical brilliance, without regard to ‘positive knowledge’, resulting only in ‘anarchic dilettantism’. Duverger makes no reference to this earlier criticism of the deleterious effects of philosophy within schools. His attack is couched in terms of the new demands of a modern, technologically oriented society, but the opposition between social sciences and philosophy as moderns and conservatives is unchanged, and the institutional and intellectual battle between philosophy and sociology which commenced with Durkheim is clearly still at issue here. This was also the charge made by Theodore Zeldin, quoted in the last chapter, of empty eloquence and verbalism as the distinctive mark of ‘Frenchmen’. Zeldin does not acknowledge its antecedents, however, nor its connotations within the institutionalization of philosophy.60 Unsurprisingly, Duverger’s intervention was greeted with even more vehement

60

Politics and Reform

outrage by those who opposed Haby because it was seen to furnish an intellectual justification of the reform. As Guy Coq commented in 1980, Duverger ‘donnait à la réforme Haby la philosophie qui lui manquait’.61 Frédéric Gaussen characterized the ensuing debate in terms of a ‘conf lit des anciens et des modernes’, humanities versus social sciences, as at the beginning of the century.62 The philosophers and their supporters loftily decried the pretensions of the upstart sciences humaines.63 Pierre Emmanuel dismissed the version of social sciences offered by the Haby reform and supported by Duverger as being without redemption, merely approximate in their methods, and tendentious in their conclusions. They could only be: une tromperie sur la marchandise, une manière de fausser l’esprit pour mieux le rendre adéquat à notre barbarie technologique.64

This notion of social science as a means of ideological adaptation clearly harks back to philosophy as official ideology in its Cousinien incarnation, and la philosophie scolaire’s self-definition against that. Duverger’s ‘nouvelles humanités’ would be the modern equivalent of philosophy as official ideology. Philosophy was therefore now defended as general culture against specialization but also critique against naïve ideology. Both GREPH and the conservatives characterize the social sciences in this way, either overtly or by default. Despite GREPH’s dual strategy of defence and attack, aiming never to argue from the same ground as their conservative counterparts, their view of the social sciences coincided very much with this view expressed by Pierre Emmanuel. Both philosophy camps were united in their opposition to any inclusion of the social sciences within schools, despite GREPH’s claim that they sought to dismantle philosophy’s hegemony over other disciplines, and to establish less hierarchical relations with them (QP, p. 430). This was part of the longstanding turf war between sociology and philosophy, dating back to sociology and psychology’s emergence from philosophy, both institutionally and intellectually, at the end of the nineteenth century.65 But it was also because the social sciences were perceived as threatening in political and ideological terms. To the technocracy advocated by the government — ‘un savoir minimum garanti’ in Giscard’s terms — instead of a general culture, the conservatives continued to oppose the claims of culture. The philosopher, Jean Lacroix, argued in Le Monde that: La philosophie doit couronner les études, parce qu’elle est réf lexion, en les situant les unes par rapport aux autres et par rapport au tout. Sans elle, dans toute la société, il n’y a plus de culture mais des techniques, plus de citoyens mais des manoeuvres.66

The terms of the opposition were clear: culture versus technique, civilization versus barbarism, but also, as Gaussen commented, anciens versus modernes, humanities versus social sciences.67 Both conservatives such as Emmanuel, and the radical GREPH members, analysed the social sciences advocated by Haby as amounting to no more than a mechanism for ideological enslavement and adaptation introduced by a technocratic government. On the one hand, the social sciences were associated with processes of modernization and with American intervention in France in the 1950s and 1960s. As such, they were viewed as ideologically tainted, as well as

Politics and Reform

61

intellectually suspect, by left-wing philosophers. The form taken by this American project of fostering social science research was indeed, in some cases, a Cold War project, aiming to fend off the encroachments of Marxism.68 On the other hand, they represented a clear threat to the humanities’s place in education. This reaction to Duverger and to Haby ref lected not just disciplinary rivalry. For the radicals, Haby’s plan to ‘root’ pupils more firmly in the world around them was ideological. A collective article in the June-July 1975 issue of the PCF oriented journal La Nouvelle Critique argued that Haby’s proposal would present the pupil with this world as a naïve, uncritical given, just at the moment of coming of age critically.69 GREPH sympathized with the first half of this view, but wanted to overturn the conjoint idea of a correct age for philosophy, and the philosophy class as a rite of passage. The view that philosophy came naturally at the end of education, not as crown or synthesis (as in the nineteenth century) but as critique, entailed sovereignty over the other disciplines. Educationally, it also placed the pupil in a passive relation to her studies up until that point, the ‘moment décisif ’ (p. 73), according to the Nouvelle Critique account, where philosophy intervened and pupils could suddenly become active and critical. GREPH’s goal of extension sought to change both these aspects, but kept the idea of philosophy as the necessary critique of other disciplines. This produced a tension in their work, making it difficult for them not to keep philosophy in sovereign position in relation to other forms of knowledge, as will be seen in due course. Ten years earlier, at the time of the Fouchet reforms, the official upholders had been mainly concerned to define philosophy as a non-literary subject. Poucet suggests that this was not just the result of philosophy’s downgrading and the stress laid on science education, but was also due to methodological changes in literature teaching in schools.70 The Lansonian methods of literary history, based on endless taxonomies and rigid periodizations were finally, after sixty years in favour, shifting to thematic criticism. This reliance on themes such as power, violence, language, and happiness represented a direct encroachment on philosophy’s territory, resemb­ ling closely the official topic-based programmes which listed similar subjects. In a widely-read, and subsequently much cited essay in Les Temps moderns (1965), Dina Dreyfus, who was to become an inspecteur général of philosophy, and Claude Khodoss, a preparatory class teacher of philosophy, argued that there could and must be no confusion between literature and philosophy teaching.71 Literature repre­sented the education of taste. The only convergence was the apprenticeship of language. Philosophy was still in sovereign position here, as crown of literature, coming after and teaching another language — that of rational debate and of thought.72 What is striking for the moment in terms of philosophy and the other disciplines in the 1975 debate are the following two things. One is that science is rarely discussed and neither is literature. Henri Duméry, in the article already referred to, argued that philosophers should add subject specialisms to their areas of expertise, in order to be in a position to engage with them, and critique them philosophically (p. 2). He mentions the history of science and maths, but again, his real target is the social sciences. The second is an implicit opposition at work between the ‘good’ social sciences and the ‘bad’ social sciences. For the radicals, aiming to further the

62

Politics and Reform

contestation of knowledge, and to institutionalize that contestation, the steadfast opposition to the social sciences seems at first surprising. All the more so since the work of Derrida in this period is strongly associated with the social science disciplines of linguistics, anthropology and psychoanalysis which were within the purview of structuralism. However, it is the ‘reactionary’, empirically based disciplines of psychology and, above all, sociology, which are being targeted here. They are the bearers of naïve, pre-critical ideologies or undeclared philosophies which it is up to Philosophy to unmask. Duméry’s pairing of philosophically-trained individuals and pre-philosophical domains is clearly not envisaged as an interdisciplinary relationship between two equal areas: philosophy is envisaged as the sovereign bearer of critique. The suspicion of both derives not just from a hostility to their apparently naïve and positivistic methodologies, but to their institutional history in relation to philosophy. The presence of a certain kind of psychology as part of the legacy of Cousin within academic philosophy had long been decried.73 Sociology, according to Bourdieu and Passeron’s 1967 account, formed a distinctively French tradition in its theoretical emphases, with its close links with philosophy acting as the ‘theoretical bad conscience’ of the empirical American variant.74 In their account, French sociology is distinctively philosophical. For the philosophers, this represented a direct threat, and encouraged the charges of unexamined and naïve empiricism since sociology could never be philosophical enough. The rivalry was thus both intellectual and institutional for these were the disciplines with the closest ties to academic philosophy. The emphasis on critique and on ideological unmasking by conservatives is as surprising as the hegemonic attitude to the social sciences displayed by the radicals’s campaign against the Haby proposals. The former displays the inf luence of the latter. For GREPH and its allies, philosophy was to become a place of subversion, and had already become so in the 1960s. As Danièle Rancière argued, the teaching of philosophy was now ‘un lieu de contestation plus ou moins ouverte’.75 The philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch, who participated in GREPH’s opposition of the reforms, denounced Duverger’s ‘new humanities’ as preparing only ‘abrutis et crétins’.76 For him, this was clearly part of the government’s plan to rid the universities of ‘ce peuple étudiant si remuant, si dangereusement porté à la réf lexion’. Philosophy is vulnerable to such attacks, he argued, because of its unique vocation: ‘contester inlassablement sa propre existence [...] d’avoir sans cesse à se justifier’ (p. 68). As such it haunts the nightmares of millionaires and captains of industry alike because of its anarchic power and boundless force. This fairly extreme kind of polemic was satirized by Alain Renaut and Luc Ferry as emblematic of the narcissistic capacity for deluded exaggeration of the list of thinkers whose work they designated as ‘la pensée 68’.77 They accused them of revelling in a ‘pathos de victimisation’ and of delusions of ‘quelque fantasmagorique complot étatique’.78 This scorn was meted out as part of Ferry and Renaut’s characterization of the self-indulgent excesses and politicized distortions of the soixante-huitard legacy, in which they included a ‘style de vie philosophique’ (p. 38) involving much radical posturing as part of a ‘composite reference’ to Heidegger, Nietzsche and Freud (p. 239).79 In other words, they convict them of a kind of

Politics and Reform

63

heightened tone of the kind evident in Jankélévitch’s remarks. Their portrait of the philosophical radicals, including GREPH, and particularly Derrida, is uniformly hostile, both at the time and in retrospect. Even in their capacity of philosophers participant in subsequent processes of ref lection and reform of philosophy in education, they display no interest in the nuances and contradictions of the 1970s debate.80 Despite his incendiary rhetoric of Mercedes-burning and the onset of revolution, Jankélévitch ultimately concludes his defence with a standard defence of philosophy as crown, ‘reine ou rien’: le couronnement à la culture générale est le dernier souvenir que le lycéen devenu étudiant gardera de l’enseignement secondaire. (p. 69)

If the ‘conservatives’ adopted a rhetoric of critique and an ideological suspicion of the social sciences, here a philosophy ‘radical’ who overtly situates himself in the line of ’68, ends with a classically conservative defence. He does, however, go on to prophesy, quite correctly and presciently, that the ‘opening’ of education to the real world of industry and business advocated by both Haby (and subsequently Beullac, himself a former ‘captain of industry’) could only result in a one-way exchange — in other words, the presence of local business bosses on university governing councils and a managerialist, pseudo-corporate approach within education. This defence of philosophy as the possibility of contestation was to become an institutional argument: philosophy’s unique role for educational purposes was that of ‘critique’. The adoption of this as another rhetorical strategy by the conservatives meant that it became in their discourse almost a version of transferable skills — ‘l’esprit critique’ which only philosophy could provide a training in, and which were a vital part of citizenship and the need to ‘former des citoyens lucides’.81 Just as the culturally conservative defences, borrowed from the turn of the century, were failing in an atmosphere of utilitarian aims and purposes, they latched on to the soixante-huitard discourse of ‘critique’, voiding it of its real connotations of ideological and social critique to produce an intentionally inoffensive version — critical skills and training without the political aims. This culminated in the bathetic justification of philosophy in schools in order to ‘savoir lire un bulletin de vote’.82 Whilst decrying the technicist barbarity of the reforms and of the ‘new humanities’ advocated by Duverger, they thus in fact ended up developing their own version of philosophy within schools as a key part of social integration — the critical skills of today’s citizen-consumer. GREPH’s own interventions in the course of this debate in 1975 took the form of a brief, collective ‘Prise de position’ against the reform (QP, p. 459), and two articles by Derrida which set out the positions and analyses of the group. The first, ‘La Philosophie et ses classes’, was published in Le Monde de l’éducation in March alongside an interview with René Haby, and the second was a reply to a questionnaire on responses to the reform sent out by Nouvelle Critique, published in May as ‘Réponses à la Nouvelle Critique’.83 In these articles, Derrida warned of the difficulties of ‘defending’ philosophy, because of the equivocal, ambiguous historical legacies of the terms of such defences (QP, p. 447); he also warned of the need to change philosophy by analysing and dismantling the ‘mythe rusé’ of an age for philosophy, the argument that seventeen or eighteen is somehow the ‘correct’ age

64

Politics and Reform

for coming into contact with philosophy for the first time, neither too late nor too early, and that this is both educationally and philosophically true. Simply defending philosophy would be to keep in place ‘un très vieux verrou psychologique, sexuel, socio-politique’ (p. 448). To change its position by teaching it to younger pupils and over a number of years would transform not just philosophy, but its relations to the other disciplines, transforming its current relation of ‘retard hégémonique’ (p. 455). Derrida turns round the argument of the covert philosophy of other disciplines, making it into an argument for philosophy throughout schooling. Thus the argument that pupils would not be able to cope with philosophy at this age is undermined by the fact that they are already exposed to philosophy through the teaching of the other disciplines, where ‘une philosophie très déterminée s’enseigne déjà’ (p. 449). If undeclared, clandestine ‘philosophy’ is at work already within the other subjects, training is required to decipher, render explicit, and critique these hidden ‘philosophemes’: De surcroît, la ‘classe de philosophie’ intervenait à un moment où de façon empirique, implicite, mais très efficace, la ‘philosophie’ des forces sociales dominantes a déjà opéré à travers les autres disciplines. (p. 447)

The ‘philosophy’ to be found in other disciplines is both philosophical and ideological. This converges to an extent with Duméry’s plan for the pairing of criti­ que with a particular ‘positive specialism’ for each philosopher. Duméry employs a Monsieur Jourdain style argument to the effect that philosophy is in fact already everywhere — in the other disciplines, outside education — and, therefore, the case can be argued for philosophy’s role within ‘unexpected’ spheres and loca­tions. How­ever, philosophy is still unapologetically placed in sovereign position over the pre-critical philosophies contained within other forms of teaching. This leads to the problem of understanding ‘philosophy everywhere’ as pre-philosophy, naïve and pre-critical ideology only, and philosophy therefore as exact converse of ideology, pure versus impure. Duméry’s plan suggests clearly demarcated domains which can fruitfully be brought into (hierarchical) relation with one another. There is no sense of ideology in his account. Derrida stresses that he is not advocating a return to philosophy’s role as overseer and legitimator of all forms of knowledge, but rather a redistribution and redefinition of boundaries and practices, including ‘inter­ disciplinary’ ones, and ultimately, the putting in question of any idea of a unitary single form of philosophy, ‘la philosophie’ (p. 449). This was marked in GREPH’s title, the Groupe de recherches sur l’enseignement philosophique, by the reference to ‘l’enseignement philosophique’ rather than ‘l’enseignement de la philo­sophie’, as Michèle Le Dœuff stressed in her presentation of their work to an English audience in 1977.84 Such was the aim at least. The difficult relations between philosophy and other disciplines, and hence the possibilities of radically recon­cept­ualizing philosophy itself, are very problematic for GREPH throughout their work. The need to argue simultaneously for philosophy whilst rethinking it as a disci­pline runs the risk either of dissolving it too effectively, or coming very close to the essentializing terms of philosophy as the saviour of their conservative oppo­nents.85 GREPH were accused by their opponents of advocating a kind of caricatural

Politics and Reform

65

interdisciplinarity based on structuralism86. The risks of recuperation were also evident when René Haby himself, writing his own account a few years later after his dismissal, claimed that they were in fact the only ones to have supported his planned changes to philosophy.87 The question of interdisciplinarity is a key one here. Derrida both includes it as part of the necessary transformation of philosophy, and registers caution about it at the same time. The project of an ‘université critique des sciences de l’homme’ had been part of the May ’68 protests which had led to the establishment of Vincennes. Thus the report of the strike committee of the Law Faculty had denounced current disciplinary divisions as part of the capitalist organization of society, and, in particular, the division of the sciences humaines as technicist and ideological.88 GREPH is in a direct line with this demand, in terms of its view of the social sciences as an advanced mode of adaptation, which, if introduced as proposed by Haby, would take on the role of ideological impregnation which philosophy had played in the nineteenth century, and, in terms of its view of philosophy as ‘contestataire’, the only place where recent Marxist or psychoanalytical texts could be read in schools (p. 447).89 Their demand for philosophy is thus as part of a breaking down of the ‘cloisonnement des disciplines’, of the inclusion of the new forms of knowledge which Derrida refers to here as providing both new techniques and new conceptual resources, ‘les nouveaux dispositifs théoriques’, poetics, semiology, linguistics, psychoanalysis, historical materialism (p. 449) — in short, what would become known after their institutional translation to an Anglophone context as ‘theory’.90 These would disrupt the possibility of something which arrogates for itself an outmoded form of intellectual and institutional hegemony, and disperse its unified sense of its own role within different forms of knowledge, and consequently within education. The role of philosophy thus seems closer to that espoused for it by Jean-François Lyotard, both in his ‘political’ writings (his writings on the politics of education in the 1960s) and in La Condition postmoderne, written around this time.91 In his ‘Preamble to a Charter’, writing against the Fouchet reforms in 1968, Lyotard draws up an opposition between the politics of the disciplines. Whereas the humanities effectively separate education (his focus is exclusively the university) from society and thus ‘defuse’ or recuperate critical energies, the social sciences ‘technologize’ reality and produce experts. Both ‘traditional’ and ‘modernizing’ discourses in fact are complicit in the capturing of the university for the purpose of disenabling social critique.92 The role of the philosopher described in the introduction to La Condition postmoderne is the refusal to fall in with either of these options, to be neither scholar nor expert, but to take on the role of ‘uncertainty’.93 Lyotard surmised from his analysis that the chief risk in ‘producing’ radical new kinds of knowledge is that the system can always recuperate them and recirculate them harmlessly — in other words, the problem of institutional domestication which Culler was concerned with in his analysis of Derrida’s work, but understood far more politically.94 GREPH, following on from this, stated their refusal simply to focus on curricular alternatives in their critique of philosophy teaching, since these would simply be absorbed and ingested in their turn. Since 1968 they had experienced a sense of closing possibilities and regression — the feeling that, as Michèle Le Dœuff

66

Politics and Reform

commented, ‘it is always [now] better to talk about Descartes rather than Freud’. She gives the example of the depressing realisation that the work of Alain, mythologized as a philosophy teacher but not as a philosopher, was now treated as worthy of philosophical respect at least officially, whereas ten years earlier it had been derided as a bad joke.95 Notably, and despite its radicalism, GREPH maintained its belief in philosophy within schools as a place of critique, subversion, and contestation in the face of the conservatism of those in charge of philosophy as an institution and the rigidity of control over its practice. They argued that simply advocating a more ‘up-to-date’ curriculum for philosophy was not enough. This would only be recuperated. To guarantee both survival and renewal required reconsidering the structural aspect of its entire ‘apparatus’. This was what had to be changed in order to transform philosophy itself rather than simply altering its ‘contents’. The Marxist philosopher and teacher at Vincennes, François Châtelet, had attacked philosophy in French education as a bastion of traditionalism in his book La Philosophie des professeurs of 1970.96 Châtelet portrayed this establishment as a dead hand, stif ling innovation and presiding over a moribund discipline. His attack is thus in the same line as that of Paul Nizan in 1932 against what he termed Les Chiens de garde, but is less polemical and more pessimistic.97 He termed it ‘La P.S.U.’, la philosophie scolaire et universitaire, suggesting that there was no fundamental difference between the two — they functioned together in mutually determined inertia — and he portrayed it as ‘l’administration déférente d’un cadavre’ (p. 242).98 ‘La P.S.U.’ is ‘le lieu de l’intégration’ (p. 241), and like a vast stomach forever re-ingesting both new and old work alike, reducing it all to a banalized crib-sheet version of itself through the relentless pedagogical machine of programmes and exams. The way philosophy is taught in schools determines its existence in universities, eliminating the possibility of renewal in either. New forms of knowledge are entered in to the Programme as a paragraph in the introduction or as an addendum (p. 217), without making any difference to the sheer force of pedagogical routinization. Châtelet’s book consists principally of an analysis of the manuals used by philosophy pupils as crib-books, and of the ‘lieux communs’ of ‘la bêtise domi­ nante’ which philosophy in its present form of teaching perpetuates. These manuals act as a contradiction of the philosophy teachers claims to intellectual freedom and the engagement in untrammelled philosophical ref lection with their class, and they show up school philosophy for the reductive routine way in which it in fact operates. He does affirm, in the midst of his excoriation of philosophy, that if there is no good philosophy, there is no good suppression of philosophy either (p. 28). But his account leaves little manoeuvring room for the creation of alternative modes of pedagogical practice. The key difference is also that, although he shares the discontents of GREPH with the current way it is taught, Châtelet was not simultaneously dealing with a situation of institutional crisis for the discipline and was not forced to incorporate a defence of philosophy into his attack. This led them to advocate alternatives in order to bring about renewal and transformation, rather than simply subjecting philosophy to a triumphant ideological unmasking and declaring it complicit with ‘the dominant ideology’. The difficulties of this double strategy for GREPH are evident. Like Châtelet,

Politics and Reform

67

they saw philosophy as a potential source of radicalism, but unlike him, they wanted to retain the sense that its institution was not so much ‘un cadavre’ as ‘un corps en décomposition’ and to take this decomposition as an opportunity.99 GREPH referred to the new areas and approaches which both those in control of the philosophy institution, and those in power, effectively stif led. The view that Marxism was a specific target of the reforms was expressed by Madeleine Barthélémy-Madaule, a philosophy teacher at the University of Amiens, in La Nouvelle Critique.100 GREPH broadened this view out to the need for a critique of the technocratic order which was busy reforming the educational system in its image and for its purposes. For them, in contrast to Cousin’s defensive schema, that philosophy was both innocent and invaluable, it was now designated as both dangerous and useless simultaneously. The political régime associated philosophy with the educational radicalism and youth ferment of 1968 and it was trying to outlaw ‘la pensée 68’ as a series of ‘doctrines négatives’, just as Duruy had re-instituted Cousin’s spiritualism as a bulwark against the ‘doctrines négatives’ of materialism.101 The charge of uselessness had come to the fore in the curricular debates at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but at that time philosophers such as Fouillée had been able to produce unabashedly elitist defences. The upholders of the status quo recycled these defences even as they tried to find new adaptations of them more in keeping with the mantras of modernization and democratization. This led to a series of contradictory claims made on behalf of philosophy in its current form in French education. The disjunction between a very traditionalist academic establishment and practice of philosophy and the idea of philosophy within education as the place for contestation was noted by Olivier Roy, writing in Le Doctrinal de Sapience a few years after the ‘bataille de la presse’.102 He argued that what the Haby reforms wanted to suppress was less the actual current practice of philosophy than a particular image of non-conformism and subversion, and that the question of the actual practice of philosophy teachers was not his chief concern. GREPH, meanwhile, argued from a position of both intellectual and political subversion, and of the crucial links between the two, and took this ‘image’ of subversion seriously. For them, there was no doubt that one of the motivations of the Haby reform was, as Derrida commented, to ‘soustraire la masse de lycéens à l’exercice de la critique philosophique et politique’ (DP, p. 170). This was more than a matter of trading on an image alone. Radicals And Conservatives: The Politics of the Disciplines In response to the outrage provoked by the proposals and the debate which had raged in the press, Haby’s law of July 1975 abandoned the idea of basing terminale on pupil choice. The immediate threat of philosophy as compulsory in première level only, and then as a particular option in terminale, therefore disappeared from view for the time being. The ‘battle’ was won, to this extent at least. This was at best a temporary reprieve rather than an outright victory, however. The law which was passed fixed an overall framework, but the implementation in detail, and especially in regard to outcomes for particular subjects, was pushed over onto the Décrets d’application, the next stage of the process.103 The detailed changes

68

Politics and Reform

to the upper levels of secondary education were therefore planned for the autumn of 1981. By the time of the ‘États-généraux de la philosophie’ at the Sorbonne in 1979, a reduction in philosophy in schools was still in view.104 The intention was now to have three or four hours of compulsory philosophy a week for all pupils. The number of teaching posts was still being cut — by nearly 50% in 1978–79, as compared with 70–75% in 1973–74. The victory of the ‘bataille pour la philosophie’ was only partial and short-lived, therefore, and GREPH’s campaigning activities continued over this period. The question of ‘positionality’ was the crucial one in GREPH’s foundation and in their first sustained campaign. This question was used to dismiss the group in retrospect as simply the expression of a position — radical, avant-garde, renowned — within a particular circumscribed field of possibilities. According to this logic, their modes of operation and ref lection could only ever be ‘characteristic’ of a point within a pre-ordained configuration. This cast aside the political and intellectual content of their work, in terms of its substantive engagement with both education and philosophy. In GREPH’s terms, however, positionality represented their dual strategy of defence and attack. In order to both defend and attack, they set themselves the task of a complex mode of self-situation, analysing the discourses which circulated in order to dismantle them and then to effect a transformative critique. This strategy aimed to avoid excoriating the traditionalism of the ‘P.S.U.’, as François Châtelet had, to the point at which philosophy’s continued existence in schools could only seem untenable, because permanently compromised by its insti­t u­tionalization. At the same time, GREPH sought to avoid functioning merely as part of an unthinking protectionist reaction — a mere ‘beet-growers’ lobby — acting out of what Frédéric Gaussen had described as the ‘patriotisme de disci­pline’, the professional deformation of French teachers in general.105 They thus began a work of theoretical ref lection on the pre-existing forms of the defence of philo­ sophy in order to situate themselves against it. GREPH set out to open a debate on what Jean-Luc Nancy was to term the politics of the disciplines (QP, p. 215), as opposed to what might be called a tradeunionism of knowledge. This aim was stated at the beginning of QP as part of their avowedly anti-corporatist positioning: Et bien qu’il [le GREPH] vise au premier abord un enseignement déterminable dans la grille des disciplines, telle qu’elle est aujourd’hui constituée, il met cette grille en question. Avec le corporatisme prétendument apolitique qui lui est en général associé (QP, p. 8).

This was their more generalizing intent, not simply to focus on philosophy in isolation, but to put into question the implications of the current divisions and teaching of different subjects in relation to one another. This analysis was conceived of as both epistemological and political. Their desire to address the actual reform as a whole was not borne out during the press campaign, although their attacks on technocracy testify vividly to the embattled situation of the humanities. Within their perspective the democratizing intentions of the reform were obfuscatory rhetoric, aiming only to create more and better skilled workers, and thus to service the capitalist state. But to assess the aims of the reform overall would have required

Politics and Reform

69

a wider analysis of the politics of education and the history of those politics. Their diagnosis of a very real and tangible ‘demand’ for philosophy — despite everything, despite what the technocratic government might claim, despite the sterility of official academic philosophy — stems from their own experiences in ’68, and it subsequently formed one of the recurring themes of the ‘Étatsgénéraux de la philosophie’. Michèle Le Dœuff gives an account of a ‘teach-in’ she participated in as a lycée prof de philo in 1968 in order to explain and illustrate this unaccustomed demand, one which, she comments, is normally extinguished by the education system itself.106 The analyses of the discourse, and the philosophy of the reform, of the official defence, and of the current institutional arrangements which constituted philosophy as a material practice which the texts first published in GREPH’s name in 1975 — all either by Derrida, or recognizably Derridean — are strongly linked to the accounts of the demands for new forms of knowledge and of teaching of ’68. Lyotard’s attacks on the transparent ideology behind the ‘sham’ pretence of democratization and modernization of the Fouchet reforms are, as noted already, very similar. His account of what was most worthwhile in his experience at Vincennes, written in 1978, are also identical to Le Dœuff ’s in the value they place on teaching as contestatory activity.107 Lyotard explains how, when his class on operators in persuasive discourse focusing on Plato and Aristotle was interrupted by a strike ‘commando unit’, he continued teaching, but ‘subjecting the statements relative to the strike to the same analysis [...] thinking together about the discourses that persuade or dissuade us’. The type of analysis of discourse and of critical unmasking characteristic of the documents section of QP is clearly part of an attempt to prevent the shut-down of the effects of ’68. As a series of contestatory practices aimed at intellectual and institutional trans­ formation, and at reasserting the impossibility of separating the two, the provenance is clear therefore. The strategic mode of defence and attack, working simultaneously on two fronts, both theoretical and practical, has also been glossed as ‘quasi une règle de politique déconstructive’ by Geoff Bennington, in the book he produced with Derrida in 1991.108 GREPH faced a particular ‘torsion’: ‘la philosophie qu’on défend n’est plus exactement celle qu’on attaque’. Their self-ref lexive positioning forms the ‘double strategy’ of deconstructive politics on this account, staging oppositionality from within. Robert Young pro­ vides a useful point of comparison in this arena of the ‘politics of the disciplines’, and in particular the humanities. He traces a similar predicament in the defence of humanities subjects in the English context.109 In the face of a utilitarian and technicist atmosphere of increasing hostility to the humanities from 1979 onwards, the part of the would-be disciplinary radicals was played in this context by the literary theorists. When trying to engage with the attacks on the humanities within British universities, they found that: the terms by which their subject was established historically, and the only effective ones with which it could still be defended, were those of the cultural conservatism and humanist belief in literature and philosophy that ‘literary theory’ has, broadly speaking, been attacking since the 1970s. (p. 205)

Seeking to protect their discipline, the only defence was the one which they wanted

70

Politics and Reform

to attack in intellectual terms. Young suggests that this situation is indicative of what he terms the limitations of oppositional politics, since in attacking humanism, the radicals found that they were placing themselves effectively in consort with Government policy. Consequently, Young argues, the defence of the study of the humanities as such was unavoidably left to those with conservative views of the subjects concerned who had fewer qualms about recycling nineteenth-century attacks on ‘barbarism’ — in other words, promoting science, technology, and the principle of ‘skills-oriented’ utility within education. Young is right to identify the uneasy position of educational radicals, particularly those whose concerns are disciplinary — that is to say, attacking and questioning the prevailing values and ideology of the institutionalization of their discipline, as well as its methods of teaching and assessment. The position of those debating at the level of the system as a whole is to some extent more straightforward since they do not have to wage internal battle with their most immediate colleagues simultaneously. As Derrida commented in the interview given in September 1975, after the initial period of the ‘bataille’ for and against philosophy: L’hétérogenéité du champ de luttes requiert qu’on s’allie, dans une situation donnée, à des forces qu’on combat ou combattra en un autre lieu, à un autre moment.110

However, Robert Young sees the available options as simply for or against ‘utili­ tarian’ government interventions, and hence the ground for debate is completely co-opted by the latter. Effectively, on this view, educational radicals are left with no position from which to argue. Young himself sees this as deriving historically from the left’s suspicion of educational utility, given that the aim of social change through education seemed to them to have been already annexed, and its emancipatory aim curtailed by the utilitarians themselves in the context of the mid-nineteenthcentury English debate concerning education, specifically higher education. For Young, these lines of debate have remained in place, and have continued to vitiate attempts at genuine radicalism, or what he terms ‘effective socialist argument for higher education’ (p. 194). GREPH was similarly engaged in this kind of politics of the humanities, but the terms of their debate were changed by their focus on schools rather than universities. Philosophy as the locus of critique was, crucially, a function of its place in mass, compulsory education. Also, GREPH was more concerned to differentiate their defence from previous and contemporary positions than their attack. The pre-existing discourse of the defence of philosophy in schools, which was more or less coeval with the institutional arrangement itself, provided them with one of their most significant strands of discursive analysis. The literary theorists of Robert Young’s account had spent ten years transforming their subject from within and now faced external pressure for the first time. The catalyst of Haby’s proposals meant that GREPH’s attacks on its own discipline were both ‘institutional’ and ‘intellectual’ from the outset, and the difficulties of divorcing the two arenas so neatly were foregrounded as part of its constitutive project. The prior history of philosophy’s institutionalization had created a narrative of the explicit philosophie d’État project of Cousin, followed by abolition, followed by the golden age of freedom from institutional constraint, according to the mythologization.

Politics and Reform

71

This narrative of the incursions of the state was the backdrop of their actions, making their attempts to repoliticize the debate on academic philosophy crucially different to that of English universities a few years later. Above all, GREPH sought both to defend and attack by means of what Guy Coq termed a ‘souci du concret’.111 Their series of concrete demands included the level at which philosophy was introduced, the number of hours, and hence its position and function within secondary education.112 The politics of the disciplines which the dual strategy sought to make visible meant not accepting inevitable recuperation as a given. In contrast to François Châtelet’s attack of five years earlier, La Philosophie des professeurs, it also meant re-examining the position of philosophy in education in order to transform it, and not assuming that institutionalization could only be a kind of corruption. The title of Châtelet’s book implied an opposition between philosophy and the establishment of its teaching. The implication is that the institutionalization of philosophy can only ever be a debasement of philosophy itself, an untrue version, through the sheer force of pedagogical routinization and institutional recuperation. Philosophy is therefore allowed immense potential power, but is always necessarily vanquished by the organization of its practice: this is the same paradox of ‘Socrate-fonctionnaire’, alive as a form of attack on philosophy in French schools since Cousin, which was referred to in the previous chapter. To examine GREPH and Derrida’s attempt to find ways of working through this paradox and effecting change, and the dual strategy which Geoff Bennington named as a ‘quasi-rule’ of deconstructive politics, the next chapter will turn to the problematic underlying the perceived paradox of Socrate-fonctionnaire, that of the putative indissociability of philosophy and its teaching. Notes to Chapter 2 1. On the background to May ’68, there is of course a huge bibliography available. I am not here attempting to cover this ground again. See Atack; Cockburn and Blackburn, eds.; Hanley and Kerr; Hamon and Rotman, 1988; Joffrin; Reader and Wadia; K. Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives; Schnapp and Vidal-Nacquet, eds.; and Touraine, Le Mouvement de mai and 1972. 2. Cf. Ferry and Renaut, eds., and Pinto, Les Philosophes entre le lycée et l’avant-garde. 3. Douailler et al., eds., La Philosophie saisie par l’État, p. 10. As will be explained below, Douailler and Vermeren (another co-editor) are both former members of Le Doctrinal de Sapience; they produced this collection as the result of a seminar and work-group at the CIPh. They coined the expression ‘l’ordinaire de la philosophie’, and that of the ‘petits écrits’, the discourse on philosophy teaching in France characterized by its obscurity and repetitiveness from the midnineteenth century onwards. GREPH’s work both belongs to this genre and stands in critical relation to it. 4. États-Généraux de la philosophie, p. 12. 5. ‘Actes premiers’, QP, p. 427; ‘Protestation contre le rapport du jury de Capès’, QP, p. 439. 6. AP was published in QP, also in 1976 as an annexe to Derrida’s contribution to Grisoni, ed., and again in Derrida, Du droit à la philosophie (DP). 7. I will examine this double approach in the next chapter. 8. In 1970 there were 1,673 philosophy teachers in schools, an increase from five years previously when there were 1,311. In 1960 there were only 905, and in 1946, 600 (Pinto, Les Philosophes entre le lycée et l’avant-garde, p. 144). University philosophy teachers in comparison were small in number: 124 in 1963, and 267 in 1967. In the same period the number of university teachers in Lettres as a whole went from 1,150 at the start of the 1960s to 5,782 in 1969, more than twice

72

Politics and Reform

the total of only four years earlier (Bourdieu, Homo Academicus, p. 271). 9. ‘Un meeting du GREPH’, Le Monde, 23 April 1975, p. 12. 10. This was carried out by the GREPHON group, headed by Michèle Le Dœuff; it was formed in October 1974 (QP, p. 432). Its analyses will be discussed in Chapter 4. The topic of women in the history of philosophy and its teaching is also listed — a rare gesture towards feminism in the political and philosophical project of GREPH. It is not linked directly to Le Dœuff here, but she did work on this topic, publishing her essay ‘Women and Philosophy’ in English in 1977, and her book Recherches sur l’Imaginaire Philosophique in 1980 (the book includes both this essay and ‘En rouge dans la marge’, one of her two contributions to QP). 11. This idea of a ‘contre-séminaire’ is not elaborated upon further at this point, acting only as a glancing reminder of the problematic of staging oppositionality from within. I will return to this in Chapter 5 in the context of the founding of the CIPh a decade later. It is at that point that the temptation to style such operations as, simply, anti-institutions is more fully broached, and particular vigilance with regard to this is brought into play. 12. This essay is examined in detail in Chapter 3. 13. François George’s novel Prof à T., focusing on the discontents of a provincial prof de philo, was published in 1973: on this, see Reader, pp. 133–35. A testimony to the teacher depicted in this novel, i.e. George himself, appeared in Le Doctrinal de Sapience (see Petit, p. 13). Other cultural representations of the philosophy teacher include Jacques Sojcher’s Le Professeur de philosophie, published a little later in 1976, and the much earlier novel by Louis Guilloux, Le Sang noir (1935), and also those of Barrès and Bourget at the end of the nineteenth century. The latter two will be discussed again in Chapter 4, in relation to the myth of the prof de philo arising from the period of the Third Republic. 14. The title was taken from the popular literature of the ‘Blue Library’ published in Troyes in the eighteenth century (Fynsk, ‘Legacies of May’, p. 968). Vermeren was at the time a lycée teacher in Troyes. 15. The announcement of this centre and its work was made in the journal of the Doctrinal by Rancière and Jean Borreil (QP, p. 461). Les Révoltes logiques took its name from Rimbaud’s Illuminations: see K. Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives. On the constitution of the ‘popular’ and the ‘people’ as object of study in the historiography of the nineteenth century, and the inf luence of the concept of ‘history from below’ and the work of E. P. Thompson in this context, see Rif kin and Thomas, eds. 16. Vermeren, p. 6. 17. Hence the title of their publishing enterprise ‘Les Almanachs du philosophe boîteux’ which published their re-editions of Joseph Ferrari and Cousin’s Défense, which were referred to in the Chapter 1, above. 18. Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, p. 157. 19. Ibid., p. 155. 20. See Bourdieu and Passeron, Les Héritiers and La Reproduction, and Baudelot and Establet. It is interesting to consider, as a counterpoint to the embedded and specific, yet both historical and theoretical, projects of GREPH and the Doctrinal members, the criticisms made by nonFrench observers of the theoretical models of Althusser’s ISA and Bourdieu and Passeron’s conception of reproduction and the ‘cultural arbitrary’. Both have been criticized for being, in fact, ‘covertly dependent on the structure of French education’ in the development of their models — as Archer argues in ‘Bourdieu’s Theory of Cultural Reproduction’, p. 225 — which thereby impedes theoretical transportability in terms of reach and explanatory power. GREPH acknowledged that it had to restrict its focus to the system in which it operated since its aim was both theoretical and practical from the start. On Althusser’s limitations in this regard, see Kelly, ‘Materialism in Nineteenth-Century France’, p. 31. QP includes in the final document section a denunciation of the Comité Consultatif des Universités for its refusal to accept Althusser on the official list of those able to work as maîtres de conferences (p. 469). 21. Althusser had been scheduled to speak at a seminar on the Haby reforms organised by Guy Besse of the Parti Communiste français (PCF) for the Centre d’Études et de Recherches Marxistes held on 16 and 17 March 1975, although in the event he sent a message of support but did not attend. For a PCF declaration of support for philosophy, see Besse.

Politics and Reform

73

22. These figures are taken from A. Prost, 1989, p. 24. 23. Robert, pp. 90 ff. This long and drawn-out process of consultation represented a procedural departure for the ministry and was a very public attempt at forging consensus prior to determining action. It was because of this that GREPH first ‘heard rumours’ of the changes which would affect them over a protracted period, which increased the charged atmosphere of protest and allowed them a long period over which to mount their own campaign. For an initial overview of Haby’s proposals for all three sectors, primary, middle, and lycée, see Le Monde de l’éducation, 16 (April 1976). Accounts of the reforms can also be found in Halls; H. D. Lewis; Prost, Éducation, société et politique; and Raynaud and Thibaud. On earlier attempts to create an école unique and to remove the elitist privileges of the lycées, see Archer, ‘Education’, and Prost, Histoire de l’enseignement en France. Robert, p. 91 points out that this was the first time that the word ‘system’ was used to designate the entire educational apparatus. This was symptomatic of Haby’s modernizing, systematizing intentions, but also of his desire to integrate primary and secondary education, so that they would be seen no longer as two different kinds of education — the legacy of the nineteenth-century distinction between education for the masses and education for the bourgeoisis — but as two stages within a single whole. 24. These figures are taken from Halls, p. 147. 25. The formulation of Ardagh, p. 128. 26. Gaussen, ‘M. Haby devant l’histoire’. 27. Both cited in ibid. 28. Raynaud and Thibaud, p. 137. On the Republican educational values, see Corbett, 1996. 29. Coq, ‘Propositions aux enseignants’, p. 4. Coq was himself a teacher and a frequent commentator on both educational and philosophical issues at the time for Esprit and other more specialist publications. I will look at these below. Coq was a GREPH sympathizer, presenting them within his overview account of the effects of Haby’s reforms in 1980 as ‘l’un des rares centres possibles d’un renouvellement de l’enseignement philosophique en France’ (Coq, ‘Qui a peur de la philosophie?’, p. 55). 30. See Le Monde de l’éducation, 33 (September 1977). 31. Haby, ‘On est allé trop loin dans certaines réformes’. Haby insists throughout the interview that his hostility to pedagogical innovation is not part of his modernization. Cf. Haby, ‘Premières réf lexions sur la réforme’, and Prost, Éloge des pédagogues, p. 213, n. 2. 32. Robert, p. 98. Jean Lacroix commented in his article ‘Apprendre à réf lechir’ for Le Monde, 4–5 May 1975, : ‘l’on sait que les régimes autoritaires, comme le Second Empire, tendent toujours à limiter ou à supprimer un tel enseignement’. 33. On the campaign for history, see Le Monde de l’éducation, May 1980, ‘Histoire: La vérité sur une crise’. In addition to Haby’s measures, the historians were also involved in the controversy over teaching ‘l’histoire immédiate’ i.e. post-war history, which was not included in the school syllabus. Cf. also the intervention by the general secretary of the APHG at the ‘États-Généraux de la Philosophie’ held in June 1979, who views the struggle as the same for history as for philosophy, États-Généraux de la Philosophie, 1979, pp. 89–90. 34. For an overview of history teaching in France, see Joutard, and for more in-depth studies of its role in the inculcation of Republican values of citizenship and patriotism, Citron, Déloye, and also Héry. 35. Cf. Vidal-Naquet et al. 36. See Lyotard’s ‘Preamble to a Charter’ (1968), reprinted in his Political Writings. I refer to this edition throughout because of its greater accessibility than the original articles. For accounts of the Fouchet reforms and the complex changes made in the university structure, see Halls, pp. 181–84, and Gildea, 2002, pp. 111 ff. 37. Marshall, p. 181. 38. Poucet, pp. 335 ff., 356–57, and 361. Poucet more or less omits the Haby reforms since the archives which form the major source of his study are as yet unavailable to scholars. Chaplin, p. 175 notes the significance of the reforms as illustrative of ‘the relationship between philosophy and the French public’. 39. The proceedings were published as Recherches sur l’enseignement philosophique in 1971. Cf. Marchal, and Poucet, pp. 345–48. 40. See QP, pp. 454 and 461. GREPH explicitly positioned themselves between the so-called

74

Politics and Reform

defence of philosophy, and resigned themselves to ‘the death of philosophy’. Ferry and Renaut, eds., pp. 239 ff. consign them to this view, in a strange reduction of both Heidegger’s arguments about the end of metaphysics, Derrida’s philosophical positions in relation to this, and the fight for the institutional survival of philosophy. 41. Ferry and Renaut, eds., p. 239. 42. Dosse, II, p. 128. 43. Bloom includes a wistful reference to the fact that ‘Europeans’ remain existentially connected to philosophy throughout their lives because it is part of the school curriculum unlike in the States. He does not specify that this is only in fact true of France, nor that the campaign for its survival over the preceding decade had been headed by Derrida, his designated arch-enemy and — according to him — chief destroyer of liberal education and hence philosophy (p. 377). For a consideration of this problem of how to justify philosophy in a non-French context, see MacIntyre, ‘Are Philosophical Problems Insoluble?’, and for an example of such an attempt in a hostile Australian climate of utilitarianism, Coady. 44. Educational controversy in France is marked by a tradition of examining education as a whole as a specific project of social mobility and meritocracy, which can be deemed to have ‘failed’, as in the well-worn phrase ‘l’échec de l’école’. Debates about the constant reforms leading to particular modifications of curriculum or of classroom hours ref lect this degree of both politicization and fundamental questioning. An early example of this questioning of education as a specific, Republican project is Edmond Goblot’s 1925 Le niveau et la barrière which examined the significance of education for the bourgeoisie and the role of the classical humanities curriculum in schools as the creator of bourgeois status. 45. See the statistics section of ‘La Philosophie et ses contextes’ in Jacob, ed., i, p. 836. When those in charge of the educational system still viewed it as educationally fundamental, it was taught to a minority: 11,649 pupils in 1933. As its educational role shrank to one of distinction and prestige within the non-science subjects only, and not within education as a whole, so the numbers exposed to it increased as a result of the changing nature of the system — from 30,961 in 1950, to 255,919 in 1980, including the bac technique. The number of philosophy teachers has thus risen from 235 at the beginning of the ‘golden age’ in 1880 to 6000 today, 4000 of whom are in state education (Tavoillot, p. 235). 46. Cited in Brunet, p. 818. 47. This is the argument of G. E. Davie, the historian of Scottish universities, who argues from the perspective of the advantages of reintroducing and expanding philosophy: Davie, The Crisis of the Democratic Intellect and The Democratic Intellect. In Germany it was not compulsory in the same way: see Schmitt. 48. For an example of the defence of classics in the English context at the beginning of this cycle of massification of education, and the decline of the humanities as self-evidently the natural training-ground for an elite, cf. M. I. Finlay in J. H. Plumb (ed), 1964. Finlay insists that no subject can be maintained by compulsion. For a history of the ‘crisis’ of Classics and its strategies for a forced reinvention, cf. P. Cartledge in Y. Lee Too and N. Livingstone (eds), 1998. Classics has arguably functioned in analogous ways in English education to philosophy in France. Whilst studies of ‘the rise of English’, i.e. of the study of English as a national literature, abound, the larger history of this resides within the history of classics as a discipline. For an excellent history of classics within English education, cf. C. Stray, 1998. 49. Caveing, pp. 44 and 46. 50. For example, see Jonathan Rée’s overview of the history of philosophy as an academic discipline, the starting point of which is that philosophy used to be conceived of as a stage in education but is now a distinct area of knowledge (Rée, ‘Philosophy as an Academic Discipline’, p. 6). Its place in French schools meant that the debate around philosophy in France steadfastly refused to accept the idea of philosophy as a professionalized, ‘separate-but-equal’ discipline as a possibility. The defence of it as a particular stage in education feeds directly into the question of a correct ‘age for philosophy’ which GREPH set out to dismantle as a standard argument. This will be examined fully in Chapter 4. 51. In conclusion to his publication in book form of his editorials in the Revue de l’Enseignement Philosophique and as president of the APPEP, Jean Lefranc in 1994 commented: ‘c’est un unique

Politics and Reform

75

combat qu’il faut sans cesse soutenir à nouveau’ (Lefranc, p. 91). The APPEP, founded in 1947, viewed the Fouchet and Haby reforms as its period of glory and struggle, irrespective of the outcomes (ibid., p. 31). It is merely indicative of the intransigence and — admittedly understandable — protectionism of the Association that he claimed that the battle never changed: it was always philosophy versus anti-philosophy engaged in an unchanging battle — ‘l’anti-philosophie a toujours même visage’ (ibid.). For an example of a more recent defence of philosophy as a compulsory part of mass education, see P. Ricoeur’s introduction to Réussir la philosophie au bac, the manual for philosophy pupils assembled by Frédéric Gaussen and produced by Le Monde de l’éducation in 1994. 52. See D. Rancière, ‘L’État et la philosophie’, p. 5. 53. Caveing, p. 45. 54. Ringer, Fields of Knowledge, pp. 141 and 146. I have drawn this information from Ringer’s very thorough account of the curricular reforms at the turn of the century, and the arguments between upholders of Classics and Modern curricula: see, in particular, pp. 141–60. The latter camp was very much inf luenced by Durkheim; the former represented the humanities, including classics and philosophy. It thus was an extension of the ‘battle for the New Sorbonne’ of the same period, and the inf luence of the new social sciences in higher education and research. On the latter, see Bompaire-Evesque, and also Lepenies, Between Literature and Science. On philosophy in particular see Fabiani. Ringer’s version of the ‘golden age’ of philosophy relies heavily on Fabiani’s work. See also Fouillée on the reform of philosophy. Keylor discusses Fouillée and the rivalry between the philosophy and history professions. 55. For example, Guéhenno: ‘C’est la philosophie de ses écoles qui définit et commande la culture d’un peuple’. 56. Duméry, ‘La Philosophie et les pèse-lettres’. 57. Emmanuel, writing in Le Figaro on 18 February 1975. Emmanuel had some experience of educational controversy and curricular reform, having served on a commission for the reform of French literature teaching four years earlier. 58. Duverger. 59. Durkheim, 1975, p. 403. 60. Another example of this charge against philosophy teaching in France — that it induced a facile relationship to ideas based on synthetic and rhetorical skills only — was made by the former philosophy teacher (albeit only brief ly) turned social scientist Claude Lévi-Strauss, in his explanation of why he felt compelled to give up philosophy (Lévi-Strauss, p. 37). 61. Coq, ‘Qui a peur de la philosophie?’, p. 57. 62. Gaussen, ‘Mettre la “philo” à sa place’. 63. The sciences humaines had by this time been ‘upstart’ for approximately one hundred years. I use both terms — human and social sciences — but of course do not wish to suggest an equation between what is understood in English by social science and in French by sciences humaines. The institutional and intellectual history of the two is significantly different. I therefore use the English phrase to refer to the terrain of the French sciences humaines simply as a convenience. For an initial attempt to survey some of the problems of comparative history of the disciplines with regard to the English and French social science traditions, see Collini, ‘ “Discipline history” and “Intellectual history” ’. 64. Emmanuel. 65. Brooks provides an in-depth account of this emergence. 66. Lacroix. 67. See the article in La Croix by the Catholic philosopher Étienne Borne, himself a former pupil of Alain. Henri Duméry argued that the culture versus technique opposition could only lead to ‘une idéologie rêveuse’, dormant in the humanities, and a massive, naïve ideology of power and interest in the ‘technologies [...] hébétées par leurs certitudes’ (Duméry, ‘Les Philosophes se rebiffent’). 68. See K. Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, p. 186 on the funding of the social sciences by the Rockefeller and the Ford Foundations in the post-war period. This led to the foundation of the EHESS in 1975, developed out of the sixth section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE), originally founded by Victor Duruy as a German-style integrated research institute, as

76

Politics and Reform

already mentioned in the last chapter. Derrida was to be appointed in 1984 (he was elected in 1983) as directeur d’études in ‘Les institutions philosophiques’, after twenty years teaching as a maître-assistant at the ENS. 69. Bernadi, Fussler, Henry, and Lhomme. 70. Poucet, pp. 335–36. The APPEP’s official pronouncement manifested alarm that philosophy was being redefined as a ‘literary’ discipline. They argued that secondary education as a whole was and should be considered as ‘un enseignement de culture, la considération des carrières ultérieures ne pouvant venir qu’en second rang. [...] La classe de philosophie n’est pas une classe littériare, mais elle est le couronnement de toutes les études secondaires, aussi bien scientifiques que littéraires’ (Revue de l’enseignement philosophique, 15 (1965), cited in Poucet, pp. 356–57). 71. Dreyfus and Khodoss, pp.1008–11; cf. the response of Jeannette Colombel’s, also in Les Temps modernes. 72. Although they do not refer to this essay, Jean-Luc Nancy, together with a literature teacher, Bernadette Gromer, tackled exactly this schema of the relationship between literature and philosophy teaching, and the relationship of both to language in their teaching, as part of the experiments in teaching younger pupils philosophy which they carried out for GREPH. I will examine their account in detail in Chapter 4. 73. On the legacy of Cousin’s version of psychology, based on the unity of the self, see J. Goldstein, ‘Foucault and the Post-Revolutionary Self ’, pp. 101 ff., and on sociology as a ‘disloyal opposition’ operating within the space of philosophy and depending on philosophical assumptions, see Brooks, p. 15. 74. Bourdieu and Passeron, ‘Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945’, pp. 211–12. I return to the relationship between sociology and philosophy in terms of Bourdieu’s own attempts to ‘desacralize’ philosophy in France in the next chapter. 75. D. Rancière, ‘L’État et la philosophie’, p. 5. 76. Cf. Jankélévitch, ‘Pour la philosophie’, p. 26: ‘sa fonction est de contester, mais son destin est d’être contestée’. Jankélévitch, ‘Philosophes et Bovidés’. Cf. also his ‘Assassiner la philosophie’. 77. Ferry and Renaut, La Pensée 68, p. 39. 78. Ferry and Renaut, La Pensée 68, p. 40; and Ferry and Renaut, ‘Philosopher après la fin de la philosophie?’ (1984), reprinted in Ferry and Renaut, eds., p. 232. 79. Those unsympathetic to Derrida as a philosopher, such as the French analytic philosophers Jacques Bouveresse and Joëlle Proust, joined in the criticism of radical posturing both at the time and subsequently. Bouveresse, writing in the special issue of Critique which announced the ‘end of the end of philosophy’ in 1978, commented of GREPH’s title Qui a peur de la philosophie? that ‘les philosophes ont besoin de se sentir dangereux’, and that it would be difficult to persuade ‘le pouvoir’ that philosophy teaching is both a serious threat and a necessity because of the threat which it poses to that power (Bouveresse, ‘Pourquoi pas des philosophes?’, p. 106). Proust chimed with Ferry and Renaut’s broad-scale characterization and dismissal in her opening essay to the special issue of Critique on Continental versus Analytic philosophy in 1992. She charged them with ‘une conception sacralisée du personnage du philosophe’ [rather than the philosophy teacher] based on ‘un pathos du risque’, and of thinking at the limits, given the philosopher’s self-appointed task of uncovering ‘l’impensé du texte’ (pp. 12–13). Their subNietzschean rhetoric is of the courage of the one who dares to unmask and the posture of the heroic philosopher. Echoes of this kind are to be found in the contribution of Martine Meskel and Michael Ryan to QP which invokes Nietzsche explicitly within a rhetoric of risk. GREPH alone dares to criticize philosophy teaching and is cast as the unhypocritical criminal in relation to the hypocritical judges (QP, p. 354). 80. As already mentioned in the last chapter, they completely ignore GREPH and its associates’ work on the history of philosophy teaching in their 1999 collection. 81. Cf. Lefranc, p. 30, who uses this formula as justification of philosophy’s unique contribution within a modern society in an editorial from 1982. 82. Declaration of philosophy teachers of Saint-Malo, October 1975, cited in Robert, p. 98. 83. Reprinted in QP, they function together with the ‘Actes Premiers’ and the ‘Avant-Projet’ as the founding documents of GREPH. They are also reprinted in DP. 84. Le Dœuff, ‘The Philosopher in the Classroom’, p. 3. Le Dœuff is not named as the interviewee here, but referred to only as ‘a representative of GREPH’.

Politics and Reform

77

85. Cf. Le Dœuff, QP, p. 416. 86. Cf. Brunet, p. 815. 87. Cf. Haby, Combat pour les jeunes Français, pp. 109–10. Similar remarks were made in response to their proposals to extend philosophy by both Haby and the APPEP (see QP, p. 8). André Robert, in his history of recent educational reforms in France, singles GREPH out for attention in relation to the Haby reforms, only to make the same mistake (Robert, p. 98). 88. ‘Université critique’ report: introduction reproduced in Schnapp and Vidal-Nacquet, eds., pp. 679–81, quoted in Atack, p. 66. 89. On Derrida’s involvement at Vincennes in advising on courses on philosophy and psychoanalysis, see Dosse, II, p. 128. As part of the seminar at the ENS in which Derrida introduced the subject of the history of the teaching of philosophy, he also brought in a corpus of Marxist texts to his teaching for the first time — Marx and Engels, Gramsci, Althusser, Balibar (Derrida, Points de suspension, pp. 77–79. This is the second half of the interview held in 1975, published as ‘Ja ou le faux-bond’. In response to the interviewers’s question with regard to this, Derrida resists the designation of a specific body of texts as ‘the-Marxist-texts’ as opposed to ‘the-metaphysicaltexts’ (p. 77). 90. For an attempt to situate ‘theory’ in relation to ’68, see Starr. 91. Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne. This book, henceforth referred to as PMC, was written and published at the point at which Vincennes had its accreditation revoked by Beullac for having a curriculum which was too ‘innovative’ (PMC, p. 9). PMC was, of course, written as ‘a report on knowledge’ for the Québec government. 92. Cf. Readings, ‘From Emancipation to Obligation: Sketch for a Heteronomous Politics of Education’, p. 252. 93. As author of this report, Lyotard, p. 9 states that he is ‘un philosophe, non un expert’, the difference being that the latter knows what he knows whereas the former does not. As Readings points out, this is not so much ‘epistemological modesty’ as a ‘foreground[ing of ] the institutional question, [being] unable to take the institution as either merely an object of knowledge or a way of life’ (Readings, The University in Ruins, p. 220). 94. The terminology of ‘producing’ knowledge itself stemmed from an Althusserian-Marxist problematic. Lyotard viewed it with suspicion as already subsumed under a jargon of bureaucratic accountability and managerialism. 95. Le Dœuff, ‘The Philosopher in the Classroom’, p. 3. Le Dœuff also comments on the lack of interest of her students at the ENS either in Marx or in GREPH, another indication of the period of reaction which those participating in GREPH felt they were experiencing. 96. Châtelet, La Philosophie des professeurs. 97. Nizan and Sartre both criticized academic philosophy as the purveyor of a meaningless bourgeois humanism, one which included the study of Marx only in order to refute his arguments as part of a set routine. For Nizan, philosophy needed to be made more concrete and specific, and to change its teaching was an urgent task. His attack was therefore a counterblast to Benda’s call for a return to the pure, universal and abstract calling of the intellectual in 1927. Nizan encountered the same problem as Châtelet: in outlining the hidebound spiritualism and meaningless abstraction of the official presentation of a philosophy reduced to a doctrinal survey (in other words, a continuance of the Eclectic form of philosophy instituted by Cousin), he provides both a convincing account of the need for change and a convincing account of its futility. On Nizan’s metaphorical feminization of this decadent philosophy as passive, female, bloodless, merely women’s work, and ‘spinster’s embroidery’, see Moi, p. 58. Châtelet’s attack was greeted as largely a repeat performance of this earlier debate, and therefore dismissible: see Chirpaz. Chirpaz does not, however, point out the relevance of Lenin’s attack on philosophy teachers in 1908, described by Althusser in the appendix to Lénine et la philosophie. Althusser explains how Lenin’s attack was in terms of the mass effect of the philosophical teaching function, irrespective of the fact that a few of them will be able to exploit the ‘jeu’ that exists within the system in order to turn their teaching and ref lection against established values of ‘l’idéologie dominante’ (Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, pp. 46–47). In 1954, Althusser had come to broadly optimistic conclusions: the battle between Marxism and the spiritualism imposed as an orthodoxy by institutionalized philosophy testified to the vitality of the conf lict within philosophy, and as such was a marker of contemporary social struggle

78

Politics and Reform

(Althusser, ‘La Classe de philosophie’, p. 859). Althusser also added in a standard APPEP-style defence of philosophy as the crown of schooling in France, guarantor of its ‘caractère culturel’ as opposed to the threat of specialisation (p. 864). Henri Duméry’s evaluation of Pierre Thuillier’s Socrate fonctionnaire follows the same path as Chirpaz on Châtelet — that the need for a viable alternative to the deadening orthodoxy of academic philosophy is clearly expressed but not matched by suggestions of how to implement this (Duméry, ‘Socrate renvoie son traitement’). Thuillier’s attack is not, however, an ideological one, but rather a polemical account of how ‘philosophy’ has been ‘effrontément confisquée par une corporation’ (Thuillier, p. 2). As such, it bore greater similarities to J.-F. Revel’s 1955 pamphlet attacking the French institution of philosophy (see Revel, Pourquoi des philosophes?). 98. The acronym of ‘La P.S.U.’ also played on the abbreviation of the Parti Socialiste Unifié, in a satirical jeu de mots. 99. Derrida, ‘Où commence et comment finit un corps enseignant’, in DP, p. 120. 100. Barthélémy-Madaule, 1975, p. 24. 101. Cf. Séguin, p. 21. Also, Dutourd who commented: ‘Cocteau disait: “La France est composée de 40 millions de cartésiens qui n’ont pas lu Descartes.” La réforme de M. Haby a au moins cet avantage qu’elle nous évitera peut-être une France de cinquante millions de marxistes qui n’ont pas lu Marx’. 102. Roy, ‘Sophie va au lycée’, p. 12. 103. Cf. Robert, pp. 99 ff.; EG, pp. 11–14. 104. This was held on 16–17 June 1979, and published in book form in that year (États Généraux de la Philosophie). I return to this assembly in Chapter 4. 105. Gaussen, ‘Mettre la “philo” à sa place’. 106. Le Dœuff, ‘The Philosopher in the Classroom’, p. 3. 107. Lyotard, ‘Endurance et la profession’, reprinted in Lyotard, Political Writings, p. 72. 108. Derrida and Bennington, p. 244. 109. Young, Torn Halves, pp. 204 ff. 110. ‘Entre Crochets’, in Derrida, 1992, p. 23. This interview with D. Kambouchner, J. Ristat, and D. Sallenave was held in two parts in September and October 1975; it was published as ‘Entre Crochets’ in 1976, and reprinted in Derrida, Points… Interviews, 1974-1994, 1995. 111. Coq, ‘La philosophie dans l’enseignement’, p. 39. 112. The nature of these demands forms the focus of Chapter 4.

Chapter 3

v

The Double Strategy As a collective movement GREPH operated on deliberately non-cohesive, decen­ tralized lines, aiming for productive dispersal both geographically and throughout the institution, operating within different sectors, both school and university, and opening itself to the recipients of philosophy teaching, and to those in other disciplines. Subsequently, and as outlined in the first chapter, GREPH has been addended to Derrida’s oeuvre, as a ‘lieu d’engagement’, which turns out in these accounts to be not itself worthy of engaging with. In order to understand Bennington’s formulation of the double strategy as a ‘quasi-rule’ of deconstructive politics understood non-reductively, I now turn to the ‘Avant-projet’ (AP), drafted by Derrida, and to his 1976 essay ‘Où commence et comment finit un corps enseignant’ (OC). GREPH included members of a generation of newly appointed philosophy teachers — the youngest and lowliest members of the institution — as pointed out already, and thus it was not simply a Derridean project, nor a project restricted to Derrideans, nor one which somehow ‘applied’ his philosophy to teaching. However, Derrida was not simply the best-known and relatively older member of the group. He served as a figurehead, spoke on its behalf, and wrote its founding documents in consultation with others. He was also jointly responsible, together with founder GREPH member and school philosophy teacher, Roland Brunet, for initiating and organizing the ‘États-Généraux de la philosophie’, at the Sorbonne in June 1979.1 To examine GREPH’s aims and methods in terms of these texts is not, therefore, to traduce the collective and non-uniform aspects of the group. GREPH’s project was ‘a project of deconstruction’ whose ‘object [...] is in philosophical institutions’, as explained in Le Dœuff ’s account in Radical Philosophy.2 There was a risk of ‘idolatry’ of Derrida, as Martine Meskel and Michael Ryan warned in their contribution to QP (p. 377), and for this reason a certain ‘forgetting’ of Derrida’s work was necessary, so as not to operate only in its shadow; this, however, added to rather than detracted from the readiness to envisage their project as continuous with Derrida’s already published work and profile. Other main contributions to QP will be examined in detail in Chapter 4, notably those of Jean-Luc Nancy and of Roland Brunet, as well as the multiform nature of the collection. The decentralization espoused by GREPH meant that only a limited number of its activities were published in nonephemeral form, and Derrida’s own work takes a pre-eminent place within these. The question of the relationship between these essays, and other parts of Derrida’s work is also an important one, in terms of understanding GREPH’s afterlife and reception, its activities, and the place of both with reference to Derrida.

80

The Double Strategy

Derrida and the Institution In ‘Entre crochets’, the interview which took place in two parts in September and October of 1975 after the height of the ‘bataille de la presse’, and which was published in Digraphe, the journal founded and run by Derrida’s former and current students at the ENS-Ulm, Derrida was asked to consider the possible relations among and the necessity of the different forms of his activities.3 The questioners refer to a novel division of activities in his work since the publication of Glas in 1974: concurrent publications which are relatively ‘classical’ such as his essay on Lacan, ‘Le Facteur de la vérité’; those which are unclassifiable according to normal standards such as Glas; and interventions on certain political or institutional questions. In response, whilst he insists upon the interconnectedness of these apparently discontinuous activities, Derrida refuses as a possibility the production of a neat overview summary of ‘the logic [...] necessary to account for what must have in fact taken place between one text and another, between a group of texts and another’ (pp. 20–21). These texts are explanations of themselves and of their relations to the other texts taxonomized by his interlocutors as ‘classical’, ‘unclassifiable’, and ‘political’, and are themselves subject to internal divisions which resist such once-and-for-all categorization (p. 27). Derrida, as interviewee, is not about to produce a summary of links since this would not capture these relations in ways which the texts themselves do not already do. He does point out that Glas, published in 1974, took up the correspondence between Victor Cousin and Hegel which he again focused on in his contribution to QP, ‘L’âge de Hegel’.4 In his teaching, Derrida was including in his seminar series both the canonical texts of the Marxist tradition, as his interviewers mentioned, and the questions arising from his involvement with GREPH — the ‘defence’ of philosophy, the political and pedagogical projects of the Idéologues, and the question of the corps enseignant in relation to philosophy.5 But this does not mean that Derrida is willing to fall in with a diagnosis of some kind of Marxist or political ‘turn’ in his work, nor to situate his institutional questioning within this established framework. One of the reasons which he gives for not writing on these questions before now is that his thinking simply coincided with these critiques of the educational system (p. 22). He does not feel the need to parade this allegiance, nor to publish a record of his minor disagreements in the manner of a former disciple. Nor is it a question of thematic ‘matching’, although his emerging interest in Cousin, even before GREPH, and via Hegel, is significant. His questioners are chief ly concerned to link this analysis to the question of Derrida’s relation to historical materialism, and the question of ideology and superstructures (pp. 74–76). Their question is whether ‘a’ deconstruction can have as its object a corpus of Marxist texts — a string of names is given — in the same way as that which has been operated on metaphysical texts. The problem of the presumed unity of ‘a’ historical materialism is the same as that of a presumed unity for philosophy referred to above by Derrida in OC, and indeed of ‘deconstruction’ as a singular, delimitable force. Institutional concerns had been part of Derrida’s own experience as part of a system whose ingrained habits of pedagogical stagnation and rigid centralized control had undergone such radical upheavals and challenges as a result of 1968.6

The Double Strategy

81

In his thesis defence of 1980, like Le Dœuff in her presentation of GREPH to a non-French audience, and like Vermeren in his retrospective account, Derrida remarks upon the period after 1968 as one of retrenchment, during which ‘the old armatures were being hastily recentred, reconstituted, reconcentrated’ (p. 44). He thus introduced questions of the institution and of politics and philosophy into his teaching. As he cautions his interviewers in ‘Entre crochets’, this does not mean that his teaching in relation to the established institution of French academic philosophy suddenly became somehow isomorphic with the ‘irrecevable’ relationship of deconstruction to the philosophical tradition. He was not, in other words, now ‘teaching deconstructively’, if that was to be construed as entirely radical and discontinuous with the forms and norms of the institution. The double strategy of simultaneous defence and attack, and of theoretical and practical interventions which the AP had outlined, pertained no less to his teaching practice. Since it is not simply a matter of teaching different things, but of effecting a sim­ ul­taneous critique and transformation of ‘la scène, le cadre, et les rapports de forces’ (p. 23), as outlined in the last chapter, this kind of transformation would no longer couler des discours relevant du code ou du stéréotype révolutionnaire dans les formes intactes de l’enseignement, sa rhétorique, et ses programmes. (pp. 23–24)

This double strategy aims to resist ‘neutralization’ (p. 63), as opposed to the ‘nomadisme officiel’ (p. 65) of those who view themselves as free to wander the margins of the institution without attempting to change or analyse its structure.7 He sees this as a direct legacy of the ‘littéraires’ — the literary avant-garde who see their own practice as autonomous and unaffected by these issues (pp. 57–58). The point is thus not to produce texts which are inadmissible for a certain tradi­tion whilst affirming one’s unrelated left-wing sympathies. If the style of deconstruction is ‘irrecevable’ (OC, p. 117) for the institution of philosophy, it must be because it does not limit itself to the content of teaching. This is what, in OC and subsequently in his La Vérité en peinture of 1978, Derrida was to term the problematic of the ‘frame’.8 The essay ‘Où commence et comment finit un corps enseignant’ is therefore linked to earlier concerns in his work, but represents a particular moment of articulating more fully the problematic of philosophy and its institutional anchorage, undertaken as a continuation of ‘la lutte circonstantielle’ of militating against the Haby proposals, but at the same time going beyond these immediate circumstances.9 Philosophy and its Teaching/ Philosophy and its History GREPH’s complex mode of self-situating is not, then, merely incidental, a product of a curious alliance between radicals and conservatives within philosophy, and the result of the uncomfortable, contingent need to make common cause with an internal enemy in order to drive back the threat from without. This awareness of positionality explained in relation to the initial campaign in the last chapter was glossed by Bennington as a ‘fundamental principle’ of GREPH.10 Derrida stated in OC the dual necessity that this mode of activity entailed:

82

The Double Strategy luttant comme toujours sur deux fronts, sur deux scènes et selon deux portées, une déconstruction rigoureuse et efficiente devrait à la fois développer la critique (pratique) de l’institution philosophique actuelle et engager une trans­ formation positive, affirmative plutôt, audacieuse, extensive et intensive, d’un enseignement dit ‘philosophique’. (pp. 120–21)

The difficulty was of closing the gap between the two, as he commented in the ‘Entre crochets ’ interview (p. 28). This was the formulation taken up by Jonathan Culler, who suggested the irreducibility of theory as radical, ‘uncalculating pursuit’ to politics, and, simultaneously, the inevitable dilution of such radical theory in teaching.11 GREPH’s ‘Avant-projet’ elaborated the problematic of the institution of philosophy in a dual fashion: as the question of the relationship of philosophy and its teaching, and how this relationship had been inscribed. The aim was both theoretical and practical and the method both philosophical and historical. The dual methodology comprised both bringing to light the history of philosophy as an institution, and the history of the concrete situation in which they were functioning — in other words, philosophy teaching in France, as well as theoretical ref lection upon that history. This kind of research and analysis enabled them to intervene politically. The relationship was thus conceived of as mutually enabling — ‘the effectiveness of philosophical, textual critique itself calls for a practical, political involvement’.12 They are not reducible to one another, but not incommensurable either, in the way which Culler suggests. The study and consideration of disciplinarity is part of a project of critique (AP, p. 434), and the idea of a ‘crisis’ in philosophy links to the problematic of ‘reproduction’ which Derrida engages with in OC. The very possibility of a general, critical, and transformative history of philosophy and its teaching is the first task set out as GREPH’s mission (p. 433). The insistence in their title on ‘l’enseignement philosophique’ rather than ‘l’enseignement de la philosophie’ implies both the breaking up of philosophy as a singular, sovereign entity, and the interdependency of philosophy and its teaching. This is posed as a clustering of questions in AP, which is worth quoting in full since the entwined interrelations of these questions gives an initial indication of the difficulty of unravelling the problematic: Quel est le lien de la philosophie à l’enseignement en général: Qu’est-ce qu’en­ seigner en général? Qu’est-ce qu’enseigner la philosophie? En quoi l’enseigne­ ment (catégorie à analyser dans le réseau du pédagogique, du didactique, du doctrinal, du disciplinaire, etc.) serait-il essentiel à l’opération philosophique? Comment cette indissociabilité essentielle du didactico-philosophique s’est-elle constituée et différenciée? Est-il possible, et à quelles conditions, d’en proposer une histoire générale, critique, et transformatrice? (QP, p. 433)

This interdependence functions historically, in terms of the concrete ways in which philosophy has been practised, and the idea that the way in which it has been constituted as an academic discipline has affected the forms and norms of philo­sophical ref lection. The ‘double framing’ of the AP is both philosophical and historical. But this is a more complex issue to resolve than in other areas, such as literature. Behind this enquiry is the guiding self-idealization of philosophy as an educational practice: that philosophy teaching is both representative of education

The Double Strategy

83

as a whole and emblematic of philosophy as an activity, since philosophy teaching is itself a philosophical activity, a process, something taking place. The crucial correlation of this is that if philosophy is not taught, in some way it does not take place. The practice of philosophy, on this view, is its teaching, in dialogue, in the form of questioning between teacher and pupil — in other words, the originary scene of Socrates and the pupil-disciple. As such, it is a special case precisely because it is the most representative case of teaching and learning in general. Philosophy as incarnated by Socrates is first and foremost an activity, and that activity is its teaching. Teaching is the most representative form of philosophizing and the most authentic incarnation of active ref lection. Jean Lefranc, president of the APPEP, reiterated the crux of this idealization repeatedly as justification of philosophy teaching in schools, stating that ‘l’enseignement philosophique est inséparable de la parole vive, où se réinvente une pensée sans cesse en éveil’.13 This is the ‘essential indissociability’ of philosophy and its teaching, and from there, education in general. As the philosopher and philosopher of education, Amélie Oksenberg Rorty comments, Philosophers have always intended to transform the way we see and think, act and interact; they have always taken themselves to be the ultimate educators of mankind. [...] Even ‘pure’ philosophy — metaphysics and logic — is impli­ citly pedagogical. It is meant to correct the myopia of the past and the imme­ diate.14

This is what the philosopher David Cooper has termed the ‘Intimacy Thesis’: philosophy and education are so intimately related that an enterprise is educational if and only if it is philosophical.15 This is a relationship of mutuality, then, which is complicated by the existence of the third term: if all true education is philosophy, then philosophy is always educational in its mission to enquire after truth and root out illusions; and also, philosophy only occurs as an activity within education. Education is then a form of philosophical enquiry, and a version of its journey towards knowledge, without a fixed goal, ‘the truth wherever it may lead’. The essential reference point is Plato, and philosophy envisaged as the Socratic dialogue, conducted together by teacher and pupil, rather than indoctrination beaten into the bored schoolchild by an empowered, authoritarian pedagogue.16 The correlative of this is that philosophy is therefore peculiarly susceptible to an awareness of the gap between an idealized version of itself and the dull reality of its institutional forms and norms. This is the paradox of Socrate-fonctionnaire in both senses — the banalized routine of the institution, the contradiction of philosophy in the service of the state. If philosophy is most truly embodied in its teaching, then pedagogy, implying preset methods and inert curricula transmitted uniformly and routinely, functions as its implicit antithesis. To this cornerstone of philosophy’s self-conception must be added that referred to already, of philosophy as transcending its history or, at least, retaining an ahistorical relationship to that history.17 These two problematics are both embodied and perpetuated in the ways in which philosophy is taught and studied. This, in turn, forms an additional strand: not just the relationship of philosophy to its past, understood as a canon of great texts written in several European languages at

84

The Double Strategy

different points in history, but its refusal of material determination as such. The form of Socratic questioning, as Alan Montefiore has argued is also ‘the form of philosophy’s own looking back upon itself ’, its reference and relation to its own tradition, which is the main form of the activity of its teaching.18 Pierre Bourdieu addresses this cluster of questions in his consideration of his own, and sociology’s, relationship to the distinctive practice of philosophy. Bourdieu is referring to the modern pursuit of academic philosophy. He does not specify that he is restricting his analysis to the French tradition in terms of philosophy as a practice, but his accusations of the distortions produced by the teaching of philosophy in fact refer only to that system — in others words, the one in which he himself qualified as a ‘philosophe patenté’, as he is fond of saying.19 According to Bourdieu, the distinctive illusio of philosophy as a discipline is that it is not affected by such constraints, not described by its practices, or if such descriptions are produced, that they can form no part of philosophy itself: they will be historical and/or sociological only.20 Bourdieu is thus in agreement with GREPH on the point that philosophy must be forced to engage seriously with the history of these material conditions and practices, and that these do not have a merely external relationship to it. The institutional determinations of philosophy are seen as crucial in both their approaches. Both have as a declared aim the project of ‘dethroning’ philosophy, of removing the basis for its putative sovereignty over other forms of knowledge and modes of enquiry. As mentioned in the last chapter, Bourdieu’s analyses of the French educational system in terms of its perpetuation of inequality whilst proclaiming equality as its mission were an indispensable reference point for and inf luence on debates around the politics and functions of education in the 1960s in France. As such, his work is part of the intellectual background to any critical consideration of education at the time, and in particular of the specific problems of the French system. However, his relationship to philosophy is strikingly different to that of GREPH. Bourdieu, like GREPH, is concerned to re-emphasize the importance of the material conditions and practice of philosophy as a discipline. Bourdieu construes the relationship between philosophy and sociology — an unusually close one in intellectual and institutional terms in France21 — as one of conf lict: the latter threatens the former since it is capable of dethroning it.22 GREPH also avowedly set out to transform philosophy’s hegemonic relationship to other disciplines, and also saw this as a question of its institution. As staked out in the ‘bataille de la presse’, social sciences were identified both as a threat, and a bogus one by the offi­cial upholders of philosophy. GREPH, in its response to the Haby proposals, seemed to concur with this: forced to defend philosophical ‘specificity’, they argued for its role in critiquing the naïve ideologies of other disciplines, especially the sciences humaines. The question of where they stand in relation to other disciplines is therefore a crucial and difficult one. In his 1967 article, co-authored with Jean-Claude Passeron, ‘Sociology and Philo­sophy in France since 1945: Death and Resurrection of a Philosophy without Subject’, Bourdieu attributed the ahistorical ‘philosophia perennis’ approach to the teaching process of philosophy.23 He reactivates this challenge in several key articles

The Double Strategy

85

published in the 1980s.24 The first of these, ‘Les Sciences sociales et la philosophie’, was published in the journal which he founded in 1975, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales. Here he argues that the threat of sociology is not simply that of usurping philosophy’s territory but rather of offering a rival definition of intellectual activity to that which is ‘objectivement inscrite dans le poste et la posture du philosophe’ (p. 49). That is to say, sociology is ‘porteuse d’une autre philosophie’.25 The ‘philo­ sophie sociale’ which philosophy inscribes is incarnated in its attitude to history which is perpetuated through its teaching. Bourdieu takes his cue from Durkheim for this attack on philosophy through its dominant pedagogical modes. As mentioned already in Chapter 2, above, Durkheim was critical of philosophy teaching in France because of what he considered to be the tangibly noxious effects of its teaching. These effects comprised a specious cult of formalism and mere eloquence which placed sociological, ‘positive’ knowledge in a dependent, inferior relationship to its own forms of enquiry, duping the young by its facile brilliance. Bourdieu is not, of course, simply producing another defence of the positive methods of sociology. Rather, he defends the primacy of sociology in terms of its alternative philosophy — in other words, in terms of its superior theoretical legitimacy which derives from its realization of the constitutive role of the social and historical conditions of thought. Whereas philosophy claimed its critical superiority over the pre-critical naïveté of the sciences humaines in the debate over the Haby proposals, Bourdieu reverses this in order to claim the critical ascendancy of sociology over philosophy’s constitutive naïveté. Bourdieu cites Durkheim not in terms of his attack on the classe de philosophie, but in terms of the latter’s analysis of the study and teaching of classics in L’Évolution pédagogique en France.26 Bourdieu adopts this analysis of the methodology of the classical humanities (which was Durkheim’s target in the Classics versus Moderns curricular debate of the end of the nineteenth century) as an illustration of the links between philosophy’s ‘undeclared’ philosophy — in other words, its refusal of social, historical and political determination, its attitude to its own history, and how both are constituted and perpetuated in its material practice, which is its teaching. According to this analysis, historical texts are ‘neutralized’ (Bourdieu’s term) in a manner similar to the phenomenological reduction introduced by Husserl — the bracketing off of everything connecting the text to a society, and to a history. This method ‘derealizes’ the text, disallowing the determining import of its context. Pedagogically, the text is then actualized by the philosophy teacher each time he uses it in his class. The teacher produces a commentary on it which purports to be textual and philosophical, but is in fact historicizing without realizing it, since it is itself inevitably, as a discourse, ‘à la fois située et daté et achronique’. This commentary transforms the text it comments on unconsciously, in terms of the historical and social determinations of the teacher’s own discourse. The teacher’s refusal to situate the text which is the object of study results in the inability to take on board his own situatedness. To think philosophically is quite simply to think ahistorically, and to treat the philosophies of the past as ‘des options essentielles’ (p. 47). There is thus a structural unthought, ‘l’impensé de toute production philosophique’ (p. 50), which only sociological critique can bring to light. If the history of philosophy, according

86

The Double Strategy

to philosophers, is irreducible to social determination, sociological analysis will emancipate them from this mistaken belief, and will thus be able to livrer aux philosophes patentés ou apprentis l’histoire (sociale) de l’héritage philosophique, qui les possède d’autant plus complètement qu’ils croient mieux le posséder, ce serait leur offrir la possibilité d’une véritable psychanalyse de l’esprit philosophique et leur donner l’occasion de se réapproprier leur propre pensée. (p. 51)

This ‘impensé’ is instituted by the teaching of philosophy. The very name of philosophy is a ‘titre de noblesse’ which expresses its social distinction — in France (p. 50). Bourdieu argues both here and in ‘The Philosophical Institution’, his contribution to the collection Philosophy in France Today edited by Alan Montefiore (1983), that the only way to overcome the unthought limits of the social conditions of production and operation of thought is to produce a critical knowledge of them, instead of denying them (p. 5). The philosopher behaves like the artist, as if he were ‘an uncreated creator [...] who owes nothing to the institution’ (p. 4). In other words, the external history of philosophy is deemed to be not philosophical by philosophers, and to have only secondary, empirical status alongside their own discourse, which cannot be seen to be determined by it: this would be merely a sociological reduction. Bourdieu argues that his project of critique will enable not only the apprehension and description of these unseen constraints or ‘limits’, but will do so ‘in order to transcend them’ (p. 5). Bourdieu’s critique of philosophy does not however stem from the desire to alter philosophy’s relationship to itself, in terms of the relation it has to its own past. The social history of the conditions of thought which he produces aims to uncover ‘the implementation of socially constituted taxonomies’, as he comments in his provocatively entitled article, ‘Fieldwork in Philosophy’,27 and how ‘l’inconscient scolaire’ constitutes philosophy as a practice, in terms of the judgements it passes which purport to be philosophical but are in fact social.28 He sees philosophy’s ahistorical approach as an expression of ‘aristocratic’ disdain (‘Fieldwork in Philo­ sophy’, pp. 16–17). The danger and reductiveness of this approach is that it results in only ever discovering the same, single meaning in each philosophical text and in every philosophical practice: all are manifestations of the ‘social unconscious’ and of hierarchies which are ultimately social and not purely conceptual. Returning to Patrice Vermeren’s declaration of ‘l’impureté nécessaire’ of the relationship between philosophy and the political, it is clear that although many of the same aims are shared by GREPH and their associates, and by Bourdieu, of unmasking purported institutional neutrality, and the professional neutrality claimed by philosophers, and of examining the sovereign position of philosophy in relation to other forms of knowledge in terms of its position and role in the hierarchy of disciplines as instituted in the educational system, they are irreconcilable ultimately.29 If Bourdieu aims to dethrone philosophy, it is impossible for him to avoid the counter-charge, made by Jacques Rancière, that he does this in order to crown the sociologist as king instead.30 The ‘conf lict of the faculties’ is one in which sociology, ‘the instrument of knowledge par excellence’, will always triumph, and philosophy is not so much reduced to its material history, as constrained by a

The Double Strategy

87

reading which is always the same, the unmasking of social domination and socially constituted, politically conservative judgements concealed by a methodology of idealism, and a proclaimedly neutral, disinterested stance.31 This is not necessarily an invalid critique of philosophy, but it is of limited philosophical interest — necessarily, since its conclusions are always pre-ordained. Derrida makes a few and not fully elaborated remarks on Bourdieu’s project in the opening sections of DP. Its aim of ‘complete objectivation’ of the conditions of production of thought represents an infinite task which is necessarily structurally infinite, as Derrida emphasizes (DP, pp. 106–08). As Bourdieu himself points out, it entails complete objectivation of sociology itself — ‘l’attitude du sociologue’ (DP, p. 105) — as well as the object it has set itself, ‘philosophy’. As Derrida formulates it: il faut ‘objectiver’, constituer en objects ce que les sujets (par exemple des philosophes, des héritiers ou lecteurs de Kant) n’ont su par définition objectiver de leur pratique, de leur appartenance socio-institutionnelle, de leur désir de pouvoir symbolique. (p. 105) ‘Philosophy’, according to this, includes a less restricted ‘field’ than the representatives of a particular academic field name, but also its ‘inheritors’ and readers. The philosophical tradition exceeds the restriction of a contest between philosophy and sociology.32

Bourdieu’s relationship with philosophy is one of ‘amorous rupture’, as Derrida commented in a radio interview on France-Culture in 1990.33 In Bourdieu’s account, the legitimation claims of philosophy rely on a refusal of history: historicism is a ‘scandal’ for philosophy.34 But Bourdieu does not consider the epistemological choices embodied in the relationship of philosophy to its history. The lines of questioning of his problematic are entirely germane to the consideration of GREPH’s project. Clearly, his overriding consideration of philosophy in terms of the academic system is of great relevance to GREPH’s aim of critiquing the relations between the two. His analyses of education, of the ‘fields of struggle’ for recognition of the university disciplines, and of sociology versus philosophy are unavoidable in that sense. As one Bourdieu commentator has remarked, there is an important sense in which Bourdieu asks the right questions, irrespective of the answers he then provides.35 His project, as I said at the outset, coincides with that of GREPH in that he makes clear from the start how philosophy as a practice affects philosophy — although he views the nature of this determination in much stronger terms than this, of course — and that this is crucially not admitted.36 The ‘Avant-projet’ gives a more proliferating set of questions to delimit the problematic of philosophy and its history, philosophy, and its teaching, and it is less programmatically clear that the latter determines absolutely the former. He has himself characterized the work of Derrida as that of a ‘consecrated heretic’, and argued in Homo Academicus (pp. 304–06) that Derrida’s work in the late 1960s and early 1970s represented a ‘strategy of reconversion’ to the newer social sciences.37 He does, however, show a greater degree of solidarity when retrospectively linking himself to the shared ‘subversive or anti-institutional dispositions’ of himself and Derrida in the 1970s.38 GREPH itself has been subjected to sharp criticisms by Bourdieu’s disciples: Jean-Louis Fabiani, whose Les Philosophes de la République was published in the ‘Le

88

The Double Strategy

sens commun’ series edited by Bourdieu at Les Éditions de Minuit, and Louis Pinto, another long-time associate of Bourdieu’s Centre for European Sociology and contributor to Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, who produced an analysis of the contemporary philosophical ‘field’ in 1970s and 1980s France.39 Fabiani produced a history of the ‘âge d’or’ of philosophy teaching in the Third Republic which focuses in terms of changing structures of credentialization and professionalization, and the ‘interested’ nature of particular intellectual moves and forms of production. Both analyse the more contemporary institutional structures of philosophy in France in terms of ‘producers’ and ‘reproducers’, the latter in charge of the institution as such, the former wielding the power of their reputational notoriety.40 For Fabiani, all attacks on the teaching of philosophy — he refers to those of Châtelet and Thuillier — are simply expressions of professional alienation masquerading as institutional critique, when what is required is sociological analysis.41 He traces the impetus for his study to the problems confronted by philosophy as a part of school education in the 1970s (p. 18). Both he and Pinto were originally philosophy teachers. Pinto analyses the field in terms of two poles: the ‘savant’ and the ‘avant-garde’. Pinto’s analysis of GREPH is dismissive of their avowed ‘double strategy’, claiming that this meant only a predictable division of labour — the lowly unknown footsoldiers carrying out the experiments in teaching younger pupils, whilst the ‘stars’ undertake ‘difficult’ theoretical work.42 These analyses illustrate clearly the risk of the sociological reduction: the actual content of GREPH’s proposals and campaigns is overlooked in order merely to situate them in terms of a fixed hierarchy of positions. The collective aspect of GREPH, including university and school philosophy teachers, does not fit this schema, and so is dismissed as mere face-saving rhetoric. GREPH is only seen as ref lecting Derrida’s own ‘position’ within the structured field of oppositions. Even in Pinto’s terms, one of the two main accounts of experimental teaching by GREPH in QP is that by Jean-Luc Nancy. He ignores this, since it does not fit his pattern. Fabiani’s approach is more rewarding generally than that of Pinto, and I will return to some of the ground he covers in the next chapter, in terms of the myth of the prof de philo. However, their use of GREPH as instantiation of a structural position only — that of the avant-garde ref lecting Derrida’s ‘consecrated heretic’ status — means that they display no interest in GREPH’s actual positions or theoretical work, even though they are engaged in closely related work themselves on the history of the institution of philosophy in France. Their work therefore remains resolutely non-philosophical, external, and antagonistic to philosophy and in sharp contradistinction to that of GREPH.43 In the approximate characterization mentioned in the first chapter, the Analytic tradition distinguishes between philosophers and historians of philosophy whereas the Continental does not, and the latter retains a keener sense of the historicity of the philosopher.44 This characterization is also borne out by the pedagogical contrast between the two: the one predominantly oral, the other more textual and ‘literary’. These two practices of philosophy teaching do provide a significant contrast, but one which is less straightforward than that kind of characterization would suggest. Analytic philosophers, as opposed to historians of ideas or of philo­sophy, nonetheless rely on a canon of historical texts, which are taught in

The Double Strategy

89

terms of the ‘pen-pal’ approach to history, treated as existing out of time, and used in translation.45 The arguments of these philosophers are ‘ventriloquised’ by the teacher, who reconstructs them with his pupils, in order to learn from them but then to go beyond them. But this reconstruction is oral not textual, and the ‘history of philosophy’ functions as a kind of ‘shadow history’,46 based not so much on close recourse to the texts, nor on sophisticated history of ideas methodologies of recovering discursive conventions governing these texts,47 but on generations of teachers extrapolating ‘positions’ in debates — Hume on identity or causality, say. The history of philosophy, understood as entirely separate from philosophy in this way, results, as Jonathan Rée comments, in textbook surveys of ‘disembodied, arbitrary dramas [...] that read like opera synopses gone wrong’.48 However, the idea that non-Analytic philosophy is generally more historical, and more ref lexively aware of its relation to this history, is undermined if its predominant pedagogical modes are considered. When GREPH was operating, the philosophy teacher still relied on a textual approach, a more literary explication de texte model than the analytic philosopher, but the history of philosophy nonetheless consisted of the doxographical recital of a series of opinions and arguments of past philosophers without reference to their historical status or context. This was the ‘derealizing’ technique criticised by Bourdieu. What is striking here, and in Derrida’s remarks on the ‘scandal of translation’ for philosophy which will be returned to again in the last chapter, is that the linguistic and historical determinations of philosophy are refused in the practice of philosophy, both Analytic and Continental. This contradicts the ‘received view’ of Continental philosophy. The predominance of history of philosophy much criticized in French philosophy teaching equates to the criticism that it is too reliant on models of literary criticism rather than rational argument. However, the myth of the professeur de philosophie, as will be discussed in the next chapter, relied on the Socratic reference above all because Socrates was the ‘philosopher who did not need to write’.49 This enabled them to view their own — oral — teaching discourse as their creative philosophical production, and their teaching as a philosophical activity. Their teaching was not, therefore, based on philological commentary; this was a gradual and later shift, which Bourdieu simplistically claims represents the sole form of teaching philosophy in France over the last two centuries. Another attempt to ‘de-idealize’ philosophy not unrelated to GREPH is that of the British philosophers involved at the same time in the ‘Radical Philosophy’ group, of whom Jonathan Rée, whose work I have referred to at various points, was a key member. Their journal acted very much as a conduit for ‘foreign’, in particular French, philosophy deemed unacceptable by the Oxford Analytic philosophers at the time, and indeed since. As mentioned already, they produced a presentation of GREPH and Le Doctrinal de Sapience in 1977, noting its relevance to their project, and they are in turn mentioned in QP as a related project-group.50 The editorial declaration made in the autumn issue of 1976 bears the marks of inf luence of GREPH’s project in its stated intent to confront philosophy’s tendency to idealize itself. The statement emphasizes that instead,

90

The Double Strategy philosophy is a social institution, with its peculiar patterns of authority, and its own codes and rituals: its own politics.51

Of course their situation was markedly different: philosophy was a minority university subject, not part of mass, compulsory education.52 Equally, there was no ‘official’ discourse on philosophy teaching, regulating its contents and methods. Within its own, specific context, however, this was very much part of the project sketched out in the AP, in the inventories drawn up of elements of the conditions of teaching philosophy, both past and present. The ‘didactico-philosophique’ was to be examined in terms of the didactic operations of philosophical texts, and in terms of all the specific practices of teaching, examining, the figure of the philosophy teacher, and so on. But these were not conceived of as elements of an external history of philosophy, but as themselves constitutive and hence, potentially at least, instruments of philosophical and critical transformation. GREPH adopted the brief statement made by Georges Canguilhem in response to the questionnaire on the Haby reform sent out by Nouvelle Critique and published in May 1975 as an encapsulation of their project.53 Canguilhem remarked that: La philosophie n’a pas besoin de défenseurs, dans la mesure où sa justification est son affaire propre. Mais la défense de l’enseignement de la philosophie aurait besoin d’une philosophie critique de l’enseignement.

This summarized GREPH’s demand for a philosophical examination of the teaching of philosophy, which uncovered its history in order to understand it more critically, and to be in a position to transform it — the reinscription of the deconstructive double strategy. However, as Derrida emphasized in the opening essay to Du droit à la philosophie, writing more than a decade later, whilst GREPH recognised its aims within this statement, their overall double strategy could not rest content with the opposition between ‘l’affaire propre’ of philosophy on the one hand, and a ‘philosophie critique de l’enseignement’ on the other.54 For them, the point was to resist at all points the division between the two — the theoretical and philosophical on the one hand, the professional and practical on the other (DP, p. 45). In the Avant-projet, GREPH’s ‘souci du concret’ seems to be underwritten by a concentration on a culturally and historically delimited field of enquiry, one whose genealogical exploration itself represented a core part of the projected activism on behalf of l’enseignement philosophique. To defend the latter, yet attack its present form, required the excavation of the historical and ideological underpinnings of the status quo in philosophy teaching. The questions which in the Avant-projet are less clearly tied to the specificities of the French situation pertain to education and/ or teaching, and its relation to philosophy, and their putative indissociability. The manner of their inscription within particular texts and pedagogical practices is raised, though the examples given are less specifically French ones. The paradoxical pull of maintaining this double position and activity even as they set out to analyse and critique it, will be explored further, especially in relation to the insistence on ‘philosophy’ in the face of what were seen as the alarming encroachments of the sciences humaines, as seen in the debate in the press. This was the programme of transformative research set out by Derrida and GREPH. Some of it came to fruition in the initial work in Qui a peur de la philosophie?, and subsequently through the

The Double Strategy

91

Collège International. The ‘Avant-projet’ simply opened the way to a vast project of research, and stands as a kind of document of ‘deconstructive politics’ in its full complexity. The next section will now turn to Derrida’s analysis of that specific French institution of philosophy in his 1976 essay, ‘Où commence et comment finit un corps enseignant’. Philosophy versus Pedagogy Philosophy of course, despite the tenacity of the teaching idealization, has not always been an academic activity in the sense in which it is now. Other ‘incarnations’ of the philosopher have been considered in attempts to consider philosophy ‘as social expression’: the philosopher as aristocrat, saint, gentleman, or scholar.55 Before the eighteenth century, philosophy formed part of the school liberal arts curriculum as logic, but this was not envisaged as fundamentally connected to the ref lections and exchanges of the great philosophers themselves. Philosophy within education was ‘Scholastic’ — in other words, a form limited to the constraints of schooling only and therefore discontinuous with the activity of philosophizing. As an educational institution within France, since Cousin, the idea that the two are or should be intimately connected if philosophy teaching is not to be an entirely empty pursuit has been a recurring reference and point of contention — an ‘alibi’, as Derrida comments (DP, p. 166). One representative example of this continuing ‘defence’ is provided by Jacques Muglioni, an inspecteur général and lycée philosophy teacher, in the following statement: Depuis les temps fondateurs de la Grèce, l’école doit son plein sens à une idée philosophique. Il est même vrai de dire qu’il n’y a d’école digne de ce nom que pour la philosophie.56

The two-way indissociability view of philosophy and education is employed as the justification of philosophy as the essence of education. The charge that this teaching was empty at best and stif ling and reactionary at worst has been levelled at philosophy in French schools since Cousin, as seen already in the accusation that Cousin’s rigid prescriptions and caution with regard to the authority of the Church meant that paid philosophers were only paid not to think.57 However, the idea that philosophy teaching should itself contain a selfref lexive consideration of these issues in order for it to be philosophical — not as part of the parallel discourse on philosophy teaching, but as part of that practice of teaching — is one tied in with Derrida’s own consideration of philosophy’s relation to its institution and to its tradition, and the two together, as part of the same problematic. Alan Montefiore’s article of 1977–78, published in the American journal Teaching Philosophy, and situating itself in the wake of Derrida’s elaboration, or ‘deconstitution’ of the philosophical tradition, which was discussed above, concludes that: there is for the teacher of philosophy who seeks a lucid understanding that he may share with his students no honest avoiding of the question of the philosophical status of his own activity as a teacher [...]. There is no avoiding the question in as much as it is itself both philosophical and philosophically controversial. (p. 279)

92

The Double Strategy

This is a radical departure from the critique of philosophy teaching as necessarily an unrelated activity to philosophy, because unavoidably debased and deadened by that teaching. The charge that philosophy could not and should not exist within the state educational system was made in the nineteenth century by both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.58 Both the excoriating attack on philosophy teaching and the f lattering reference to the idealized scene of teaching are interwoven within the institution of philosophy in French education, as we have seen. Between these two extremes lies the philosophical question, of no interest to Bourdieu and his associates, ‘can philosophy be taught?’59 The question implies a view of philosophy as a specific endeavour — a necessary view for those defending it against cuts — but one which is also crucial to understanding Derrida’s own position in relation to a ‘defence of philosophy’.60 If the ‘Avant-projet’ sets out the double terrain of philosophywithin-teaching and its historical inscriptions in the French tradition as its area of theoretical and practical engagement, Derrida in OC turns to the question of the ‘gap’ identified in ‘Entre crochets’ between these two kinds of activity, in terms of the putative gap or delay between pedagogy and knowledge, and hence the question of philosophy as anti-pedagogy. François Fischer, in his contribution to the seminar on teaching held at the ‘Fins de l’homme’ conference on Derrida’s work at Cérisy in 1981, formulates the deconstructive double strategy as follows: S’engager donc à la fois contre l’obscurantisme pour la raison et produire des textes irrecevables par la tradition rationaliste et universitaire.61

This ‘obscurantism’ comprises the defence of philosophy as necessary, as a pure questioning force, objective, neutral, and free (OC, p. 142). But Fischer’s statement fails to convey Derrida’s — and GREPH’s — stake in institutional terms. In terms of elaborating his strategy, it only suggests a kind of personal level of difficulty: he could not fall in with colleagues in a generalized defence of philosophy against the proposed reform’s depredations of its role and presence within French education, because their understanding of philosophy was wrong. If Derrida were simply putting forward such a disagreement and at the same time producing work which they in turn would not accept, then there would be no contradiction: in both cases, he would simply be ranging himself against the status quo, critiquing it, and seeking to provide an alternative. This alternative would be ‘irrecevable’ by that tradition. This misleadingly suggests an oppositional activity that is confrontational in a simple, direct way. This was the problem of Pinto’s and Fabiani’s comments on GREPH — the avant-garde versus the official, traditional, and lowly, or soixantehuitard versus the ancien régime represented by the older generation, in Ferry and Renaut’s account. Derrida’s position is not simply ‘radical’ in this way, however, since, as already stated, it entails a deconstructive relationship to the tradition and history of philo­ sophy. Firstly, ‘taking on’ the institution of philosophy involves a kind of ‘decele­ bration’ of that tradition, as Derrida comments in ‘Entre crochets’.62 This decele­ bration entails a double gesture. As Geoff Bennington states: on reconnaît un endettement primordial envers une tradition qu’il ne s’agit pourtant nullement de préserver ou de célébrer en tant que telle.63

The Double Strategy

93

This is in order not to assume the position of an avant-garde that sets itself wholly apart from the discourse of the status quo and from the institution, which Derrida distanced himself from in the same interview (pp. 63–64), as mentioned above. In trying to separate itself off in this way it maintains only a useless parallelism in which it never engages with that discourse, but merely runs alongside, and is ultimately re-assimilated at a later stage institutionally: it cannot simply denounce its enemies and pursue its own course. As he emphatically comments: abandonner le terrain sous prétexte qu’on ne peut plus défendre la vieille machine (et qu’on a même contribué à la disloquer,) ce serait donc ne rien comprendre à la stratégie déconstructrice. (p. 120)

The institution is ‘parergonal’ (OC, p. 114); it naturalizes its structures as a neutral framework. This ‘frame’ is not taken into account, but in fact ‘paraissant l’entourer, la détermine jusqu’au centre de son contenu’. The frame is wrongly understood normally as merely the ‘logement externe’, the extrinsic conditions of practice — in other words, the historical forms of teaching, and the social, economic and political structures of the teaching institution, as Derrida explains in ‘Le Parergon’ in La Vérité en peinture.64 Unless this division between the extrinsic and the intrinsic is seen to be untenable, critical transformation cannot take place. Teaching takes place within a space marked by its heterogeneity, it is a ‘champ agonistique hétérogène, divisé, travaillé d’une lutte incessante’. As such a relation to the institution necessarily implies a prise de parti within this field. However, Derrida is not simply operating some sort of demystification here, whereby an apparently neutral, benign set-up is at a stroke unveiled as politicized and political through and through. He invokes the particularly over-determined position of speaking from within, and, in a non-straightforward sense, against, philosophy. Philosophy’s role, its normative disciplinary self-idealization is precisely that of self-criticism, implying an ongoing dialectical subsumption in which critique provides the generating motor of its internal tradition, and thus the self-critical reproduction of philosophy. This kind of self-perpetuating activity can only leave everything intact, and the struggle for transformation of the frame, of the ‘borders’ which he is seeking to effect, (p. 114), would thereby be contained and rendered superficial. It is only in taking on the frame at the same time that transformation is possible which goes beyond internal critique. It is important to stress that Derrida’s care in positioning himself in this complex way is not akin to previous critiques of the educational institution, such as François Châtelet’s attack on it which was discussed in the last chapter. Neither is Derrida’s target simply institutional inertia, the inertia of ‘a body almost entirely in control of its own reproduction’.65 Derrida goes further: philosophy’s internal critique forms part of the dominant system. He elaborates the point thus: de son code même, de son rapport à soi, de sa reproduction autocritique, la reproduction autocritique form[e] peut-être l’élément de la tradition et de la conservation philosophique, de sa relève incessant. (p. 115)

This self-critical reproduction is only ever the reproduction of its own internal authority (DP, p. 158). If the style of deconstruction is ‘irrecevable’ (p. 117) for the

94

The Double Strategy

institution of philosophy, it must be because it does not limit itself to the conceptual content of teaching, as Châtelet’s attack did. Rather, ‘[il] s’en prenne à la scène philosophique, à toutes ses normes et formes institutionnelles comme à tout ce qui les rend possible’. In this sense, the operation is a belated one, since as he notes he has been functioning within the system for fifteen years. Having elaborated on the danger of self-critique as self-reproduction, of reproducing philosophy’s relation to itself (p. 118), there remains the equal danger of neglecting internal destructuration. He views this as the necessary correlate of attacks such as those by Châtelet or Nizan (p. 118), which are too hastily politicizing and historicizing and which, as such, can only retain traditional metaphysical schemas as guides.66 If deconstruction undermines the indissociability of the uni­ ver­sity and philosophy, it does not seek to lay waste to an enemy, as it were, and then move on to a new site (p. 119).67 It is not a question of deconstructing the insti­t ution and imagining something radically new in its place: this would be to abandon the struggle to technocracy (p. 120) and confine the deconstructive strat­ egy to an ‘ensemble’ of theoretical operations only. If the reactionary defenders of the status quo are in fact, ultimately, conserving ‘un corps en décomposition’, then his effort, reversing and continuing the metaphor, is one of decomposing the structure of that decomposing body, playing on the sense of the corps enseignant (pp. 120 and 127). The danger of invoking the teaching body in this way is that it again implies a unity, that of a single body marshalling its resources on behalf of philosophy in general, against the agression of the non-philosophical construed as an external threat (p. 128). This is the position illustrated by Jean Lefranc when he warns that ‘l’anti-philosophie a toujours le même visage’.68 This is to suggest that the only conf lict is between philosophy and forces outside it. But there is also internal con­ f lict and opposition within (p. 128), and the boundaries between inside and outside: philosophy and anti-philosophy cannot be maintained in this way. By decomposing the structures of the institution, disaggregating them, de-naturalizing them, the deconstructive strategy is a double one, of transformation and reinscription, going beyond the necessary stage of critique. Those who remain unsuspicious of the institution, he adds, are perhaps the most vigorous agents of its decomposition. ‘Decomposition’ is used first in an approbatory way, to characterize the operation of deconstruction, but then also as a negative comment on the react­ ionary defenders of philosophy. A rigorous and efficient deconstruction will always be working in this dual way encapsulated in the quotation, already cited, ‘luttant comme toujours sur deux fronts, sur deux scènes et selon deux portées’ (pp. 120–21). The movement of re-inscription thus aims to go beyond a simple inversion or reversal. Bourdieu’s analysis of transcending unseen limits through the unmasking techniques of the sociology of knowledge would thus fall victim to the charges of hasty ‘sociologism’.69 It is a key example of inverting priorities in a way which does not allow for the more convoluted connections between philosophy and its practice. The question of the institution is not just a neglected area, to be brought back to the fore in the first instance and then, once passed through definitively as a stage, transcended. Hence the degree of complication in this initial elaboration of his own relation to GREPH’s project.

The Double Strategy

95

Edward Saïd, in his 1978 essay on Derrida and Foucault, stages a ‘choice’ between the work of Foucault and Derrida and opts for the former as what Culler terms ‘the choice for American criticism’ — another version of the pitting of the two bodies of work against one another in terms of the so-called question of ‘theory and politics’.70 Saïd makes no reference to GREPH or to OC as part of GREPH’s project, despite the fact that this is the entire focus of OC. Derrida invokes the philosophical institution in terms of both the educational system and the institution of philosophy, understood both ‘internally’, as its own tradition, and ‘externally’, within that system. Thus, on the one hand, the inf lexible centralization of the French educational system is invoked in terms of a military operation (p. 126). There is a spurious staging of freedom and liberalism which masks ‘le programme réel du pouvoir’. On the other hand, this complex machine also implies the philosophical tradition ‘des chaînes de tradition ou de répétition’, whose mode of functioning is not particular to a single historical or ideological configuration. Derrida plays on the term ‘programme’, in the educational sense of the official syllabus imposed from above, and the ‘programme of power’, in order to suggest both the philosophical and political constraints and determinations of the institution. The task of deconstruction is to ‘exhibit’ the logic of how these powers can be re-invested and re-exploited. Saïd criticizes this portrayal, commenting that ‘Western thought’ if dealt with in this way will remain ‘an abstraction and as it is’. Saïd takes Derrida to be refer­r ing to the entire operative structure of Western thought as exemplified in the philosophical tradition, and to be staking out deconstruction’s concern in a very general way. Saïd sees this as not allowing for Western thought being more ‘differentiated and incorporative’ than this would suggest. However, Derrida is careful to avoid any suggestion of a vast underlying structure, generating epi­ pheno­mena which can be analysed in terms of their reinf lection of its ‘chaînes’. Moreover, the terms of Saïd’s criticism, that the operations of Western thought are ‘differentiated and incorporative’, are scarcely ones with which Derrida would be in disagreement. In any case, Saïd is clearly wresting the description from its place in OC (p. 126), where it is part of the unravelling of the relations of philosophy and its institutionalization. Derrida is seeking to draw out the ‘strange logic’ in which the two are caught up, and is wanting to go beyond the trivial observation that ‘le pouvoir contrôle l’appareil d’enseignement’ (p. 127). The specificity of the essay as intervention is entirely lost in Saïd’s version. Just as Derrida is seeking to avoid the recourse to sociological reduction referred to above, he is indicating another function of his double gesture. Deconstruction’s quasi-systematic pursuit avoids ‘l’éberluement empiriste’ (p. 127) in this way, by not ceding either part of its dual strategy. This does not mean that the level is one of generality and ‘abstraction’. As he points out, these ‘pouvoirs multiples’ are not only des schémas logiques, rhétoriques, didactiques, ni même essentiellement des philosophèmes mais aussi des opérateurs socio-culturels ou institutionnels, des [...] conf lits de force utilisant toute sorte de représentants. (p. 127)

Saïd, in other words, even though his account is an evaluation of the relative political functions of Foucault’s and Derrida’s work, does not take on board the institutional problematic which is the entire focus of this essay.

96

The Double Strategy

Derrida begins OC with a cautionary gesture regarding the use of ‘deconstruction’(p. 117). The unity of the sequence of ‘Western thought’, or metaphysics, belongs to an ‘auto-representation’ whose attempt at circular closure of a field then works on this field ‘otherwise’ — in other words by surrounding and containing it. This is the problematic of the ‘parergon’ already mentioned. Deconstruction’s force cannot derive from its ‘originality’: if it were only a kind of rupturing with tradition, remaining at the level of radical theory, it would remain within the self-critical reproduction of the internal tradition.71 The ‘chaînes de répétition’ are also part of the tradition in terms of the relat­ ionship between teacher and pupil. Derrida draws this out further via the term ‘agrégé-répétiteur’ (OC, p. 122). His own position of maître-assistant has been designated by this other term since the nineteenth century at the ENS (p. 140). It is a curious one, corresponding to that of a teacher who produces nothing, that is to say who neither innovates nor transforms. The répétiteur is part of the institution’s own reproduction, destiné à répéter et à faire répéter, reproduire et faire reproduire: des normes et des contenus. (p. 122)

But the répétiteur is not merely the agent of power and of reproduction of the system. In a further twist, he becomes also the representative of that system or, rather, an expert in its demand. Having first submitted to its demands himself, he in turn explains it, translates it, repeating and re-presenting it on behalf of his young pupils. In so doing, he thus acquires this role of expert in the interpretation of that demand. Importantly, this leads to a kind of dissociation, or indeed to a series of dissociations. The teacher is in the position of applying rules to which he does not himself subscribe, which he is engaged in criticizing elsewhere. This is the situation of GREPH and of Derrida, and Derrida refers indirectly to their original protest against the report of the Capès jury which went unanswered (p. 124). Derrida’s reference to the young aspirant or would-be ‘adherent’ implies the notion of disciples who seek to fashion themselves in replication not simply of the master, but of the position which they grasp to be what the system ordains for them. This corollary of the position of the aspirant as explained here is particularly linked to a cycle of teaching geared to the production of apprentice philosophy teachers, in which the cycle of systemic reproduction is unbroken. Derrida thus falls into an assumption of reproduction of the teaching body which is more relevant to philosophy teaching in universities than in schools in France, although he does not make this clear. The semi-archaic term ‘répétiteur’ stands as the opposite of the philosopher teacher ideal. Derrida takes this up through an extended quotation from André Canivez’s history of the teaching of philosophy in France in which Canivez is commenting on the situation in late eighteenth-century France (OC, p. 129).72 The original role of the répétiteur was as a kind of teaching auxiliary, rehearsing exercises with the students as part of their exam preparation. This function was carried out by someone not yet a teacher, who had just finished being a student, and was thus only slightly older than them. Thus none of the connotations of the master and his disciples are present. There is no model of authority and no transferential relationships. In short, it is the antithesis of the idealized scene of teaching in what

The Double Strategy

97

Derrida terms the ‘socratico-transférentiel’ model. The position of the répétiteur is outlined earlier on in the essay in order to stand in opposition to Canivez’s judgement on the stagnant, ‘unphilosophical’ teaching of philosophy in the late eighteenth century. Canivez remarks, in the passage quoted by Derrida, that at this time, the philosophy teacher was, le transmetteur fidèle d’une tradition et non l’ouvrier d’une philosophie en train de se faire.73

The ‘good’ philosopher, undertaking creative, philosophical ref lection only functioned outside education at this time, according to Canivez. This figure is here instantiated by Condillac (p. 134), who delivered scathing critiques of the education system and calls for its reform. Derrida refuses the implicit opposition of external/internal, and argues that Condillac was in fact not truly outside the institution looking in, but was arguing from a different institutional location, basing his proposals on the model of the learned academies.74 But more than that, in dwelling on the figure of the répétiteur, and extrapolating from the kind of strictly non-idealizable teaching which the latter undertook, he is opening a space for institutional subversion from within. Derrida does not want to be simply caught by an opposition between, on the one hand, a scene of philosophy teaching understood as belonging to a former golden age or merely functioning as an exhortatory ideal to which current practice should aspire, and its counterpart, on the other, philosophy teaching in a decadent, fallen state, necessarily contaminated by the institution. This is the opposition between philosophy and pedagogy. From this stems the counter reference point: the philosopher as anti-pedagogue. GREPH saw philosophy within education as a site of possible subversion, and Derrida’s supporters often pose the question of what a ‘radical’, ‘new’, and completely other style of ‘deconstructive teaching’ would be like. This was the question asked by his 1975 interlocutors, by conference participants at Cérisy a few years later, as mentioned already, and has crossed over into ‘theory’, in attempts such as that of the celebrated deconstructive critic, Barbara Johnson, who produces a list of literary critical reading methods which are ‘deconstructive’.75 The idea of philosophy as anti-pedagogy again relies on the Socratic idealization, but poses as the truer, because more critical, version of this.76 Instead of letting philosophy become a reified set of unquestioned practices, it will provide a true practice, overturning institutional decadence. But Derrida’s account implies that all teaching is part of a structural repetition of delay. Even antipedagogical teaching would require the enacting, each time anew, of the pursuit of truth, and in its staging within an institution would participate in repetitive structures which represent the ‘forms and norms’ of philosophy as a practice — in other words, understood as a material, historical practice. The implicit or explicit claim that philosophy is indissociably linked to teaching, but as anti-pedagogy, has been made in the French discourse on philosophy teaching, but also outside it.77 As a claim, it distinguishes itself from appeals to pedagogy itself, which are seen as a form of deliberate limitation, always reactionary because of their appeal to accepting the limitations of what is possible. As mentioned in the consideration of Derrida’s American exponents in the first chapter, an entire

98

The Double Strategy

sub-branch of ‘theoretical’ work has developed, based on ‘pedagogy and theory’. Gregory Ulmer and Vincent B. Leitch, two of the critics referred to there, place their remarks on GREPH in relation to this area.78 But as Shoshana Felman, in an examination of psychoanalysis and pedagogy which is more interesting than most of the ‘theory’ accounts of the area, suggests, the ‘anti-pedagogue’ is in fact the pedagogue par excellence.79 Socrates tells Meno, ‘you see that I am not teaching anything, all I do is question’. Theodore Adorno considered the problem of how to teach philosophy in Germany in a 1965 radio lecture on ‘Taboos on the Teaching Vocation’.80 Again, he was concerned with tracing the same pattern, of contrasting the ideal with the reality, comparing the students’ lack of interest in anything other than what was required for a particular exam with the ideal of philosophy-in-itsteaching, where the pupils participate in the processes of reasoning embodied in the teacher’s spontaneous thought. He argues that the repetition and recital inherent in education are suspect because they are of something already established, and this kind of ‘circulatory activity’ is socially suspect (pp. 181–82). Pedagogy is opposed to untrammelled philosophical activity, and is deemed to be ineradicably inauthentic: The problem of the immanent untruth of pedagogy lies probably in the fact that the pursuit is tailored to its recipients, that it is not purely objective work for the sake of the subject matter itself.81 (p. 181)

As seen earlier in terms of his self-situating in relation to earlier critiques, including those of Châtelet, Derrida is not setting up an opposition between an ideal philosophical discourse and the travesty of its transmission, the baseness of the pedagogical reduction. Rather, the thematics of repetition are generalized. The répétiteur, the lowliest possible person in philosophy teaching, stands for the whole of teaching: En ce sens, tout entier absorbé dans sa fonction de médiateur à l’intérieur de la répétition générale, il est aussi l’enseignant par excellence. (p. 139)

The possibility of subversion is thus structural — not ‘new contents’ only, or pure versus impure types of teaching. This structural possibility is twofold: the relationship of the teacher to his ascribed role and to the system, and the gap or ‘lag’ between knowledge and its institutionalization, which makes teaching a heterogeneous field of conf lictual multiplicity (p. 131), subject to unevennesses and contradictions. In terms of the teacher’s role, Derrida explains this possibility in terms of his own position. There is a gap in the system for those in the middle ranks, like Derrida, neither insecure nor already fully invested in the system (p. 141). Derrida again employs a metaphor of military strategy here, of ‘opening a front within’ (p. 140). This subversion occurs as the series of dissociations already mentioned (OC, p. 124), which represent a division in his own teaching practice. His own teaching has been distanced from his published work, and the repetition of ‘code’ and programme has remained separate. His own teaching thus takes place somewhere between the constraints of the agrégation and the demands of GREPH (p. 141). There is a splitting in relation to an ascribed educational role. Derrida explains that the répétiteur no longer believes in the rules, because they seem out-dated (OC, p. 123), and as if belonging

The Double Strategy

99

to a foreign language, either dead or living. But this is not just a kind of professional malaise of the type diagnosed by Jean-Louis Fabiani as the only thing to be learnt from attacks on philosophy teaching by philosophy teachers. It is also the pupil or, rather, the ‘aspirant’ who practises this knowing division, and both exchange ‘des clins d’oeil en même temps que des recettes’. The mediation of the marginal répétiteur is not simply that of power or commodified knowledge. This mediation makes him emblematic of the functioning of the system as a whole. ‘Subversion’ is introduced ‘comme en contrebande à trajet long’ (OC, p. 124). Deconstruction is not simply therefore an external threat to the institution, but it takes on a divided role in order to resist recuperation to a form of ‘internal critique’.82 The second part of this generalized structure of repetition and delay is that between institution and knowledge. Derrida comments on another part of the quotation which he takes from André Canivez’s history of philosophy teaching in France, in which Canivez comments that: La pratique pédagogique retarde toujours sur les moeurs, sans doute parce que l’enseignement est plus rétrospectif que prospectif.83

This was part of Canivez’s commentary, discussed above, of a contrast between philosophy and philosophy teaching to the detriment of the latter. The critique, in other words, of the routinization force of pedagogy. Derrida employs a linguistic homology. This ‘delay’ between transmission and the current state of knowledge or philosophical ref lection is, he states, in fact ‘un invariant structurel de l’enseignement’ (p. 130) which is structurally analogous to linguistic deferral or delay. Canivez, p. 82 was referring to theological dominance in philosophy teaching in eighteenth-century France, which was ‘behind’ the revolutionary philosophy of the Idéologues, and out-of-step with an increasingly secularized society. This represents a key point in Derrida’s theoretical analysis of the institution, since he takes a historical point and reformulates it at the level of structural necessity. The gap between teaching and knowledge was also the focus of a consideration of teaching by Gérard Genette in his essay on the official death of rhetoric in French schools, ‘Rhétorique et enseignement’ (1969). It is useful to bring it into consideration here in order to unravel further Derrida’s use of Canivez.84 Genette considers the lack of interest in such a change as part of a general naïveté of public opinion with regard to the history and practices of teaching (p. 23). There is no awareness of education, and its reform, as historical; it is treated as atemporal and neutral. This he views as a ‘tabou de silence’ surrounding education as a practice, as if the latter were self-evident and free of ideology, a ‘pur organe de transmission du savoir’ (p. 24). Education as an institution is disregarded in the same way that language is not understood as an institution, but seen as ‘un véhicule neutre, passif, sans inf luence sur les “idées” qu’il transmet’. The ‘institutionality’ of teaching is in fact its historicity. This historicity derives from the relative autonomy of teaching from knowledge. Genette remarks that ‘Les structures du savoir et celles de l’enseignement ne coincident jamais parfaitement’. Thus rhetoric continued to be taught until 1902, even though the advent of Romanticism and with it the historical conception of literature had displaced it from ‘la conscience littéraire générale’ a hundred years earlier (p. 24). Genette evokes the classe de rhetorique,

100

The Double Strategy

taught at seconde and première levels — in other words, before philosophy — as a crowning subject also. Genette’s remarks on the historical and ideological nature of the education system are interesting here because of the idea again of a temporal lag partially separating teaching from ‘l’ordre du savoir’ which distances the two, and thereby constitutes the relative autonomy of educational practices. This official death of rhetoric — in formal education — has of course had a complex afterlife, as suggested by the very varied re-appropriations of its classificatory system of figures as a renewable taxonomy by Genette himself.85 But, as Genette points out, the study of literature as ‘apprentissage de l’art d’écrire’ has been entirely replaced by literary history, and its core exercise, the explication de textes which was first introduced after the 1902 reforms due to the strenuous efforts of Lanson.86 No calls have been made or campaigns mounted to return to this or to reincorporate the study of Fontanier’s Manuel classique pour l’étude des tropes. Genette makes the point thus: l’enseignement est une réalité historique qui n’a jamais été ni transparent ni passive: les structures du savoir et celles de l’enseignement ne coincident jamais parfaitement, une société n’enseigne jamais tout ce qu’elle sait, et inversement elle continue souvent d’enseigner des connaissances périmées, déjà sorties du champ vivant de la science: l’enseignement constitue donc un choix significatif, et à ce titre il intéresse l’historien. (p. 24)

But where Canivez was making a local, historical point about the continuing inf luence of religion in eighteenth-century philosophy teaching, Genette changes the level of analysis from that of historical observation to one that hovers on the verge of necessity. For Genette, the very institutionality of teaching, which is not generally recognized, and hence its historicity, derives from the relative autonomy of teaching from knowledge. The discrepancy is between the structures of knowledge and of teaching --in other words, of practice (Genette, p. 24). This suggests a more fundamental relation of delay, in effect a structural lag, in which the procedures of teaching form a kind of additional sedimentation which can be ‘uncovered’ according to this geological metaphor. However, care is needed here if we are to avoid sliding into a view of teaching as ancillary, and of no account in the tradition of a discipline, thought as internal to itself in its unfolding, the practices of education as external. Derrida views the relationship between teaching and knowledge — in terms of philosophy — as more intimate than this. Yet he does not want to advocate an anti-pedagogy as saviour of philosophy against inevitable routinization. Jean-Claude Milner, in his 1984 polemic on education, De l’école, encapsulates this view in remarking on the fundamental heterogeneity of the relationship between the two.87 He states his view as follows: l’école donne forme institutionnelle à quelque chose qui n’a pas un rapport évident aux institutions, nommément les savoirs.

There is a fundamental heterogeneity between the institution and knowledge, which always exceeds it and cannot be articulated by it. But in adapting Canivez’s remark, Derrida goes further than Genette’s diagnosis of a parallel false presumption of the neutrality of form in language seen only as vehicular and in the institutionality of

The Double Strategy

101

teaching. He posits his linguistic homology at the level of structural invariance, and hence of necessity. This is to suggest that the relations in both are always homogeneous and isomorphic, according to the ‘structure retardataire’ of both (p. 130). This homology of the gap and the delay between the structure of teaching and knowledge, and the structure of language is concerned with a principle of effacement, in which constitutive mediations — of pedagogical practice, of the operations of language — are obscured almost as an article of faith.88 Derrida then goes on to take this relationship between teaching and knowledge to be a structural invariant of educational practice, and of what he terms its ‘semiotic structure’ (p.130) in which language is placed in a secondary, derivative position in relation to the knowledge, the signified, which it is supposed to be conveying to the pupil. If any force is to be allowed the linguistic analogy — crudely, that practice, like language, mediates, constitutes, and can therefore transform — it has to be this possibility of transformation, not just as deferred hope, but that both are themselves transformational operations, always already. It is therefore these kinds of effacement which require a ‘decomposing’ analysis of the ‘concept d’enseignement comme procès de signifiance’ (p. 131). The parallels with the teaching of rhetoric as part of the teaching of literature are illuminating, but only up to a point. On the one hand, it can be illuminating because, as Genette stresses, rhetoric once occupied a similar ‘crowning’ position within secondary education in France and, moreover, because it was then definitively vanquished and died an institutional death, the one which the defenders of philosophy of the 1970s and since the Third Republic had feared for their subject. On the other, the teaching of literature is clearly not prey to the same kinds of structural anxiety as philosophy, since its practitioners are not seeking to elide their activity with that of writing literature. They have no stake in claiming creative status for what they do. Whatever large claims can be and are advanced on behalf of teaching literature, teaching a novel and writing a novel have never been seen as the same activity, even if Genette interestingly reminds us that the study of rhetoric was allied to the art of learning to write well rather than to learn objective facts about the history of literature, or learn how to produce readings, as in the subsequent incarnations of literature teaching. Literature’s most representative activity or practice has never been thought to be its teaching. Throughout OC, Derrida very carefully tries to display the links between his own body of work, and his own institutional position as maître-assistant, and the aims of GREPH as outlined in the accompanying ‘Avant-projet’. The striking contrast drawn out and elaborated with such care is that of, on the one hand, the critique of educational forms and practices as dangerously reductive, in a dialectic of attempted subversion and inevitable recuperation in which everything remains the same. On the other hand, to try not to fall into this ever-waiting trap, Derrida stresses the importance of the frame, and of examining educational forms and norms which are taken for granted, even by those who have written the most condemnatory accounts of old-fashioned or ideologically unbearable curricula. But it is the institution of philosophy which is important here, precisely because of its guiding self-idealization as in some way the most representative form of

102

The Double Strategy

education, and as most truly embodied in its teaching, and because it is ‘l’institution de l’institution de la philosophie’ (p. 131) — in other words, a relation to its own tradition which is intimately related to its practice, and therefore its teaching. The double strategy of GREPH’s project is clearly ‘deconstructive’ in the sense posited by Bennington of a dual operation, working to displace and re-inscribe in order to transform. As such Derrida sought to examine philosophy in relation to its teaching practices, but not in terms of ‘proving’ that philosophy is in fact socially determined, as Bourdieu does, nor in terms of an inverted ideal of philosophy as anti-pedagogy, the truer and more authentic version of pedagogy. The relationship between philosophy and the historical institution is understood in terms of a thematics of repetition in relation to teaching in general. There is no ‘pure’ alternative, nor outside vantage-point from which to produce an external critique. The self-consciousness with regard to one’s own activity and to the philosophical tradition highlighted by Alan Montefiore still does not include within it the elements for institutional transformation as such. Teaching is needed not just where ‘language is at stake’, but where the institution is at stake, in terms not just of including it as a topic for ref lection, but of efforts to transform it structurally, according to the logic of reinscription.89 The next chapter therefore examines GREPH’s efforts to do this in terms of the question of a correct ‘age’ for philosophy, and their experiments in teaching it to younger pupils, and the implications of these demands. Notes to Chapter 3 1. The published proceedings, États-Généraux de la philosophie, are henceforth abbreviated as EG. 2. Le Dœuff, ‘The Philosopher in the Classroom’, p. 5. 3. The interview was published in Digraphe in two parts: ‘Entre crochets I’ (1976) and ‘Ja ou le faux-bond II’ (1977); it is reprinted in Derrida, Points... Interviews 1974–1984, p. 13. The only previous series of interviews Derrida had given before this was Positions in 1972. 4. Derrida, Glas, pp. 184–86, 206–09. 5. Listed in the groupes de travail section of QP, as already mentioned, and also in the introduction to OC (this is reprinted in DP, from which I take the pagination). 6. ‘That event which one still does not know how to name other than by its date’, as Derrida comments in his thesis defence of 1980 (Derrida, ‘The time of a thesis: punctuations’, p. 44). Derrida explains there how he simply abandoned his thesis between 1968 and 1975 as his own philosophical trajectory changed. He was encouraged to submit it in order to be in a position to take on Ricoeur’s university professorial post; he did so, but his application for this post was then refused. This formal mark of disapproval meant that Derrida never taught within the university as such. His post as maître-assistant at the ENS, a rank which forms part of the considerations of OC, was far from being underprivileged but he retained a sense of marginality from this experience (Derrida and Bennington, p. 306). 7. See the introduction to Grisoni, Politiques de la philosophie. Again, similar to Lenin’s diagnosis of those who exploit the ‘play’ of the institution, diverging from it whilst functioning within its recesses, but who do not in fact make any difference to it. Derrida includes within this apparatus that of publishing, as a support structure to the university, and an additional field of its operations, but his own analyses focus on the institution of education. 8. Derrida, La Vérité en peinture, pp. 23–24. 9. EG, p. 14. 10. Derrida and Bennington, p. 244. 11. Culler, On Deconstruction, p. 158. This was discussed in Chapter 1 above. 12. Le Dœuff, ‘The Philosopher in the Classroom’, p. 5.

The Double Strategy

103

13. Lefranc, p. 11. 14. A. O. Rorty, ‘The Ruling History of Education’, p.1. 15. The term was coined and expounded by David Cooper in a paper, ‘Philosophy and its Educational Role’, given to the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain at the Institute of Education on 19 February 1997. Philosophers of education have shown some interest in Derrida’s work more recently but not in terms of the issues discussed here in relation to GREPH: see, for example, the work of Biesta and Egea-Kuehne, eds.; Peters, ‘Professing with Derrida’; and Trifonas, The Ethics of Writing and ‘Auditing Education’. 16. On the Platonic versus the Isocratean educational systems — ‘education’ in the service of nothing but the truth versus ‘pedagogy’ at the service of government and its power structures — see the contributions in Pedagogy and Power: Rhetorics of Classical Learning, edited by Yun Lee Too and Niall Livingstone. On the implications of the etymologies of ‘education’, ‘instruction’, and their cognates, see A. O. Rorty, ‘The Ruling History of Education’, p. 11. 17. The question of philosophy’s denial of a historicized understanding of its own history as extraor non-philosophical was introduced in Chapter 1. 18. Montefiore, ‘The Neutrality of Philosophy and its Teaching’, p. 278. 19. Unlike Durkheim, whose critique of philosophy and of the classical humanities approach is used and adapted by Bourdieu, as will be discussed below. 20. Bourdieu, ‘The Philosophical Institution’, p. 1, explains the term thus: ‘In the beginning is the illusio, adherence to the game, the belief of whoever is caught in the game, the interest for the game, interest in the game, the founding of value, investment in both the economic and the psychoanalytic sense’. 21. As referred to above, this was because of the emergence of sociology from the philosophy faculty at the end of the nineteenth century in France, and because until recently there was no separate agrégation for sociology which meant that many sociologists, including Bourdieu himself, were trained first as philosophers. On his own status as a ‘philosophe patenté’ and the experience of studying philosophy in the 1950s, see Bourdieu, ‘Fieldwork in Philosophy’ and ‘Aspirant philosophe’. As noted above, Brooks provides a clear overview of the relations between academic philosophy and sociology in the late nineteenth century. Other useful historical surveys of the emergence of French sociology include T. N. Clark, Leroux, and Mucchielli. 22. Cf. Bourdieu, Homo Academicus, p. 166: the social sciences are ‘capables d’usurper la position régalienne qu’a toujours revendiquée cette discipline’. 23. Bourdieu and Passeron, ‘Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945’, p. 170. This is not an imaginary target: for a recent example, see Grateloup. 24. Bourdieu, ‘Les Sciences sociales et la philosophie’ and ‘The Philosophical Institution’. All these were therefore written after and in the wake of his critique of the ‘intellectualist’ illusion of freedom from social conditioning of La distinction, published in 1979. The lofty disdain of the philosopher for the ‘vulgar’ empirical sciences, which require philosophy to legitimate them, is the same as the model used there of the opposition between ‘pure’ and ‘impure’, in relation to Kant. 25. Cf. Macherey, Histoires de dinosaur, p. 188. 26. Cited in Bourdieu, ‘Les Sciences sociales et la philosophie’, pp. 45–46. 27. Bourdieu, ‘Fieldwork in Philosophy’. He takes the title phrase from the work of the Oxford linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin, whose work he approves of, using it provocatively of course, to import empirical connotations into the field which disdains empirical research. It is interesting to compare Bourdieu’s tracking of the political and sociological concealed cargoes which the classifications and practices of French (and German, in terms of his work on Heidegger: see his L’Ontologie politique de Martin Heidegger) academic philosophy contain, to his approval for the work of Austin. He does not concentrate on the differences between Analytic and Continental philosophy in terms of their practices, even though he is keen to acknowledge intellectual debts to both Austin and Wittgenstein (Bourdieu, 1987). The English context of philosophy in which these two philosophers operated was analysed, and attacked, in a not unrelated way by Ernest Gellner. In his 1959 book on Oxford linguistic philosophy and on Wittgenstein, Words and Things: A Critical Account of Linguistic Philosophy and a Study in Ideology, Gellner launched a polemic on the concealed ideologies of social distinction of notably Austin. Gellner, like

104

The Double Strategy

Bourdieu, was a trained philosopher turned sociologist and anthropologist. There is no space to compare the two distinct, but similarly motivated critiques, only to observe how Bourdieu falls victim to the same effects of treating foreign texts — in other words, English philosophy as ‘foreign’ to the French tradition, as opposed to the paradoxical intimacy of inf luence between German and French philosophy texts — in a way which ignores their context, and thereby renders invisible their social and political associations. Bourdieu thus falls victim to the processes which he analyses elsewhere, with regard to the ‘international circulation of ideas’ and the crossing of national boundaries instituted by differences in education systems where ideas are imported shorn of context (Bourdieu, ‘Les Conditions sociales de la circulation internationale des idées’). 28. Cf. Bourdieu, ‘L’Inconscient d’école’. 29. Vermeren, p. 5, quoted in full in the last chapter. 30. Cf. J. Rancière and Collectif. 31. I examine Derrida’s work on Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties in detail in Chapter 5. 32. I return to the question of the philosophical tradition in relation to Derrida at the end of Chapter 5. 33. Derrida, ‘Le bon plaisir de Pierre Bourdieu’, radio interview on France-Culture, 23 June 1990, quoted in Dosse, II, p. 67. 34. As cited in the first chapter, Derrida argues that the constitutive ‘scandal’ for philosophy is translation rather than history. 35. Cf. Lane, p. 201. 36. A note of caution is necessary here: a full-scale account of Bourdieu’s work on these ramifying problematics is obviously beyond the scope of this chapter. Derrida stresses, in the introduction to DP, that Bourdieu’s questioning of philosophical legitimacy is central to the work of the Collège International de Philosophie in considering ‘le droit à la philosophie’ (p. 26). Derrida refers to the special issue of Actes of 1983 which includes Bourdieu’s essay ‘Les Sciences sociales et la philosophie’ as one of the texts worked on in his seminar of 1983–84 on La distinction (DP, pp. 103–08). He does not analyse it in detail there, however. 37. P. Bourdieu, Homo Academicus, 1988 edn, pp. xviii-xix. Bourdieu argues here that what he terms Derrida’s ‘anti-institutional mood’ was due to his lack of institutional recognition in France in comparison with his increasing celebrity in America. He does not examine Derrida’s actual work on the French institution of philosophy. He argues that Derrida takes deconstruction to the point of ‘tipping over into a sociological analysis’ but always stops short of this, remaining a philosopher, though this comment is made in relation to his analysis of Derrida’s essay on Kant (on this, see Loesberg, 1997). Derrida very deliberately does not move into sociology. For him, it is not possible simply to shift ground in this way, nor, in his own complex construal of the relationship of philosophy to critique, to step outside a conceptual domain to produce an ‘external’ view-point. 38. Bourdieu, ‘Passport to Duke’, p. 453. Notably, Bourdieu is here presenting his trajectory to an American audience and responding in particular to the non-French academic phenomenon of ‘postmodernism’. It is always crucial to observe the context in which such remarks are made — national or abroad — not just because of Bourdieu’s own theorized awareness of the significance of contextualising within fields of knowledge which are nationally bounded, but because of the consequent change in the pitch of such remarks. This was the case in Pierre Macherey’s considerations of the ‘Frenchness’ of French philosophy referred to in Chapter 1. Macherey realised that the remarks, originally aimed at a Chinese audience, were in fact really addressed to a French audience. For a consideration of the translation of Bourdieu’s own work in the American institutional context, see Wacquant. 39. See Fabiani, and also Pinto, Les Philosophes entre le lycée et l’avant-garde, with the related articles ‘L’École des philosophes’, and ‘L’Inconscient scolaire des philosophes’. In his 1995 article on Bourdieu (‘Theory in Practice’, published in 1999), Pinto compares Bourdieu’s enterprise favourably to the ‘almost respectful subversions’ performed by other members of his generation, who are unwilling to ‘strike right at the heart of philosophy itself ’ (p. 95). See also Chaitin, p. 85. 40. Fabiani, pp. 165–66 analyses Derrida’s own relative ‘marginality’, which has been commented

The Double Strategy

105

on already, in these terms. Fabiani comments directly and adversely on GREPH on p. 166, and without naming the group, but simply referring to it as ‘the avant-garde’, on p. 170. 41. Fabiani, p. 12. 42. Pinto, Les Philosophes entre le lycée et l’avant-garde, pp. 147–50. I return to Pinto’s criticisms of the CIPh in Chapter 5. 43. For an example of a reductive sociological account of Derrida’s work and its translation to the American context, in not dissimilar vein, cf. Lamont, who at p. 601 states that GREPH and the Collège International de Philosophie are ‘professional organizations’. This is not a polemical usage, simply an index of her lack of understanding of their role and history within what purports to be a sociohistorical account. 44. See, for example, Critchley, 2001, p. 59. 45. The designation belongs to the philosopher of science, Ian Hacking (see his ‘Five Parables’). 46. For an approving account of why there is nothing wrong with such an approach, see Watson. 47. The approach made famous by the so-called ‘Cambridge’ school of the history of ideas, embodied in the work of Quentin Skinner and his associates. See Tully, ed., for the chief debates on historicism and relativism in relation to the history of ideas encountered in this body of work. 48. Rée, review of Bruce Kuklick’s The Rise of American Philosophy, p. 980. 49. This is the formulation of the American analytic philosopher, Stanley Cavell, who has worked increasingly on ‘non-Analytic’ areas including literature, film, and psychoanalysis (Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, p. xxi). Cavell has also addressed the question of Derrida’s work in relation to the analytic tradition in A Pitch of Philosophy. 50. QP, p. 432. Other reports on GREPH and the reforms appear in Radical Philosophy in 1976: see Parker. 51. Radical Philosophy, 15 (1976), Editorial, p. 1. 52. On the dominant ideology of gentleman amateurishness of Oxford linguistic philosophy, see Rée, ‘Professional Philosophers’. For an attempt to produce a ‘de-idealized’ history of philosophy, see Rée, Ayers, and Westoby, Philosophy and its Past; and for an initial overview account of philosophy as an academic discipline apprehended through its material history, see Rée, ‘Philosophy as an Academic Discipline’. 53. Canguilhem, p. 25, published alongside Derrida’s response, referred to in the last chapter. 54. Derrida, Du droit à la philosophie, pp. 44–45. 55. Philosophy as Social Expression is the title of Levi’s book, already referred to, in which he lists the above ‘social roles’ of the philosopher over time (p. 10). 56. Muglioni, in Philosophie, école, même combat, p. 21. Or, to take an example from the long defence of philosophy teaching against the Fouchet reforms and against literature teaching: ‘L’Enseignement philosophique est donc l’enseignement qui répond pleinement à l’exigence éducative’ (Dreyfus and Khodoss, p. 1011). 57. The accusation of Joseph Ferrari, Cousin’s former disciple, referred to in Chapter 1. 58. Schopenhauer was Nietzsche’s ‘hero’ in this regard, for having abjured university teaching. ‘Interested’ accounts, like those of Fabiani and Pinto above, would point out that he was consumingly jealous of Hegel’s appointment. On Schopenhauer’s diatribe of 1851 against the university, see Stewart, and Abensour and Labarrière. On Nietzsche’s 1871 attack, see Cooper, Authenticity and Learning, Hohendahl, Building a National Literature, pp. 250–70, and Silverman, Textualities. Nietzsche’s characterization of ‘old maids’ and ‘breadwinners’, or ‘realists’ and ‘scholars’, is effectively the same as Lyotard’s 1968 opposition between the equally tame uncritical projects of both modernizing social sciences — ‘experts’ — and traditionalist humanities — ‘scholars’ — already referred to in Chapter 2. 59. Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, p. xxiv. 60. For an example of this, see Lefranc, 1995, p. 269. 61. Cited in Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, eds., Les Fins de l’homme, p. 244. 62. Derrida, ‘Entre crochets’, p. 26. 63. Derrida and Bennington, p. 244. 64. ‘Le Parergon’, in Derrida, La Vérité en peinture, pp. 23–24. 65. Bourdieu, ‘The Philosophical Institution’, p. 6.

106

The Double Strategy

66. Derrida’s essay predates the work of Bourdieu discussed in the previous section. 67. The question of the university and philosophy as elaborated by Derrida will be examined in Chapter 5. 68. Lefranc, L’Enseignement philosophique: éditoriaux, p. 31. 69. Bourdieu, ‘The Philosophical Institution’. 70. Saïd, ‘The Problem of Textuality’, pp. 698–99, in particular; Culler, Framing the Sign, p. 62. 71. Cf. Derrida, ‘Ja ou le faux-bond’, in Derrida, Points… Interviews, 1974–1994, 1995, pp. 72–73. 72. A. Canivez, Jules Lagneau. Canivez’s history of philosophy teaching in France was introduced in Chapter 1. 73. Ibid., p. 88, quoted in OC, p. 133. 74. Derrida’s essay on Kant’s ‘Conf lict of the Faculties’ returns to the relation between the learned academies and educational institutions at this time. This essay will be discussed in Chapter 5. 75. B. Johnson, ‘Teaching Deconstructively’, pp. 141 ff. The question of ‘pedagogy’ and decon­ struction is subsumed into a literary critical methodology here. 76. Though not the same opposition, an interesting additional historical point is the contest between ‘pédagogie’ (the theory of pedagogy) and psychology of teaching, and philosophy in the compulsory curriculum for écoles normales — in other words, in the training of primary school-teachers, another means by which philosophy felt that it underwrote the whole of schooling. On Alfred Fouillée’s attempts to institute compulsory philosophy for all instituteurs, see Ringer, Fields of Knowledge, p. 251. This battle-ground was taken up again in the 1980s. 77. See, for example, Besnier. 78. As Culler points out, an entire branch of literary theory — reader-response theory — was developed as a response to classroom difficulties with literary criticism (Culler, ‘Criticism and Institutions’, p. 92). Thus Leitch, in a section of his Postmodernism book entitled ‘Protocols for a Practice of Deconstructive Teaching’, subsumes Derrida’s work in this area under the question, ‘what does a pedagogical practice, derived from the “principles” of deconstruction, entail?’ (p. 75). The idea that a single ‘method’ can be extrapolated in this way and then used as the founding principle of a particular practice is in fact the very opposite of Derrida’s approach. 79. Felman, pp. 76 ff. 80. First published in 1969, and translated and reprinted in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. For a discussion of Adorno and of education more generally, see Hohendahl, ‘Education after the Holocaust’. 81. Louis Marin makes a similar point in his contribution to the 1975 collection on the university and political commitment edited by Alan Montefiore. He argues that because the teacher does not produce knowledge in the act of teaching, but merely reproduces it, and transmits it within and through an institutional framework, he is necessarily dispossessed of his discourse at the moment of its utterance, being able to regain it only in his role as a functionary of the institution’ (Marin, p. 95). This is precisely the opposition, between authenticity vouchsafed by the creative production of new knowledge, and transmission as the dead hand of institutional routinization only, which Derrida is seeking to disrupt. 82. There are some similarities to Roland Barthes’s espousal of the disruption of pedagogic authority, but this did not of course form part of a collective, or specifically political project (see Barthes, ‘Écrivains, intellectuels, professeurs’ and Leçon). 83. A. Canivez, p. 82, cited in OC, p. 130. 84. Genette and Derrida were former colleagues, having both taught in hypokhâgne at Le Mans in 1959–60. Derrida does not allude to Genette’s essay, but the area is very relevant to the problematic he is considering. 85. Notably also by Barthes in L’Aventure sémiologique. 86. On Lanson’s inf luence over curricular reform and literary education in general, see Com­ pagnon. 87. Milner,, p. 11. One of the chief targets of Milner’s polemical attack on education was the empty science of pedagogy, which he opposes to Knowledge which is the true goal of education — not individual balanced character formation He invokes a Republican ideal centred on the educational project of Jules Ferry to this end, which I will return to in the next chapter. Milner, like Rancière was part of the ‘cercle d’Ulm’ who went to Althusser’s early seminars at the

The Double Strategy

107

ENS, together with Balibar, Macherey, Jacques-Alain Miller, and Debray. Milner’s work is in linguistics, and he is currently director of the CIPh. 88. On ‘transparency’ and teaching, see Allen. 89. Blanchot, p. 6.

Chapter 4

v

‘Reine ou rien’: The Extension of Philosophy GREPH’s ‘defence and attack’ focused on the examination of philosophy as la classe de philosophie in the nineteenth century, as the couronnement d’études, synthesizing what had gone before, as Cousin had instituted it, and from there becoming in the Third Republic justified as a particular stage of education, a ritual initiation. They turned therefore to what purported to be philosophical justifications of this arrangement in order to determine to what extent they in fact derived from this institutionalization. The indissociability of the education and philosophy thesis was one aspect of this, with its key reliance on the scene of dialogue between master and disciple and also on orality. The crucial ‘myth’ to be examined was that of the professeur de philosophie and the relation between teacher and pupil which it entailed, which was the chief resource of the defence of philosophy in schools by its official upholders. GREPH after the ‘Bataille de la Presse’ The protests against the proposed changes to the final years of schooling were thus successful, but this was only seen as a temporary suspension of part of the threat to philosophy’s survival. The proposal of three or four hours of compulsory philosophy a week, and four or five hours as an additional option,1 was rejected by philosophy’s defenders, both official and radical, since pupils would still have not studied philosophy in the earlier years of schooling, and it would thus still stand as an unenticing unknown quantity, reputedly ‘difficult’, for which pupils would be unlikely to opt. This would mean the continuing reduction of teaching posts in philosophy would continue unchecked unless the ‘battle’ continued. Christian Beullac, the minister after Haby, appeared on television to make reassuring noises about the reforms on the evening of the first day of the États-Généraux de la Philosophie, but the philosophers were unconvinced. The unease experienced by GREPH at the outset in finding themselves defending a residual vestige of a traditional curriculum originally intended for a small elite continued to inform their activities. In terms of the politics of education, those who wished to be radical philosophy teachers were still caught in what the philosopher Joël Roman subsequently termed an unlivable paradox — that of two proposed models of education, one liberal but elitist, the other emancipatory but ‘mercenary’.2 In

The Extension of Philosophy

109

other words, Haby’s reform of education had attempted to integrate as a system the two types of education developed throughout the nineteenth century — primary and secondary, for masses and elite — and thus to ‘democratize’ and ‘modernize’. This modernizing had little time for the humanities, and its ‘democratization’ was part of a view of education as tailored to society’s economic needs and as a system the sheer costliness of which required an economic justification beyond the enhanced self-fulfilment of a proportion of the population.3 Those who wished to counter this, including the philosophers, were thus still caught in this version of the politics of the humanities which was outlined at the end of Chapter 2. GREPH therefore continued to develop its demands for the extension of philosophy in order to change philosophy and not just defend the indefensible. As well as continuing with its general campaign, in 1977 GREPH produced the collective volume Qui a peur de la philosophie? and was involved in the ‘Philosophers’ General Assembly’, the États-Généraux de la Philosophie, held on 16–17 June 1979 at the Sorbonne. The decentralized structure of GREPH meant that most of their operations remained at the level of the ‘vie obscure’ of school philosophy teachers, working in groups on research topics. In this sense GREPH itself was less an organized entity as such than a multiform arena of debate. In retrospective French accounts, as we have seen, the name of the group is only used metonymically to signify ‘the radicals’. It is only possible to refer to the available published contributions of members. Some of its members were and are well-known philosophers, as seen already: Michèle Le Dœuff, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Sarah Kofman.4 Others who became prominent were lycée teachers, such as Roland Brunet and Bernadette Gromer, whose contributions to QP will be discussed below. Derrida himself is, of course, by far the best-known figure: he used his increasing fame to publicize GREPH by publishing material from their collective work alongside his own and by endlessly including them in discussions of his work with both French and foreign interviewers. His presentation of his work in relation to the project of GREPH and the double strategy of the ‘Avant-projet’ in OC, discussed in the last chapter, demonstrates how closely he envisaged the links between the two. How this fed into his subsequent work in the 1980s will be the subject of Chapter 5, below. Additionally, other initiatives were taken on behalf of philosophy in the Écoles Normales and the universities, which referred to GREPH and situated themselves in relation to them. Their name functions therefore to designate a movement of radicals — both ‘lowly’ and ‘avant-garde stars’ pace Louis Pinto’s refusal to believe this — which included a changing population of those inside and outside philosophy. It is for that reason that I consider the work of Patrice Vermeren and Stéphane Douailler within the purview of GREPH, even though they were mostly involved in their distinct but closely allied project of Le Doctrinal de Sapience. As outlined at the beginning of Chapter 2, these groups formed an overlapping discursive space of specific approaches, but shared their refusal to defend a depoliticized philosophy and to accept arguing from the ground of the traditionalists. Derrida was involved in subsequent colloques called not only to exchange papers but also to take a stand against the perceived attacks on institutional philosophy. The collected contributions of La Grève des philosophes, taking its name and its

110

The Extension of Philosophy

epigraph from Pierre Leroux’s La Grève de Samarez (1863–65), are the set of papers and some of the discussion from the Rencontres École et Philosophie conference, held at Nanterre on 20 October 1984. This conference prescribed as its theme ‘Il n’y a pas d’école sans philosophie’ and it focused on the decline of philosophy’s role in teacher training. Contributors included Châtelet, Douailler and Vermeren, Lyotard, Rancière, and Tassin. Jean-Claude Milner also participated, but criticized GREPH’s proposal for philosophy’s extension.5 In 1984 Derrida and Vermeren together organized a conference and a collection under the auspices of the CIPh on ‘Les savoirs populaires, l’instruction des prolétaires et la philosophie des classes pauvres au XIXe siècle’, which continued with the preoccupations and approach of the Révoltes Logiques group’s work on popular history.6 Both founders of that group, Jean Borreil and Ranciére, took a key role.7 The Doctrinal published in its 1979 collection a set of papers by a work group of philosophers in teacher training institutes which protested against the replacement of philosophy by ‘psychopedagogy’ — La philosophie dans le mouroir — to which François Châtelet also contributed.8 The contributions of other members to QP do not explicitly attempt to situate themselves in relation to Derrida’s work. The only such overt statements, which have been referred to already, were those of Michèle Le Dœuff in her 1977 interview, ‘The Philosopher in the Classroom’, in which she broadly aligned GREPH philosophically with the impetus of Derrida’s work but refused to see the group as solely ‘Derridean’, and of Meskel and Ryan who in QP warned against ‘idolatry’.9 Much of GREPH’s work only ever appeared in written form ephemerally, in internal bulletins and circulated sheets, and the work-groups and teaching experiments themselves were only documented in lasting form in the selections in QP.10 Some voices within the group were resistant to publishing anything more than this (QP, p. 10), or at least did not see it as a priority. Nonetheless a publication committee was elected to put together QP.11 The aim of the collection was not to stand as an ‘expression totale’ of the group, therefore, and its contents are varied, overlapping, and not worked out in relation to one another. There is no particular attempt to map the terrain in which they were working, or each to take on different and complementary approaches and sub-topics. As such it is a ‘representative’ work in both productive and unproductive ways — deliberately unsystematic and representing an ‘inaugural incursion’ in to the area only. Many of the lines of debate opened in the ‘Avant-projet’ in relation to the history of philosophy teaching in France only came to (published) fruition more than a decade later, under the auspices of the Collège International de Philosophie. GREPH’s involvement with the États-Généraux de la Philosophie was through Derrida, the main instigator, and Roland Brunet.12 Together, Derrida and Brunet called, organized, and were in charge of running the event. The committee formed to make the preparations consisted of twenty-one university and school teachers of philosophy, and it also included philosophers who were not particularly close, philosophically speaking, as Derrida subsequently remarked.13 As well as Nancy and Jankélévitch, they included other well-known figures: Paul Ricoeur, Jean Toussaint-Desanti, Gilles Deleuze, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and François

The Extension of Philosophy

111

Châtelet (EG, pp. 16–17). Participation was invited in the same unstructured way as with GREPH, asking for comments and analyses to be added to the ‘Cahiers de doléances’. Two thousand signatures were added to the initial appeal, more than half of which, according to Brunet, were from non-philosophers, and 1,200 attended.14 The highly symbolic terms used signified their ‘revolutionary’ intent of mobilizing on behalf of philosophy and of giving philosophy a collective voice in ways which would ref lect their radical intentions and not take the form of a protectionist ‘official’ defence.15 As Derrida pointed out in his opening address, the title could be used against them, in terms of the original ‘États-Généraux’, as the place of conservative hierarchy, or dismissed as a too easy gesture of self-credentializing in the name of revolution. The intended association of course was that of breaking away from an old, bankrupt system. As affirmation of this, he invokes the designation ‘avantgarde’, but in terms of its military connotations (p. 44). The symbolism of place, a large gathering in the amphitheatres of the Sorbonne, linked the event and the discussions to the events of May ’68, and Derrida invoked this resonance almost nostalgically in his evaluation six months later in terms of those moments when ‘la parole se prenait le plus librement possible’.16 The terms of debate were the same as those formed through opposition to the Haby reforms: the insistence on a real, tangible ‘demand’ for philosophy (EG, p. 9), and the refusal of philosophy as just a university specialism as its institutional extinction — ‘une langue morte entre anatomistes spécialisés’ (EG, p. 14). Philosophy teachers who are not named, but whose comments appear in the proceedings, testified to their unhappy sense of the contradiction between the oppressive institution and ‘la vraie parole de la philosophie’ (p. 95). This was the opposition deconstructed by Derrida in OC, as examined in the last chapter: philosophy as ideal freedom, stif led by the institution and requiring a new radical form unfettered by these deadening constraints. The remarks demonstrated the continuing frustration of teachers who felt threatened and undervalued, but also the difficulty of straightforwardly opposing the current status quo without invoking the idealized authenticity of philosophy teaching which Derrida’s OC essay had put into question. Those present demanded, as a minimum, four hours of philosophy in all sections of the bac, including the technical sections, and philosophy’s continuing presence in the teacher training institutes, but the real target was extension. They argued that this was not a corporatist protest, since their own jobs were not threatened; what was threatened was the institutional survival of philosophy (EG, p. 204). The battle ‘for philosophy’ had to be for a changed, pluralized version of philosophy, and, to this end, focused on extension, and extra-mural extension was included within this (pp. 132–33), a key area which QP does not consider.17 Brunet and Derrida were very much responsible for driving this agenda and they invoked GREPH’s arguments on behalf of it. Other more conservative participants, including the Catholic philosopher and inspecteur general Étienne Borne, predictably objected to this emphasis (pp. 61–62). The ‘États-Généraux’ were thus not a meeting of GREPH, although the need for such a large-scale gathering had been recognized and considered by them since March 1977, but it aimed to be an inclusive forum. Their inf luence predominated, however, and to the displeasure of some.18 Despite dissenting views, the demand for

112

The Extension of Philosophy

philosophy teaching from seconde level upwards was passed. The most significant change in the general concerns voiced about philosophy was the inclusion of the mass media as well as education within the discussion, a topic stressed at the outset by Derrida in his opening address. The Dethroning of Philosophy GREPH’s demand for the extension of philosophy to pupils younger than seventeen represented a theoretical and a practical demand. Derrida’s two essays for GREPH, which represented their immediate response to the Haby proposals in March and May of 1975, both focused on the practical transformation of philosophy by exposing the ‘mythe rusé de l’âge et de la maturité psycho-intellectuelle’ (QP, p. 448). Haby’s proposals were justified in terms of ‘pedagogical’ needs, which purported to take into more realistic consideration the real possibilities of the classroom and of pupils as individuals, and Haby himself posed this as a superior alternative to ‘socio-political analysis’. They appealed to notions such as ‘degrée d’éveil’ and ‘âge mental’, and optionalization in the final years of schooling was, as seen already, presented as ‘liberalizing’, enabling pupil choice for the first time. This recourse to ‘l’exigence pédagogique’ was interpreted by GREPH as merely reactionary. Within this, GREPH focused specifically on the ‘myth’ of a correct age for philosophy, and sought to expose its derivations, whether educational, political, or philosophical. The majority of the contributions to QP focus on this question, but in contrasting ways. They consist of a mixture of essays on texts by canonical philosophers such as Plato, Descartes, and Hegel, accounts of teaching experiments with younger pupils, and analyses of the conditions of teaching philosophy in France which draw attention to the historical determinations of that teaching. As stated in the introduction to this chapter, these essays stand as initial enquiries and arguments only. The ‘Avant-projet’ had mapped out a potentially vast analytic terrain of future research which could not be covered within a collection of essays produced immediately in response to the ‘contexte d’urgence’ of the threat to philosophy’s survival. One possible criticism of the collection as a whole is its lack of systematic coherence. There is no overall introduction of the book’s contents, nor any attempt to provide an overview of how the individual contributions stand in relation to one another, to their shared project, and to the reforms, except for the founding documents of GREPH itself. This marks the somewhat haphazard inclusiveness of the volume.19 GREPH seemed to recognize this in their foreword and afterword, drawing attention to their deliberate lack of organizational coherence. In such an intentionally self-ref lexive project this is a deficiency. This omission of an overarching commentary does not help the collection in its aim of acting as a systematic intervention by a political collective movement. A more serious criticism, mentioned already in Chapter 2 above, is that there is no attempt to make good their promise to situate themselves in relation to the reform as a whole. As seen in the outline of Haby’s proposals, this was a complex reform, and in some ways it could be seen as a radical move on the part of a right-wing government, in terms of its integrationist aims. The ‘comprehensivization’ aspect

The Extension of Philosophy

113

of it is not directly addressed by them. The aim of analysing the reform in general is restricted to scorn for its ‘false’ rhetoric of democratization. The open espousal by a right-wing government of the need to see education in terms of the needs of society prevented GREPH from going beyond this to analyze the possible effects of the reform and its potential for progressiveness. This potentially ‘radical’ outcome was not taken up by them in their analyses, and in this respect they did remain very narrowly within their own concerns only. This aspect of the reform was practically blocked by the non-cooperation of schools generally, and in fact it failed to take hold successfully. Perhaps this is only to convict them of fighting on the basis of absolutes — education should stand apart from the economic needs of a particular society, and refuse to accept such a pragmatic mission alone — which now seem unrealizable and therefore naïve. However, even on their own terms, their failure to produce large-scale analysis unavoidably detracts from their insistence on not being simply protectionists interested only in their own most immediate concerns. Qui a peur de la philosophie? is very much a response to the debate of 1975 outlined already, to the official defence of philosophy, and a marshalling of arguments for their counterposing view of philosophy. The argument for extension was based on different strands of debate, both philosophical and educational. They sought to bring out the arguments embedded in the history of philosophy’s institutionalization in France, and to make clear the provenance of the terms of the official defence. This defence relied on the notion of philosophy as crown. As seen in the survey of the press debate, even a radical such as Vladimir Jankélévitch, who polemicized the reforms simply as the dark forces of capitalism against the subversive force of philosophy, ended by relying on the formula ‘reine ou rien’.20 Not falling back like this on an over-valuation of philosophy in a bid for its merest survival was GREPH’s starting point. The terms of the defence hark back to the glory of philosophy as crown: not just of a particular cursus, but as the essence of education; as a uniquely French institution which must therefore not be tampered with; and as vital to produce the kind of citizens needed by society. All of these points can be found verbatim in Cousin’s Défense of a hundred and thirty years earlier, and are used again by the upholders of philosophy in the Third Republic, despite their self-conception as the very opposite of the philosophy teacher under Cousin. The recycling of these reference points in the contemporary debate is ahistorical and presentist in that it disallows their historical context and uproots them from it, and it is ideologically over-determined and obfuscatory in its failure to acknowledge these origins. Uncovering the historical and political determinations was the first part of GREPH’s task. The second part of its task was setting forth the philosophical implications of these arguments. These hinged on an idea of philosophy as synthesis, an outmoded view from the history of education and the view of philosophy as an initiation because of its positioning within the educational system, with all that this view entailed. Additionally, and very importantly, these educational and philosophical arguments in defence of philosophy in terminale conspired with a view of philosophy’s intellectual hegemony in relation to other disciplines and forms of knowledge. This was the view of philosophy as legitimation and critique, the

114

The Extension of Philosophy

ultimate ground of knowledge which acted as the tribunal of the other disciplines. GREPH wanted to dislodge this hegemony and to ‘dethrone’ philosophy from this epistemologically untenable position. The ‘dethroning’ of philosophy meant unpicking the defence of philosophy as crown in order to transform philosophy teaching through changing its relation to other disciplines, putting into question and ‘politicizing’ the grid of the disciplines (QP, p. 8). The découpages between disciplines were political because they represented ‘une série d’interdits’, based on distinctions between objectives, levels, ages, as Nancy formulated it (QP, p. 215). Changing the unique place of philosophy in the education system would displace it, and detach it from its claims to sovereignty as the legitimator of all other forms of knowledge, creating ‘transversal’ rather than vertical and hierarchical relations between the disciplines. The question of extension was important then, not as a kind of expansionism, but in terms of the politics of the disciplines enshrined in the educational system. According to this politics, the ‘grille des disciplines’ is not neutral, either politically or epistemologically, since this would mean that is does not have determinable effects. The question of philosophy as crown is examined at length in the QP essay ‘Margarita Philosophica’ by Roland Brunet, the lycée philosophy teacher and important member of GREPH. The title of his essay refers to an engraving of 1508 in the Musée de l’histoire de l’éducation, which depicts the allegory of the philosopher’s stone, whose three faces, natural, rational and moral philosophy, crown the liberal arts (pp. 116–17). He is situating his ref lections thus in terms of the philosophical conception of ‘l’imperium philosophique’, not just as embodied in the liberal arts curriculum of the medieval university, but in terms of the Platonic metaphor of the dialectic as the queen of sciences. The inception of its institutional justification in terms of this regal mission is traced back to Kant by Brunet, and in particular his essay of 1798, ‘The Conf lict of the Faculties’. Here, philosophy’s sovereignty is argued for in terms of its role as critical overseer of the other disciplines: it becomes a ‘contre-pouvoir vigilant’ (p. 118) not politically or externally, but internally, as the tribunal of truth for the other disciplines. Brunet only focuses on this essay brief ly, but a few years later, in two essays of 1980 and 1983, Derrida explored Kant’s defence of philosophy in the university as an important reference point for understanding the relation between philosophy and its institutions.21 Significantly, Brunet starts off from the history of philosophy to understand the institutionally embedded view of philosophy as crown. Philosophy as ‘le couronnement d’études’ is, in his analysis, a sleight of hand, borrowing from this justification of philosophy as supreme in terms of critique to institute it in terms which have no reference to this function. These terms were socially utilitarian, and concentrated on philosophy as a substitute to religion under both Cousin and the Republican regime.22 Brunet argues that philosophy thus took on not simply an openly ideological role, but a ‘quasi sacerdotale’ one within a secularized society, the opposite of the role of critique outlined for it by Kant.23 Brunet draws an opposition, not always explicitly, between philosophical determinations of ‘the philosophical’ (Plato, Kant, etc.) and the ‘ideological discourse on philosophy’ —

The Extension of Philosophy

115

in other words, the defence of philosophy from Cousin onwards in France, which claimed that its arguments on behalf of philosophy as crown were philosophically grounded, when in fact they were ideologically and politically motivated (p. 122). Though he cautions against simply reconceiving philosophy in terms of a ‘religion of critique’ (p. 125), this is in fact the logic of his position. In the terms given by Kant, philosophy stands as the necessary instrument of critique of all forms of knowledge, and this is its ultimate institutional role. GREPH wants to undermine philosophy’s sovereignty, and does so by unpicking the ideological determinants of a certain ritualistic discourse of defence, but nonetheless it wants to insist on philosophy’s subversive function. The relationship with the other disciplines which this posits is in no way transversal, therefore: philosophy has not been dethroned. This is a crucial problem for GREPH, and for its double strategy of defence and attack. I will return to it shortly. Brunet’s strategy for uncovering the ideological determinations of this ritualistic defence consists largely of juxtaposing sets of quotations from the contemporary official defence of philosophy, by APPEP representatives and inspecteurs généraux such as Louis-Marie Morfaux, one of APPEP’s founder members, with quotations from the late nineteenth century and very beginning of the twentieth century by philosophers such as Alfred Fouillée, Gustave Belot, and Paul Janet. The former resurrect the defence of the latter almost verbatim. The defence of philosophy as synthesis of all that has preceded it and its unique positioning in French education were defended as if this corresponded to the exigencies and true needs of philosophy itself — taught in a single block, at a liminal stage, ending compulsory education, and thus marking the threshold of maturity between school and ‘life’, adolescence and adulthood. He does not, however, produce anything amounting to a political and philosophical history of philosophy’s institutionalization since Cousin, and this is only an initial suggestion of how the case could and should be prosecuted. This is politically effective, but intellectually problematic. After all, as seen in the first chapter in relation to that history, one of the initially most striking aspects of it is its ideological explicitness. The fortunes of philosophy in the fifty years up until 1864 produced a discourse on philosophy which was over the next fifty years entirely bounded by the negative reference points of its ideological enslavement under Cousin and its subsequent abolition. Thus, to quote from Fouillée’s overtly elitist remarks in the defence of philosophy, of the kind cited at the end of the first chapter, illuminates the contemporary discourse of defence for what it is — entirely a product of an unacknowledged history. But it also betrays a certain naïveté in the face of that history. It is as if the radical philosophers and GREPH members had proclaimed the necessary link between philosophy and politics comprehending ideology, education, and intellectual production, and philosophy and its material history, but had themselves lacked any detailed awareness of that history up until that point. Overtly ideological pronouncements from seventy years earlier are then brandished as ‘proof ’ of ideological determination. The result is that they appear to be discovering for the first time for themselves that forms and practices of education are not, after all, ideologically neutral and unchanging — the popular fallacy which Genette commented on. The determination of the terms of the ‘bataille pour la

116

The Extension of Philosophy

philosophie’ by forgotten or obscured antecedents is crucial, as was seen in Chapter 2, above. Brunet’s assessment of this is useful as an initial, polemical analysis, but does not itself contextualize the key episodes of that institutionalization adequately. Again, it is unfair to castigate an initial essay for not producing a detailed history of the kind and length which Patrice Vermeren was subsequently able to provide in his 1995 book on Cousin. But Brunet fails to allow for this general historical background sufficiently, in terms of the initial role of Cousin, and in terms of an analysis of the educational system as a whole, and therefore philosophy’s possible relation to it. It is not sufficient, as an analysis of the kind projected in the AP, first to insist on the constitutive role of ideological and material determination, and then to adduce quotations and proclaim their ideological taintedness. Arguing openly about suitable forms of education for the creation of elites was not controversial at the end of the nineteenth century, and thus does not require very much ‘unmasking’. Jean-Louis Fabiani’s account of the defence of philosophy during its ‘golden age’ is superior in this regard, since it attends to that debate in its own terms: those of a growing sense of ‘crisis’ in philosophy, paradoxically when it was still enshrined as crown.24 This arose from the threat of a more scientifically oriented curriculum, viewed as superior according to utilitarian arguments, which can thus be mapped directly on to the debate of the 1970s. But to stop, as Brunet does, at the discovery of ideological determination fails to address the central questions of the relationship between society and education more generally.25 This is linked therefore to GREPH’s failure to engage more generally with these more fundamental questions as part of their consideration of philosophy’s position. More particularly — and here, Fabiani’s account is less helpful — it does not bring into play adequately the most obvious differences of intellectual context. Gustave Belot, at the time a teacher at the famous Parisian lycée Louis-le-Grand, and an important member of the newly formed Société française de philosophie, was concerned to develop a truly secular morality — in itself a not philosophically unworthy or necessarily conservative project for its time. The main threat to philosophy’s status was science and not political repression.26 Le Dœuff, in her short essay in QP, ‘Pour et contre l’enseignement philosophique’, discusses Fernand Vandérem’s 1894 polemic in La Revue bleue, which attacked the classe de philosophie as producing only ‘l’indifférence théorique’ because of its hopeless marathon attempt to condense everything into one year (QP, p. 259). The title of her essay is the title of the collection of articles which Vandérem subsequently put together on the subject. Vandérem proposed teaching philosophy over the course of several years at least. Le Dœuff cautions against the historical blindness of adopting this polemic as a useful precedent for GREPH’s own arguments (p. 260). The models invoked for teaching philosophy at a younger age by Vandérem are all based on moralizing aims and derive from the example of the Jesuit schools’s model of the examination of conscience, or the elementary morality classes of girls’ education. She points out, as does Brunet, that those who defended the classe de philosophie, like Fouillée, used arguments of the morality of the elite, and that the apparently ‘philosophical’ justifications of the arrangement derived from this. The point of drawing the

The Extension of Philosophy

117

parallel with the use of these same arguments by the upholders of the status quo in the Haby reform debate is therefore unmasking the hidden ‘political’ dimension of a defence which purports to be neutral and philosophical only. This is clearly useful in immediate, polemical terms, but just as precursors for GREPH’s position cannot be adopted without regard for different historical contexts, nor can precursors for their opponents’s position. The point that the latter’s discourse was characterized by obfuscation of its origins in a discourse of defence from seventy years earlier is extremely important. But overall, GREPH’s ‘unmasking’ of that history falls short of being sufficiently historical itself: it is too excited on coming across overt statements of elitism. This is ultimately presentist, and limits the uncovering of philo­sophy’s material inscription in French education — one part of the project as delimit­ed by the ‘Avant-projet’ — to merely the first stage of that analysis. This is under­standable, to the extent that QP was only ever meant to be a first staging-post in this project, and it needed to produce an impact immediately. However, a clear overview of the particular institutionalization of philosophy in France was needed.27 Brunet’s account demonstrates that the defence of philosophy’s position within terminale relies on the idea of synthesis borrowed from this earlier discourse as if it were a ‘philosophical’ justification. Since this is untenable philosophically, and was only ever an ideologically justified arrangement, the ‘prison-fortress’ of terminale must be broken out of, since it is simply the result of a prior institutionalization. Pretending still to enact this role of synthesis, of a philosophy teaching which would be encyclopaedic — the Hegelian parody of Cousin’s version — and thus unifying and totalizing is a falsification of the possibility of teaching philosophy. Moreover, keeping philosophy in such glorious and pointless isolation makes it into ‘un pouvoir idéalement suprême et effectivement serf ’ (p. 116). Most of all it depends upon a particular interpretation and usage of the indissociability thesis of philosophy and education, which was discussed in the last chapter, in terms of the scene of teaching — the putative relations of teacher and pupil, the correct age for philosophy, and most of all the myth of the professeur de philosophie. These arguments for extension were immediately attacked by opponents of philosophy as philosophical expansionism, and by its defenders as a dilution of philosophy and a betrayal of its unique contribution to compulsory education. As Derrida commented in his essay in QP, ‘L’Âge de Hegel’, to its adversaries GREPH was a grouping of eccentrics, who prétendent enseigner la philosophie au berceau: entreprise déstructrice et anti-philosophique, disent les uns, excès de zèle et panphilosophisme disent les autres, au moment où, comme chacun sait, par exemple depuis Hegel, la philosophie est finie.28 (DP, p. 204)

The outrage with which GREPH’s proposal of extension was received by the ‘establishment’ of philosophy teaching could be best understood, according to Le Dœuff, in quasi-anthropological terms, as fetishistic and irrational.29 Opponents saw the proposed change as entailing a removal from the ‘world of ritual’ and therefore scandalizing to those unquestioningly part of the institution. The link between philosophy in schools and its supposedly initiating role is, in the terms Le Dœuff saw it, so strong as to be on a par with a closed, alien belief-system. The

118

The Extension of Philosophy

next section turns to the myth of the charismatic professeur de philosophie, the cornerstone of this ritualized view of philosophy in French schools. The Figure of the Philosophy Teacher If ‘dethroning’ philosophy was the first target, extension would also change what unique positioning had entailed in terms of pupils and teachers: the master-disciple relation, the idea of initiation, the charisma with which the figure of the philosophy teacher has been imbued by virtue of philosophy’s institutional arrangements taught by only one teacher in a single year.30 The concentration of philosophy within a single year was defended on the basis of the mythicized encounter between teacher and pupil, or between pupil and philosophy: ‘un maître, une classe, un système’, as Sylviane Agacinski commented (QP, p. 40). What is implied by this argument is that the end of adolescence is the correct age for this encounter, which is an eroticized one between master and disciple. In the ‘socratico-transférentiel’ scene of teaching discussed in the last chapter, the young disciple-to-be is ‘vierge mais formé [...] innocent mais enfin mûr pour la philosophie’, as Derrida remarks in ‘La Philosophie et ses classes’ (QP, p. 444). This idea of maturity casts philosophy as entirely appropriate to the natural crisis stage of adolescence, enabling the pupil to pass through the crisis to the safety of the other side, and to socially useful adulthood. As such, Sarah Kofman argues in her QP essay ‘Philosophe terminée philosophie interminable’, it only masquerades as pedagogical realism — in fact it is a political argument. A brief but intense stage of philosophy thus serves a ‘rôle préventif et purgatif ’ (p. 36). Her critique of this institutional arrangement does not charge philosophy teaching in its current form with conservatism and rigidity or inculcation of the dominant ideology, but sees it as the place for social critique, and one that is therefore contained carefully. The critical force of philosophy is a concession awarded to the existential need for independence and questioning felt by the young: la critique philosophique, en occasionnant une décharge des pulsions destruc­ trices, servirait d’exutoire, permettrait, dans la vie réelle ultérieure, l’économie des révolutions politiques. (p. 16)

As a philosophical instantiation of this view, she invokes Auguste Comte’s idea of the ‘mal radical’ of metaphysics and youth, both of which risk disorder and anarchy before a successful transition is made to well-adjusted adulthood — in Comte’s terms, the age of sober positivism as opposed to risky, metaphysical excesses. Kofman goes on to analyse this idea of philosophy as a specific stage with reference to Plato’s Gorgias. The cardinal philosophical reference point here is inescapably that of the Socratic master and youthful disciple which regulates the pedagogic ideal of philosophy, as seen in the last chapter. As Brunet remarks, this characterizes the ‘discours enseignant sur la philosophie’ to the point at which ‘la pédagogie philosophique tend à s’y résumer tout entière’ (p. 147). The figure of the disciple is the paradigm of ‘l’éducation philosophique réussie’ as Bernard Pautrat makes clear (QP, p. 272). The defence of teaching philosophy in terminale only relies on this as an idealization of its teaching, and

The Extension of Philosophy

119

of teaching as itself a philosophical activity. In institutional terms, as outlined in the first chapter, this self-idealization depended on the changed self-conception of the school philosophy teachers from inculcators of an official ideological doctrine under Cousin to exceptional figures within a given system, enjoying an unusual degree of freedom in relation to official prescription, and now officially engaged in ‘l’apprentissage de la liberté par l’exercice de la réf lexion’, set apart from their lycée colleagues in order to introduce their charges to the fundamental questions of truth and freedom.31 The mythicization of this figure is near total. As Albert Thibaudet commented in his 1927 book La République des professeurs, the philosophy teacher was ‘à un degré remarquable un homme libre et un maître de liberté’.32 The defence of philosophy in terminale rested on a combined idealization of the Socratic master-disciple relation — the indissociability of philosophy and education, and the golden age of the philosophy teacher — and the inscription of that thesis within French education. I considered the former in the last chapter, and will now consider the latter. The genre of testimony to the indelible imprint of the philosophy teacher by his pupils dates from this period.33 This hagiographical type of account f lourished particularly amongst pupils who in turn became philosophers themselves, allowing them to position themselves as part of an apostolic succession. If Émile Chartier, or Alain as he became known, is the original incarnation of the Republican philosophy teacher, then he himself always referred back to his own teacher, Jules Lagneau (1851–1894), who became the most celebrated philosophy teacher of the last third of the nineteenth century. Crucial to this genre is the fact that these hallowed figures did not publish themselves: their cours was their personal work of philosophy, an oral discourse evoked retrospectively by their pupils. Alain took charge of publishing Lagneau’s ‘work’, as well as a book of testimony, Souvenirs concernant Jules Lagneau.34 This model of the philosophy teacher conf lates two possible models sketched out by the historian of education Sheldon Rothblatt in his work on liberal education in the nineteenth century.35 The two alternatives he poses are the ‘saintly’ model and the ‘Socratic’ model. In the first, the teacher is viewed as more important than the subject taught. This model was very much implicated in theories of character formation: the pupils would be inspired by the ‘right conduct visible in his [the teacher’s] own life’ (p. 178). At stake here was the transmission of values rather than of knowledge per se. In the second, Socratic model, the personality of the teacher ceded to knowledge, and his ego, as Rothblatt remarks, would be subordinated to his subject. If competence and training were here to the fore, at the core of this model was Lehrnfreiheit, or the unrestricted pursuit of truth (p. 180), identified with the German conception of a professor as someone who imparted scientific spirit or method (p. 179). In order to perceive oneself as scholar or scientist, the autonomy of one’s discipline had first to be recognized, and authority granted to it. As Rothblatt comments, the latter model distanced itself from the former and allied itself to the research ideal by comparing ‘the vanity of teaching to the spirit of learning’, and ranging itself on the side of the latter, but also, in so doing, on the side of professionalization and specialization.36 The figure of the professeur de philosophie represents a peculiar hybrid of the two models traced by Rothblatt in the English

120

The Extension of Philosophy

context. The German research ideal was extremely inf luential after 1870 in French education, but the charisma of the philosophy school eacher did not feed off the prestige of the scientific spirit nor the research ideal. Rather, because of its unique place, the prof de philo was a hybrid of the two models, the charismatic and the Socratic. The prof de philo incarnated his subject, and represented the disinterested pursuit of truth to his pupils directly, by the tenor of his discours magistral and by the example of his humility towards his subject.37 Jean-Louis Fabiani gives the example of Alphonse Darlu, teacher at the lycée Condorcet in this period, whose creative, philosophical ‘production’ was deemed to be his teaching rather than his writing.38 Célestin Bouglé, the sociologist and disciple of Durkheim, describes Darlu eulogistically in his 1938 book, Les Maîtres de la philosophie universitaire en France. Indeed, Bouglé pushes the point further: Il se mettait tout entier dans son enseignement; il eut pu dire non sans fierté en montrant ses élèves: voici mes meilleurs livres.39

The pupils are the creation and enduring achievement of the teacher. As Fabiani points out, the philosophy teacher’s inspirational role is glowingly acknowledged as no less than the engendering of thought in the pupil. Another former pupil, Proust, said of Darlu in his dedication to Les plaisirs et les jours: un grand philosophe dont la parole inspirée, plus sûre de durer qu’un écrit, a, en moi, comme en tant d’autres, engendré la pensée.40

The imprint of the master is indelible on his young charges, lasting for the rest of their lives, even for those who did not continue with philosophy. His vocation is thus a priestly one, of a higher nature than that of the teacher of other subjects, precisely because he incarnates his subject, both saintly and Socratic. Albert Thibaudet described Lagneau as a secular priest, fostering ref lection and closer in function therefore to the Protestant pastor than the Catholic priest, in a passage which again insists on the lasting imprint made by philosophy, even if it is discontinued.41 This idea of the master’s lasting contribution to his pupils and to philosophy was coupled with an overriding idea of humility. The master created this endur­ ing impression and incarnated his subject not by virtuoso, pyrotechnic displays of metaphysical ingenuity, but rather by his doubts, his careful weighing up of difficulties and his hesitant, never satisfied search for the true path. André Canivez’s lengthy study of Jules Lagneau constantly emphasizes the doubt and humility of Lagneau as emblematic of the true embodiment of his role: ‘le type du penseur uniquement professeur’ (p. 296).42 This incarnation of doubt in the repeated performance of Lagneau’s teaching acted, according to Canivez, as a vital counterweight to the premature certainties of a scientific age by the repeated demonstration of his personal engagement with ‘la pensée active’ (A. Canivez, p. 583). As such, his teaching was his creative production and a true philosophical act and engagement. Canivez’s encomium, delivered at the close of his study, is worth quoting in full in this context: Lagneau est un homme qui médite sa philosophie à partir de son cours et qui fait oeuvre de philosophe devant son auditoire. D’où sa grandeur, son accent de conviction et la profondeur de son inf luence immédiate. Mais il n’oublie

The Extension of Philosophy

121

jamais que c’est à des débutants qu’il s’adresse, dont la plupart, l’année terminée, n’auront plus de contact avec la philosophie. Aussi, craignant de ne pas être compris, il répète inlassablement les débuts. (p. 583)

This eulogy reads as if it were by a pupil, itself part of the testimonial genre. It is Lagneau’s simplicity and his disavowal of certainty which are celebrated, as displayed in his teaching, and commemorated in the adulatory reminiscences of his former pupils. Hence the force of the idealizing reference to Socrates — simplicity and doubt rather than positive doctrine — as the unique contribution of the truly philosophical. This is what Jonathan Rée has termed the paradox of academic philosophy, ‘majestueuse en apparence, humble en réalité’, which he suggests can be traced from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards.43 Rée’s paradox is illuminating. This humility-as-vocation reference became operative in the French context in this ‘golden age’ of philosophy teaching of 1870–1900, where philosophy was crown of schooling, and ‘reine des sciences’. The overarching role of philosophy as crown was incarnated by the humility of its practitioners and their deliberate display of inadequacy in the face of their elevated quest. In this way, their own life circumstances became a kind of philosophical posture. This can still be seen in the protestations of humility of their vocation as intrinsically philosophical by contemporary perpetuators of the myth of the philosophy teacher.44 The combination of Rothblatt’s proposed two alternative models outlined above — the Christian or saintly model, where values were transmitted by example, and the Socratic, where the teacher was subordinated to the subject — is inherent in this mythologized figure in France, in which the teaching of philosophy becomes the purest representation of philosophy as such. The teacher is not more important than his subject; rather, the two are transfused. The most significant enabling factor in this development was a change in the relation between teacher and pupil, not just between teacher and subject, or teacher and official prescription. As Theodore Zeldin argues, precisely at the moment where the philosophy teacher was no longer required to parrot fixed doctrines he also began to engage in mentorship and personal relationships with his pupils.45 Their classes, particularly in the provinces, were generally small, with no more than half a dozen pupils. For these boys, as Zeldin remarks, the endeavour of the philosophy class seemed, in comparison to what had gone before, a joint one. The pupils were invited to share in the process of philosophizing, to follow the teacher in his doubts, and to learn from the humbleness of his demeanour in the face of their shared quest.46 The teacher’s incarnation of philosophy as activity was thus a very personal one, and its benefits were construed in terms of this ‘[l’]action personnelle’, which would secure the benefits of teaching philosophy, according to the analysis of the Société française de Philosophie at a meeting to review the situation of philosophy in French schools in 1902.47 This process of mentorship, and the implied relation fostered between pupils, teacher, and subject is very much to the fore in Canivez’s examination of Lagneau. Lagneau was one possible model for the character of Bouteiller in Barrès’s 1898 novel Les Déracinés, and it is the effects of personal example and mentorship that alarmed Barrès and led him to produce such a powerful negative version of the inf luence of the prof de philo.48

122

The Extension of Philosophy

All of these factors led to an understanding of philosophy teaching based on orality and on dialogue, and to a continuing embedded view of the teacher as master and the pupil as disciple. An interesting instantiation of this is pointed out by Bruno Poucet in his history of philosophy teaching in France.49 When educational philosophy programmes were made for television in 1964–65, they set themselves up as a ‘living model’ of philosophical dialogue and discussion. The form taken was of a well-known philosopher, such as Canguilhem, Ricoeur, and Raymond Aron, talking to a lycée philosophy teacher. This cast the philosopher as master and the teacher as disciple, with the master as the unattainable ideal of the disciple.50 This ideal of dialogue as the true form of philosophy meant, in fact, that the teacher produced his oral discourse in class, and the only reciprocal production by pupils was the short (written) dissertation exercise. This was enshrined as the pupil’s apprenticeship by Monzie’s 1925 Instructions, as Jean-Pierre Hédoin points out in his essay on the history of this pedagogic form in QP (p. 290).51 The teacher’s oral discours stood as an unattainable ideal example, to which the pupil was obliged to attempt a mirroring exercise, producing the beginnings of his own personal process of ref lection, but he could only necessarily fall short of the model. As an exercise it was much fetishized by philosophy teachers. The contributions to QP do not bring out in detail the information given above which is necessary to understand the legendary figure of the philosophy teacher. Brunet, in his essay, refers to this founding myth, but does not explore it further. He is interested in how the structure of the curriculum affects the view of philosophy. As we have seen, this leads to a form of initiation as deferral — the beginning of the search for truth which is to be revealed, rather than truth itself. This is an introduction to deferral as initiation rite.52 In the 1970s debate, the argument that philosophy was ‘indivisible’ was regularly produced. This claimed that philosophy’s position in terminale as ‘un tout indivisible’ (QP, p. 40) not only ref lected its relationship to the other disciplines, but also made sense philosophically. Philosophy could not be divided up into elementary then complex levels without traducing it and diluting it.53 As Derrida points out (QP, p. 221), arguing for ‘progressivité’ — that is to say, the idea that philosophy was not somehow indivisible and could be taught over successive years of school — meant employing a provisional strategic argument for GREPH, since the idea of a linear progression in thought or education was not one to which they could unproblematically adhere. The notion was, as Brunet emphasizes at the beginning of his essay in QP, ‘encore indeterminé et d’ailleurs provisoire’ (p. 111). They were in effect borrowing from the enemy’s logic: if Haby wanted philosophy in première, why not throughout school like other subjects? (Derrida, QP, p. 102). This made it easy, as mentioned already, for Haby himself and the inspecteurs généraux to claim that GREPH was on the side of the proposals.54 The lack of progression which they focused on meant extension to lower age-groups and to the technical bac, but they also targeted the way the official programme was repeated at bac, licence, and agrégation levels. Moreover, as Brunet points out (QP, p. 146), the programme, in its divisions of topics and areas of study, had scarcely changed since Cousin, merely substituting tags: ‘la pratique et les fins’ for morality, and ‘l’homme et le monde’ for psychology. The

The Extension of Philosophy

123

lack of ‘progression’ is thus systemic — both diachronically, across the history of philosophy’s institutionalization, and synchronically, within the functioning of the system of education. GREPH’s opponents saw progression only in terms of chopping up contents into tranches, taking one set of topics first, then another the next year, leading to arbitrary divisions of interlinked philosophical subjects and problems (Brunet, QP, p. 146). Brunet argues that in fact this was an argument against diluting the impact of the philosophy teacher himself, and based therefore on the myth of the prof de philo. He gives the example of Louis-Marie Morfaux, still defending the philosophy teacher as living model of philosophy by demonstrating that: comment une personnalité, la sienne, analyse, essaye honnêtement de fonder tout ce qu’il dit, fait voir ainsi ce qu’est la liberté d’esprit à l’oeuvre.55

As Olivier Roy commented in Le Doctrinal de Sapience, philosophy is the only subject whose efficacity is not predicated on the retreat of the individual behind ‘une parole objective’, but is rather anchored in ‘le corps même’ of the teacher.56 Brunet sketches out the basis of this mythicized scene of encounter in his essay in QP. This is the figure, he comments, of ‘la philosophie même en sa nudité dévoilée’ (QP, p. 147). Philosophy becomes a kind of abstract figure: ‘Inaugural et terminal, la philosophie va déployer ses rites sévères’. The structure is that of revelation, more or less in the vein of the Sermon on the Mount: ‘on vous a dit que ... mais moi en vérité je vous dis que’. As a mode of presentation, this becomes a kind of intoxication in which the teacher subverts what has gone before, and to giddying effect — what Brunet terms a ’volupté de la subversion’ (QP, p. 146). Brunet argues that it is difficult to escape this charismatic image of the philosophy teacher whilst the same institutional arrangements remain in place. The eroticized metaphors of def lowering stem from the Platonic tradition, as both Kofman and Brunet demonstrate, and all of these notions of the indelible imprint, and of master and disciple — so prevalent in the myth of the prof de philo — arise from this.57 The idea of philosophical virginity is, however, of a ‘virginité acquise’, as Brunet argues (p. 153), which can be better understood as an acquired form of resistance. That is to say, habits of thought, ‘configurations mentales [et] cristallisations idéologiques’ are acquired elsewhere and previously. The task of philosophy, through questioning and critique, will be to subvert these. This brings us to the key area of philosophy understood as social critique and of subversion as part of mass education — as GREPH conceived it — and as critique of the ‘undeclared philosophies’ of other subjects, what Derrida termed the ‘repérage explicite et critique des “philosophèmes” clandestins, tels qu’ils sont à l’oeuvre dans l’enseignement’ (QP, p. 449). The next section turns to the complex and interrelated problems for GREPH of advocating philosophy’s role within schools as that of critique. Philosophy as Critique One of the initial projects undertaken by GREPH members was the analysis of pupils’ copies which set out to ‘read’ the essays for once rather than marking or

124

The Extension of Philosophy

evaluating them as teachers in terms of their ideological determinations.58 Employing textual analysis aimed to disrupt their institutional ‘destination’. GREPH wanted to overturn the embedded view that pupils pass through years of simple accumulation of information and then suddenly switch to ‘calling things into question’.59 The point was to explore how the pupils take on a role — that of ‘pupil’ — in their discourse, and to unravel what the expectations were which they were clearly trying to meet. Normally, as Gordon and Rée comment in their interview with Le Dœuff and discussion of this part of GREPH’s work, the ‘adolescent’ discourse of the pupils is analogous to a ‘colonial discourse’. That is to say, it is defined solely by the expectations of those in authority. The teacher and the examiner thus take the role of the colonist, they suggest, and this exercise aims to break that relation down by granting the essays a kind of discursive autonomy of their own. The analysis of the copies found what the philosophy teachers saw as pervasive ideological distortions at work. For example, when set the essay title ‘What is a citizen?’, all pupils wrote on the question ‘what is a good citizen?’, transforming the question into what the group termed ‘the moralising mode of discourse’ (p. 6). However, their primary interest was in the position assumed by the pupils which became clear once discursive autonomy had been allowed by this mode of reading: their status as ‘bearers or possessors of a discourse “which is already in place” ’ was brought to the fore. Various clichés and stock topoi recur: ‘Man’, and the ‘brute facts of society and human nature’, for example (p. 7). Any possibility of change is dismissed as ‘Utopian’ or for an elite from which the pupils exclude themselves. In the case of the individual versus society, the former is always conceived of as the victim of society, and sacralized, and the latter challenged and considered to be at fault (QP, p. 420). Most of all, ideas are not analysed or criticized in any sustained or developed way, but not, the group avers, because these pupils are systematically incapable of engaging in such an analysis. The group felt that the pupils had gained the sense from their education so far that ideas are to be referred to, but not analysed or criticized. So they produce paraphrases, and then, realizing that they must not simply appear to be indifferent, express strong approval or disapproval at the end of their presentation (p. 8). The pupils often end their essays with a pompous f lourish, a signifier of an approved inclination to show that they are ‘grown-up’, and they also often finish with an endorsement of good moral resolutions, directly linking in, the teachers argue, to the residual secular priest idea of the philosophy teacher as a ‘moral director-confessor’ (p. 9). Even though these essays are their first attempts at ‘philosophizing’ they mark the interiorization of the rhetorical constraints of the dissertation form by the pupils. However, Gordon and Rée themselves point out that these essays most plausibly demonstrate the current inadequacy of the philosophy class and the kind of ‘culture shock’ which it entails in its present, aura-laden form.60 This lack of preparation of students was in turn regarded as part of the revelatory force of philosophy which took them on to something totally different and therefore bewildering. As Brunet stated, ‘le choc justifie le bloc’ (p. 146): the ‘mise en question soudaine’ of all that has gone before is justified as philosophically valid, and therefore valid pedagogically. This effect of shock and the pupils’s consequent inability to ‘cope’ — in other

The Extension of Philosophy

125

words, to be in a position to produce non-derivative contributions of their own — is recalled fondly by Jean-François Lyotard, in his contribution to the 1984 conference on ‘École et philosophie’ at Nanterre.61 Lyotard recalls his own lycée prof de philo days, and remarks that each year entailed an experience of ‘drowning’ throughout the first term, for both pupils and teacher. The actual teaching could only commence with the ‘survivors’ of this initial onslaught in the second term, once this stage had been passed through. Despite Lyotard’s radical critique of the university reforms of the 1960s, he seems more ready to accept the set-up of philosophy in schools, and offer a ‘radical theoretical’ justification of it which does not take into account the difficulties for the pupils. The ‘discours dissertatif ’ is designated as ‘pre-philosophical’ rather than ideological, or arising from mere opinion. This immediately creates a problem, however. To avoid counterposing philosophy to ideology, the latter is redesignated as contraband — the naïve, unexplicated, pre-philosophical contents which are inertly contained in other disciplines, and outside education. Philosophy is then the instrument of critique, which will bring out these sedimentations, and render them active through its critical operations. This must also suggest a clear-cut distinction between the ‘pre-philosophical’ and the ‘proprement philosophique’. Michael Ryan points out this difficulty in his discussion of the work on the pupils’s essays in QP (p. 421). He argues that it is more helpful to see these ‘false ideologies’ in terms of sedimentations of philosophies whose philosophical nature has been forgotten and which circulate as part of the discourse of common sense (p. 421). Philosophy’s role of critique is vital to the view of it as subversive from within, as the third shift in the schema in which it moves from official ideology, to an apprenticeship of freedom nonetheless compromised by its elitist, moralizing role, to being the place of social critique. This derives from the Kantian view of its role, as Brunet points out, and can easily become yet another surrogate religion. This surfaces in the claims made for philosophy teaching as part of a still viable Republican projet de société. Thus, Jean-Claude Milner in his 1984 polemic reclaiming the Republican egalitarian school as place of instruction rather than child-centred pedagogy, argues against the extension of philosophy.62 Philosophy teaching must remain at the end of education to carry out its role of critique: only philosophy can undermine the force of the doxa. He makes this point in terms of philosophy as a unique French institution: En droit, tous les savoirs contribuent à détruire le pouvoir absolu de l’opinion. Mais seul un esprit léger pourrait s’en tenir là: dans la réalité, quelque savoir stratégique est requis, pour affirmer et démontrer qu’il existe un au-delà de la doxa. En France, du moins, un tel savoir existe: il s’appelle la philosophie.

The presence of philosophy teaching in schools is justified as the cornerstone of the Republican project and, more accurately, the conjoint project of ‘École-République’. The two are combined: the Republic is an edifice, the base of which is primary school education, and philosophy teaching at secondary level is the keystone. This is the argument made by Régis Debray in his 1991 essay ‘Éloge de nos maîtres’.63 This takes us back to the passage quoted by Debray in the first chapter, where he claimed that the fortunes of philosophy in French education represented

126

The Extension of Philosophy

the true gauge of a political regime as repressive or enlightened.64 He states that: C’est qu’il n’y a pas de République sans école ni d’école de la liberté sans philosophie pour tous à l’école. (p. 64)

Those who oppose philosophy teaching are the enemies of the republican institution itself. This kind of claim for philosophy in terms of the Republican project — as opposed to the mythologizing reference to the golden age of the Third Republic prof de philo — can also be found in the ‘official’ discourse on philosophy. At the time of the Haby debate, the upholders of the status quo adapted their rhetoric to the demand for modernization on the part of the government, and adopted new mantras of the democratic need for philosophical training which alone could impart the critical skills needed by lucid citizens. A conservative appeal is made in the 1999 book L’École by the lycée philosophy teacher Henri Pena-Ruiz who echoes Debray’s words despite the far more conservative view-point.65 This appeal suggests that any kind of exposure to philosophy represents a magically guaranteed enhancement of egalitarian and democratic ideals, somehow neutral and free of content, and without any need to examine the distinctive functioning and ideological sedimentations of the philosophical institution itself. The indispensable reference to the freedom of the teacher is now linked to the emancipation of the pupils, and philosophy is the explicit manifestation of the critical and ref lexive orientation of the Republican school. ‘Critical skills’ masquerade as an apolitical net gain for modern education. The same appeal to philosophy as a still vital component of a still viable Republican project of education is thus made by those with a very different view of ‘critique’ itself: the possibility of social critique on the one hand, and on the other, a set of critical skills with no actual political purpose, only the smooth running of a democratic and technocratic society. These content-free critical skills simply purvey a kind of liberal scepticism, as Le Dœuff points out in her essay on philosophy teaching for students.66 This is embodied in the empty rhetorical constraint of the dissertation exercise itself: every thesis must have its antithesis, the two balancing out neatly, the formal symmetry creating the mirage of a ‘balanced treatment’ of the question. Philosophy as critique in this version thus manages to void its teaching of any engagement with the questions in its purview, both social and philosophical. Philosophy as the critique of the doxa which takes place everywhere except in philosophy itself presents a false neutrality of the kind GREPH was trying to overturn, not re-entrench. It also falls back into philosophy as delivering up the ‘secret’ of what has preceded it (the formulation of Cousin) or, as Jacques Muglioni argues, philosophy must come at the end because it presupposes a savoir and a culture — in other words, those of the other disciplines which it can then work on critically. He too invokes the French secular Republican tradition as the cause and justification for the continuing need for philosophy in schools.67 As Jacques Rancière argues in his contribution to the 1984 ‘École et philosophie’ conference at Nanterre, ‘Nous qui sommes si critiques ... ’: avec cette logique reaffirmée de l’École se restaure une certaine idée de la philosophie comme raison de raison scolaire.68

This opposition of ‘doxa’ and ‘critique’ as an up-to-date justification of philosophy’s

The Extension of Philosophy

127

continuing role within mass education leads to the discussion of the media in relation to philosophy in the the ‘États-Généraux de la Philosophie’ in 1979.69 Here the same opposition was relied upon, in a very distinctive reaction against the media as that which increasingly represented ideological domination. The media was seen as having taken over the role of education and its importance for the state, and education was pitted against it in the ensuing arguments as the only means of counteracting this new force. Now that its ideological dominance has gone, education, and philosophy above all within education, functions as critique. In fact, it becomes institutionalized as critique: from the original ‘strategic decision’, as Martine Meskel and Michael Ryan term it (QP, p. 353), to ‘utiliser l’institution contre elle-même’. Philosophy then becomes the means of counter-vigilance of the School, set against the dubious power of the mass media. The media takes over philosophy’s nineteenth-century role of ideological indoctrination and forms a ‘laboratoire d’idéologie social’, as Guy Coq argues in his consideration of this event.70 The media is viewed with suspicion, as usurping the function of education in its relation with the state, and as a monolithic Ideological State Apparatus replacing the ISA of education71. It was thus discussed as an ‘école parallèle’, a rival form of education or, rather, misinformation.72 Debray participated in the États-Généraux and headed the work group on teaching and the media. He had intervened earlier on in the assembly (EG, p. 69) to argue that Roland Brunet’s proposed list of work groups — on the HabyBeullac reforms, on the programme, the écoles normales and teacher training, and the university and research — were all internal to the philosophy profession. Taking his cue from Derrida, whose opening address had referred to ‘la machinerie dominante’ both now and previously and the need to analyse the ‘techno-politique’ of the media, Debray called for another group to work effectively on ‘Philosophie et Politique’, to focus on the ‘real’ stakes of debate and above all the situation of education in relation to the other forms of transmission and diffusion of knowledge — in other words, the media (pp. 70–71). This was difficult for GREPH which opposed the idea of internal, professional questions as opposed to general issues, the first being limited and contingent, the second general and philosophical — the distinction refused by Derrida in his essay on Hegel’s letter to the minister of education regarding the right age for philosophy.73 In the event sessions were held on a mixture of both.74 The philosopher Élisabeth de Fontenay headed the teaching and media group of two hundred people, and Debray’s report is published in the proceedings. In this report, Debray states this opposition between media and philosophy teaching, ideology, and critique: [Les mass media] entraînent nécessairement une régression des formes discur­ sives, une décomposition des procédures analytiques inhérentes à la pensée critique, l’abandon progressif d’un certain nombre de contraintes propres à l’effort philosophique. (p. 161)

The systems of mass communication mean an end to the dialogue inherent in the philosophical relation. The teacher can only become a (false) prophet, since there is no direct response to what he says. His one-sided interventions, taking place outside of the dialogic situation of teaching, will become only demagogy. Education is still

128

The Extension of Philosophy

the place where ‘la transmission d’un savoir non marchand peut encore s’opérer’ (p. 165). Behind some of this, and other references throughout the assembly, was the recent ascent of the nouveaux philosophes as a media phenomenon. Bernard-Henri Lévy, who attended, mocked Debray’s critique, and claimed that television rather than philosophy was responsible for publicizing human rights abuses, and therefore had taken over the role of vigilance which Debray insisted on for philosophy.75 In terms of the logic of the École-République argument, philosophy as critique subsequently became fixed as a defence against the decline of education in the era of the mass media. The culmination of this strand of the argument can be encountered in Alain Finkielkraut’s polemic, La Défaite de la pensée a few years later. This follows the same pattern as Allan Bloom’s culturally pessimistic and essentialistic defence of the humanities of the same year: the politics of the humanities are expressed in conservative, defensive mode, as discussed at the end of Chapter 2, above. According to this, the School as bearer of an Enlightenment vision had become corrupted by decadent consumerism pandering to juvenile attitudes. The return to its Republican duty, as in Jean-Claude Milner’s polemic, requires the critical mission of philosophy. The logic of both Milner’s and Finkielkraut’s positions relies on the position of philosophy as crown and telos of an institution, and harnessing this to the Enlightenment tradition in order to produce a sense of this mission. GREPH needed to exercise caution, therefore, in the espousal of philosophy as critique, if this was not to become an officialized, functionalist justification. Viewing philosophy in schools as a place of subversion was easily recuperated by conservative commentators as either the vacant ‘critical skills’ of the conservative philosophy teachers — merely the ‘remue-ménage du doxa’ in Jacques Rancière’s formulation — or it could find itself positioned as the upholder of culturally conservative standards in an era of decline, and ultimately, therefore, part of the elitist and conservative politics of the humanities.76 As Rancière argued, the only way round this was to focus the process at the level of the individual pupil. This was both an intellectual and critical process: Reste que le seul pouvoir possible de la critique est celui de l’élève qui confronte texte à texte, non pas pour choisir le bon mais pour s’apprendre à penser en s’apprenant à traduire, acquérant cette fermeté de l’esprit qui doit supporter la décision singulière de saisir quelque chose par soi-même. (GP, p. 115)

‘Critique’ must be understood first of all in educational terms as the individual ‘acte d’apprendre’ within the teaching of philosophy (pp. 117, 120). The discussions of the États-Généraux seem, in comparison with this lucid statement of the possibility of teaching, embattled and contradictory. They were accused, even by some sympathetic to GREPH’s project, of being pervaded by a general nostalgia for power.77 Certainly, the battle for philosophy, an ongoing war in Debray’s terms (EG, p. 69), continued to be fought as if it were a battle against censorship, as in the mid-nineteenth century under Fortoul (and the force of the title Qui a peur de la philosophie? clearly poses this), rather than pedagogical alternatives or professional struggles. The argument for philosophy as subversion, which those in power therefore seek to curtail and censor has a further significant implication for GREPH — that of the

The Extension of Philosophy

129

politics and relations of the disciplines. The positioning of philosophy as critique involves them in all kinds of difficulties. Firstly, they are thereby producing a defence of philosophy based on its specificity, and secondly, one based, ultimately, on its social utility, as the official form of countervigilance, a necessary part of a functioning democratic society. Finally, this leads to a reinstatement of philosophy as sovereign discipline in relation to other forms of knowledge, in exactly the same way as the conservative defence of the Inspecteurs Généraux claimed that philosophy was always superior, as Le Dœuff commented, in the ‘knowing of itself as completely different from those mock discourses on Man’.78 Derrida had marked the need for caution in the designation of anything as simple as ‘ideology’ as the enemy in the 1975 interview ‘Entre Crochets’.79 If philosophy is defended institutionally as the necessary tool of critique of the ideologies or ‘pre-philosophies’ of the other disciplines, then it is effectively reinserted as the ‘conscience of education’, in the guise defended by Gustave Belot at the beginning of the twentieth century. Then, it becomes the legitimator of the other disciplines, and their critical overseer — its Kantian role. The rest of education (at lower levels, and of other subjects) becomes merely a part of corrupt socialization, and the ‘correct’ age for philosophy is the age of innocence, before this process has taken hold. Roland Brunet perpetuates this schema in his concept of ‘virginité acquise’: the idea that philosophy teaching in terminale only acts as an obstacle, because by then all kinds of resistance to philosophy have been acquired elsewhere. This resistance is minimal in sixième, maximal in terminale, he argues (QP, p. 153): ‘les enfants, eux, n’ont pas peur de la philosophie’. This, combined with the insistence on the demand for philosophy for younger children, which he stresses in his account of teaching experiments with them, leads to the idea of childhood, rather than the end of adolescence, as the ‘natural’ age for philosophy, before children are exposed to residual ‘pre-philosophical’ ideological elements by parents, the onslaught of the media, but most of all elsewhere within formal education. Derrida warns against this naturalization of philosophy which invokes a kind of ‘désir sauvage’: une fois qu’on aura effacé les préjugés et les ‘idéologies’, on mettra à nu un ‘enfant’ toujours déjà prêt à philosopher, naturellement capable de philosopher. (QP, pp. 77–78)

But it is nonetheless part of the argument for extension of other GREPH members. Le Dœuff too falls victim to it in her presentation of GREPH in 1977, in which she contrasts the sincere, spontaneous responses of eleven year olds with that of eighteen year olds, who are corrupted by the educational system and try to say what they feel is expected of them according to the constraints of the system.80 The American movement for Philosophy for Children was gathering momentum at the same time, the mid-1970s, and its leading advocates explained its original impetus in similar terms to those of Brunet above.81 They were philosophy teachers — at universities, not in schools — who also diagnosed their students’s difficulties with the subject as a kind of resistance, and therefore decided to experiment with very young children whose ‘wonderment’ and questioning is presented as ‘philosophical thinking’. The movement aimed to show that these university students struggling with philosophy as a new and alien pursuit had once been philosophers as children: again, therefore,

130

The Extension of Philosophy

the structural anamnesis as revelation, revealing what was there ‘already’, the natural capacity to philosophize.82 The Rousseauistic argument of corrupt socialization leads inexorably to this position. Nancy disallows such overtones from the outset of his account of teaching younger pupils. Wondering aloud does not equate to philosophical activity. He states that ‘On avancera au contraire qu’un philosophe qui s’ignore n’en est pas un’ (QP, p. 212). A level of consciousness of purpose is required to make a certain kind of activity ‘philosophical’, and children are not therefore all natural philosophers without realizing it. The corollary of Brunet’s position is also, as remarked earlier, that all of schooling except philosophy functions as corruption, which can only lead to a ‘sacralizing’ defence of philosophy as critique. This becomes no better than the effects of founding the metaphor of philosophy as crown philosophically, and from there as a ‘religion’ of critique, as Brunet argued (QP, p. 124). If philosophy needs to intervene earlier in order to get round the inert ideology of other disciplines, then its role is still that of overseer, despite the change in position. The question of the institutional frame elaborated by Derrida in OC is crucial in determining these effects. Derrida showed caution there with regard to philosophy as merely internal critique, which would in fact merely reproduce its own authority as its tradition, and underwrite its pre-eminence within the ‘conf lict of the faculties’. Ultimately, however, GREPH does not succeed in avoiding this problem because of the institutional and political exigencies of its case. I will return to this problem in the final chapter when assessing the retention of ‘philosophy’ as the umbrella-term for the activities of the Collège International de Philosophie. The theoretical problems of extending philosophy are, as Brunet himself pointed out at the États-Généraux (EG, p. 51), the problems of interdisciplinarity, and of the ‘grid’ of the disciplines mentioned at the outset of QP — how to transform philosophy through transforming its relations to the other disciplines. The next section turns to the only attempt within QP to consider these theoretically and practically — ‘Philosophie en cinquième’, Jean-Luc Nancy and the literature teacher Bernadette Gromer’s experiments with younger children. The Question of Difficulty/ The Question of Language As Alain Delormes and Roland Brunet indicate, getting official permission to carry out experimental teaching with younger children was far from straightforward (QP, p. 183). The rigidly centralized system did not encourage such attempts at innovation. They invited twelve and thirteen year olds to participate on a voluntary basis, as did Nancy and Gromer over the academic year 1975–76. Of the experiments discussed in QP, the Nancy/Gromer one is the most significant because of the collaboration with a non-philosophical colleague. Nancy and Gromer held a series of fifteen sessions with their group of pupils. The resulting account, ‘Philosophie en cinquième’, comprises both a commentary on the teaching experiment, and introductory ref lections on what was at stake, and what they derived themselves from this experiment. As Nancy notes, the division of labour, though not deliberate, ironically meant that the French teacher wrote up the account of teaching, whilst the philosophy teacher (himself ) produced the

The Extension of Philosophy

131

theoretical ref lections on the experience (QP, p. 211). What they did not want to do, even as they strategically maintained their insistence on the value of progression, was to abstract elements from the terminale philosophy programme deemed suitable or potentially appropriate for younger pupils (QP, p. 208). The actual age chosen was a simple matter of convenience, the only overriding theoretical aptness for it, in Nancy’s view, was the position of these children within the premier cycle of secondary education. Introducing philosophy into this cycle d’enseignement represented an attempt to disrupt the idea of fixed ‘thresholds of apprenticeship’ and maturity (p. 209). The principle which this experiment led them to articulate, but which they did not start off working towards was of the important philosophical effects of changing philosophy’s place within the curriculum: Déplacer ‘Philosophie’ dans l’école, c’est entraîner l’enseignement de la philosophie dans une transformation ou dans une dérive imprévisible de ses structures, de ses pratiques, et de sa notion même. (p. 208)

The search was not therefore for ‘appropriate’ material for the different age group, since this would be to suggest both separable ‘contents’, and an inscription within what Nancy, in a further, brief consideration of their experiment, termed the double schema which metaphysics traces of the passage from the elementary to the complex, and from language to thought.83 The ‘enseignement majeur’ and philo­ sophical character of Gromer and Nancy’s work consisted in the invitation to the pupils ‘d’accéder à un certain régime de discours’, one which would be distinct from narration or the exchange of opinions. This invitation was to master theoretical language as much as descriptive or affective language: ‘à ne pas mutiler la langue’ (pp. 212–13). The present structure of teaching, he notes in his related article, defines elementary stages of linguistic acquisition, then of the acquisition of literature, which effectively prohibits access to theoretical or ‘thinking’ use of language.84 The teaching of philosophy and literature is not irreducible, as Dreyfus and Khodoss had argued a decade before: rather, the problem is that they are taught as if they were nothing to do with each other. Thought, rather than being sought in language and as one of its functions at all degrees of elaboration and mastery, is always deferred and pushed back, according to just the metaphysical schema referred to: le non-élémentaire, outre-langue et outre-littérature, de la ‘philosophie’ qui se voit ainsi assignée en position terminale.85

That the official doctrine of teaching philosophy in schools cautions against using texts ‘de manière essentielle’ is merely further proof of this entrenched view, according to Nancy, and of the schema which places thought as ‘outre-langue’, a position which governs the metaphysics of the sign (p. 304). This metaphysical schema has become an entrenched pedagogical one: literature is placed in the position of a propaedeutics, an apprenticeship in language before the true exercise of thought in philosophy, which is the ‘passage outre-langue’. As for thought itself, its position can be ironically evoked, Nancy comments, as one of permanent deferral: ‘ “Vous penserez après, à la fin”; autant dire: jamais’ (p. 304). This is the ‘pédagogicométaphysique’ structure of philosophy’s place in the curriculum. The ‘theoretical

132

The Extension of Philosophy

language’ which he invokes is not to be seen as a kind of separate idiolect, weighed down with esotericism, but is rather the theoretical structure and functioning of language in general: ayant lieu dans la langue, à même la langue, et qui constituent en même temps cette langue. (QP, p. 213)

The teaching of language — of French as a subject, through traditional grammar and expression, followed by the explication of selected canonical literary texts or extracts from texts — is thought on the model of the acquisition of foreign languages in school, itself viewed in an entirely utilitarian fashion. Philosophy’s current position in terminale is the completion of this view of how language is to be ‘acquired’, first grammar, then literature as a series of examples, and then finally, and only at the very end, philosophy. This schema is nonsensical in terms of the theoretical structure and functioning of language. Pupils are kept enclosed throughout schooling until the very end in the so-called ‘literary’ domain, which is determined by the exclusion of theoretical difficulty or technicality, and by the refusal of concept or discourse ‘pris pour eux-mêmes’. The philosophy class then suddenly offers philosophical ‘contents’, without any regard for what Nancy terms ‘la langue qui doit en assurer la pensée’ (QP, p.213). This is, therefore, the triumphant completion of teaching language, writing, and speaking without ‘faire penser la langue’. It is not just ‘too late’ by then, in the sense of a due progression through a sequence, but too late at a structural level of necessity, since language has been separated and cut off from theoretical discourse, and a ‘threshold’ has been set for acceding to ‘ref lection’. The ‘question of language’ becomes, in pedagogical terms, the question of difficulty — theoretical or conceptual difficulty.86 The study of literary texts at school is defined by the exclusion of the conceptual, as belonging to a subsequent, more difficult level, and a false splitting is enforced — of age, of ‘level’, and of discipline. This is also what Derrida cautions against in his essay ‘L’Âge de Hegel’.87 Hegel, in his 1822 letter on secondary education, suggested that even an eleven year old could cope with difficult philosophical subjects, as he himself had done. This should not be welcomed as a kind of prior endorsement of GREPH’s project, nor should Hegel be embraced as an illustrious forebear, since Hegel sought the extension of philosophy in schools as a preparation for philosophy at university level only. Thought would only be reached at university, and its content would somehow be present as a preparation for this at school (DP, p. 223). Thus, in fact, Hegel’s letter marks the inception of the schema which GREPH opposes: the improperly philosophical content is allowed at a younger age, in the guise of morality and religion, prescriptive and normative teachings, suitable for docile youth who were submissive to authority. Certain ‘contents’ are separated off to provide a lower, more ‘elementary’ level — less difficult, more moralizing — and theoretical difficulty in the guise of true philosophy is postponed. For Nancy, the political function of their experiment is entailed by the series of prohibitions and exclusions operated by the official curricular programme: the divisions and sub-divisions between disciplines, the cut-off points for age and level.

The Extension of Philosophy

133

These mean that the educational system as such rests on ‘une formidable interdiction de savoir’. Their project was to displace these divisions and, thus, he states: Quelque part [...] notre travail n’a relevé que du ‘français’, et c’est par là qu’il a constitué un travail philosophique. (QP, p. 211)

The first session was based on a La Fontaine fable, chosen because La Fontaine is part of the official programme for this age-group. The fable ‘Le Chameau et Les Battons Flottants’ was selected for three reasons: the absence of animals, the relative lack of récit, and the presence of an authorial intervention (p. 218). These factors meant the minimization of falling back on the kind of interpretation and pedagogical use of La Fontaine’s fables generally deemed appropriate for this stage of education, what Nancy terms the ‘mystification’ of the story, and the locating of a moral to the tale, turning its point to Morality exclusively. The ‘topic’ of the fable for the purposes of their class was rather the relationship of man to knowledge (p. 218) and, further, to determine what a ‘philosophical text’ is. Pursuing this question further in relation to the second passage chosen, an extract from The Gay Knowledge, the difficulties encountered, after some help with vocabulary had been provided, were clear. As a literature teacher, Gromer in particular felt the need for a parallel, complementary process of explanation and working through with the pupils, in terms of types of formulation and unravelling the grammar, since the pupils lost track of the subjects of verbs, and the role of punctuation syntactically and therefore also logically, and the different values of the statements in the passage (p. 221). This apparent need led them to two conclusions: firstly, that the difficulties of the ‘philosophical text’ are those of any text, and secondly therefore that what they term ‘the study of language’ needs to begin much earlier, and not simply take the form of a traditional introduction to grammar. The ‘difficulty’ of reading these texts, according to Nancy and Gromer, stems from the inability to master language. The means for achieving this have not been made available to the pupils, and the block is ‘ideological’ (p. 221) in the sense given above, of an exclusion or prohibition on knowledge. As in the work of GREPHON discussed in the last section, Nancy and Gromer felt that by half-way through the series of sessions, having moved on to a passage from Robinson Crusoe in order to look at the topic ‘Man and Nature’, they needed to read the pupils’s ‘texts’ rather than correct them. They did this as the focus of a session with the pupils themselves, trying to decipher with them how and what they had chosen to write about (p. 228). The original planned direction therefore changed, and they moved on to two brief passages from Marx concerning man, animals, and production (pp. 231–32) in order to confront the pupils’s anthropomorphic prejudices about animals, which they saw as the result of the inf luence of advertizing images. They then passed on to animals as depicted in art, but foundered on the problem of representation. They gave the pupils two reproductions of still lives, one by Chardin, the other by Liotard (p. 241). The teachers were surprised to find that some, though not all, of the pupils were unable from the outset to grasp what for Nancy and Gromer was the obvious starting-point — that they had in front of them photos of paintings, and not simply an image.

134

The Extension of Philosophy

Indicating that painting has a history and talking about the pictures in a not purely subjective way enabled the group to feel much more able to comment. The pupils were thus put in a position to deal conceptually with the subject. In terms of Nancy and Gromer’s attempted ‘teaching of language’ and ‘pedagogy of reading’ (p. 256), they concluded that teaching in general neglects the sensitivity of the pupil to the form of a text, to its specificity, which is most frequently expressed as a kind of refusal by the pupil, who complains that it is ‘too difficult’ or ‘too bizarre’. The ability of the pupil to grapple further with this problem is missed, subsumed under the question of relative difficulty. The first set of passages chosen were deliberately all construable to varying extents as more ‘literary’ than ‘philosophical’, which was important to their project of overturning pointless divisions of this kind. Also, the pupils were viewed as not especially ‘good’ students. This idea of the ‘literary’ being defined in educational terms as not simply what is not conceptually difficult, but as what is not conceptual and hence not difficult, provides an extremely useful conception of how the balance of levels and subjects is mapped out in schools. Nancy and Gromer are not trying to argue that there is no question of age: they make remarks, as teachers, on the homework done, as ‘not too bad for a pupil of cinquième’, for example (p. 245). Rather it is the false divisions of what is deemed suitable in terms of age, and what can and must wait: conceptual analysis, ‘reading’, and the work of language are marked off and prohibited under the sign of ‘difficulty’, without attempting to provide the pupils with frameworks for analysis and reading. The interest of Nancy and Gromer’s account derives from their joint approach, as literature and philosophy teachers, one which makes their defence of the possibilities of extension far more powerful than the claims for the ‘philosophical’ propensities of very young children. The latter approach leads ultimately to a kind of anti-school position, like the ‘deschooling’ views of Ivan Illich, maintaining that organized, formal education stif led creativity, views which were highly inf luential in the first half of the 1970s. Nancy and Gromer are alert to the problems caused by the way in which education is organized. They argue that the ‘coupures’ of the disciplines effect a kind of politics of knowledge which is not acknowledged and which affects the processes of education without being realized. Their answer is to extend ‘philosophy’ and to change the institutional set-up. Their experiment, construing the apparently pedagogical question of relative difficulty as in fact both a pedagogical and philosophical question of theoretical language is a powerful demonstration of this argument. The recurring problematic question of philosophy’s relation to other disciplines in institutional terms is not resolved by their analysis, but it is the most sustained and successful example in QP of a genuine attempt at rethinking philosophy teaching in relation to the institutional constraints of disciplinarity, and it also involves a non-philosopher. Brunet’s contribution provided an illustration of the philosophical and historical combined approach espoused in the AP, testing ‘des leviers d’analyse’ against historical precedent, in Derrida’s formulation (EG, p. 31). This problematic method of philosophical and historical institutional critique forms the focus of further consideration in the next chapter in terms of Derrida’s work of institutional critique on philosophy and the university, which in turn

The Extension of Philosophy

135

reposes the question of philosophy’s relation to other disciplines and the ‘insistence’ on philosophy. Notes to Chapter 4 1. Cf. Robert, pp. 98 ff. 2. Roman, p. 168. 3. As Roland Brunet commented in 1980, ‘devant ces slogans qui sonnent bien: faire coller l’enseignement à la vie, etc., j’ai de plus en plus peur que la vie dont il est question soit beaucoup plus celle des entreprises que la vie tout court’ (‘Table Ronde’, p. 69). 4. Nancy, Kofman, and also Agacinski can all be closely linked to Derrida in terms of their philosophical sympathies at the time and subsequently; Le Dœuff less so. 5. La Grève des philosophes, p. 85. Henceforth abbreviated as GP. 6. The Collège and the situation of philosophy after the change of political regime in 1981 will be discussed in the next chapter. 7. Published as Les Sauvages dans la cite: auto-émancipation du peuple et instruction des prolétaires au XIXe siècle, ed. by Beaune, et al. (1985). 8. See Groupe de travail de professeurs de philosophie en écoles normales in the Bibliography. 9. Le Dœuff, ‘The Philosopher in the Classroom’, p. 4. 10. The tenor and subject of these, which reconfirm the general positions adopted, can be gauged from the titles of no longer extant pamphlets: for example, in the Almanachs du philosophe boîteux collection of Le Doctrinal de Sapience, a pamphlet on the strike action of philosophy teachers in Nantes in 1979 is entitled ‘Méditations touchant l’institution philosophique et dans lesquelles la vaillance d’un bouillant recteur et la réelle distinction entre démocratie libérale avancée et philosophie sont démontrées’. 11. This comprised Sylviane Agacinski, Le Dœuff herself, Michel Cresta, and Chantal Demonque (QP, p. 10). 12. On Roland Brunet, see the hommage and edited collection of Dupouey and J. Brunet. 13. Cf. ‘Table Ronde’, p. 61. Derrida, Brunet, Jankélévitch, Guy Coq, and Olivier Mongin participated in this discussion of GREPH and the États-Généraux. 14. ‘Table Ronde’, p. 61. 15. Cf. Derrida, ‘Some Statements’, p. 73. 16. ‘Table Ronde’, p. 61. 17. Jeannette Colombel, a lycée philosophy teacher, accused Brunet of neglecting this, and gave as an example her own informal discussion-groups set up with the ‘peasants’ of the Larzac region (EG, pp. 140–41). 18. Cf. EG, pp. 232–35. 19. The essay by Hélène Politis on Malebranche and Lamy, in particular, seems to be not very closely tied in with the overall project, suggesting that not all contributions were necessarily written specifically for the volume. Fynsk, ‘A Decelebration of Philosophy’, p. 84 criticizes QP for this. 20. Jankélévitch states ‘ou la philosophie est reine, comme elle l’était autrefois en terminale, ou elle n’est rien’ (‘Philosophes et bovidés’, p. 69). 21. I examine these two essays in detail in the next chapter. 22. As outlined in the account in Chapter 1, above. 23. Part of the interest of Kant’s essay is that it was not, of course, written without awareness of political constraints — and, indeed, quite the reverse, as will be seen in due course. 24. Fabiani, pp. 137–52. This is a book-length history, of course, and therefore has the scope to attend in detail to these matters. Its ability to do this does not justify Fabiani’s hostility to GREPH, however: he does not, as pointed out in the previous chapter, disapprove of them for evaluative reasons, but rather dismisses their project out of hand. As seen there, his dismissal is of philosophy being able to attend to its own history where only sociology uncover its constitutive blindness. 25. Of the kind undertaken by, for example, the philosopher Hannah Arendt in the 1960s: see her essay ‘The Crisis in Education’.

136

The Extension of Philosophy

26. For an account of deliberate attempts to forge a ‘morale laïque’, see Stock-Morton. 27. The account which I gave of this history in the first chapter works to contextualize philosophy in France — in terms of its role in education, the pre-history of the debate in the 1970s, and the context in which GREPH was operating — but it also, therefore, aims to give the background needed to understand and evaluate their own work in this area. 28. All page references for this essay refer to DP. 29. Le Dœuff, ‘The Philosopher in the Classroom’, p. 7. Her analogy is with the initiation ceremony of a Hopi headman. 30. As Jean-Luc Nancy points out in his contribution to QP, the Larousse Dictionnaire du français contemporain exemplifies initiation in terms of philosophy teaching: ‘un maître excellent nous a initiés à la philosophie’ (pp. 208–09). 31. The formula of the 1925 Ministerial Instructions and culmination of this view of the prof de philo which was referred to in the first chapter. A. de Monzie identified the teaching of philosophy clearly with the function of education as a whole, as its very essence: see de Monzie, as reprinted in Grateloup, p. 8. 32. Thibaudet, p. 232. 33. An additional form of this related more to the teachers of the preparatory classes for the grandes écoles, which perpetuated ‘teaching genealogies’ remarked on by the famous products of this system who extolled the inf luence of teachers such as Jean Hyppolite at the famous Parisian lycées: see Sirinelli. 34. Alain, 1925. Alain was a pupil of Lagneau’s for three years, 1886–89, and took charge of publishing notes and fragments with commentaries based on the latter’s teaching following his death: see A. Canivez, p. 342, and Sernin, pp. 35–47. Alain himself was, of course, a prolific writer; nonetheless it is a crucial part of the mythologization of the philosophy teacher as philosopher that he is humble and not in any way a writer. 35. Cf. Rothblatt, Tradition and Change in English Liberal Education, pp. 178–80. The object of his enquiry is English education, but his two alternative models nonetheless provide a useful counterpoint here. 36. A remark made by Sir Walter Raleigh, professor of literature, in his 1911 book The Meaning of a University, p. 12. 37. Coq’s ‘La Philosophie dans l’enseignement’ draws the same conclusion as Fabiani in his account of this ‘golden age’, drawing attention to this view of the teacher as incarnating rather than transmitting his subject in his discussion of Huguette Bouchardeu’s doctoral study of the institution of philosophy teaching in French schools from the Third Republic onwards. 38. Fabiani, pp. 81 ff. 39. Bouglé is cited by Fabiani, p. 61. 40. This is cited by both A. Canivez, Jules Lagneau, p. 296 and Gerbod, p. 318. 41. Thibaudet, pp. 245–46. He expands on this as follows: ‘Il [Lagneau] figurait, exemple autorisé et parfait, cette élite du clergé universitaire que sont nos professeurs de philosophie. Ou plutôt demi-clergé. Il y a dans la vocation philosophique un principe analogue à la vocation sacerdotale. Quiconque a préparé l’agrégation de philosophie, même s’il est devenu maquignon parlementaire ou administrateur de banque douteuse, a été touché à un certain moment, comme le séminariste, par l’idée que la plus haute des grandeurs humaines est une vie consacrée au service de l’esprit et que l’Université met au concours des places qui rendent ce service possible. Plus qu’au clergé romain, on pourrait, ce demi-clergé, le comparer au pastorat’. Toril Moi gives the interesting additional example of the fictional journal of a student, La Science et l’amour, written in 1929 by Léontine Zanta, one of the few women to study philosophy at the time. Here, also, philosophy is presented as a higher calling, not akin to teaching other subjects (Moi, p. 58). 42. Discussed in Chapter 1, above, this is drawn on by Derrida in the passage from OC discussed in Chapter 3. As seen there, Canivez opposed those who merely transmitted pre-set contents from those whose teaching was in itself creative — above all, Lagneau. 43. J. Rée, ‘Le Philosophe du peuple’, pp. 109–10. 44. For example, in his 1986 Notice pédagogique à l’usage des professeurs de philosophie Grateloup, p. 46 claims that the need for intelligibility at a simpler level is a more exigent test for the teacher —

The Extension of Philosophy

137

‘philosophiquement parlant’ than university teaching. Despite the changing material conditions of education in the hundred years between this period and GREPH this figure of the philosophy teacher derived from the Third Republic is relied upon as a kind of founding myth, which still has uncritical admirers of more than one kind. The view figures as the culmination of the historian Paul Gerbod’s 1970 study (published in 1974) of the university and philosophy in France from 1789 to 1970. His account of teaching relies on the figure of the school philosophy teacher, never an anonymous figure, to convey the formative essence of philosophy in French education: see Gerbod, p. 321. He is entirely uncritical of this view: it is in no way presented as an idealization or a myth. 45. Zeldin, France, 1848–1945, p. 212. 46. This is the idealization of Canivez. According to him, the classe de philosophie was a collective search for truth (A. Canivez, p. 297). There is a measure of pedagogical truth in this, relative to the previous set-up and to the other teachers of other subjects, but it is still relative and, as such, an idealization. 47. Amongst those present at this meeting were Belot, Bergson, Brunschvicg, Couturat, Lachelier, Lalande. See Douailler, et al., eds., pp. 660–92. 48. Lagneau was not known for vociferous espousal of Republican politics, a key element in Barrès’s savage portrayal of the philosophy teacher in his novel; another possible source was Auguste Burdeau (Gerbod, p. 317). On Barrès, see Ringer, Fields of Knowledge, pp. 130 ff. Ringer provides a useful account of how, for Barrès, the direst social consequences could only follow from introducing lower-middle class, provincial pupils to universalist philosophies. The pupils would become a socially ‘uprooted’ intellectual proletariat class through the philosophy teacher’s inf luence, especially easily swayed by the philosophy teacher’s class, because they are young and French, and hence ‘susceptible in any case to a one-sided passion for intellectual distinction’. The power of the philosophy teacher is seen as very real here, as well as in the 1889 novel of Paul Bourget, Le Disciple. (Barrès dedicated Les Déracinés to Bourget.) This power arises, in Barrès’s view, from the age of the pupils, the position of the class at the summit of the curriculum, and the nature of the class and the relations fostered between teacher and pupil in the final year, and the introduction of the pupils to noxious doctrines of universalism and Republican ideology. The inf luence and effect of the figure of the prof de philo is taken extremely seriously — f latteringly so for the inheritors of the role. 49. Poucet, pp. 342–43. 50. These talks were republished in Cahiers philosophiques, 55 ( June 1993). GREPH wanted to analyse them as part of their work-group activities but were prevented from doing so by cost (QP, p. 461). 51. Quoted from the end of Chapter 1 (de Monzie, as reprinted in Grateloup, p. 8.). Danièle Rancière who, as part of the Doctrinal de Sapience, had re-edited and published Cousin’s Défense in 1977, also later wrote a short history of the dissertation form for the ‘contexts’ section of the Encyclopédie philosophique universelle of 1989. 52. Alan Sheridan, pp. 2–3 refers to Foucault’s conversational account of this experience of deferral and inititation, from primary school to lycée, then to the classe de philo where the ‘secret of secrets’ was to be revealed, then to find there another deferral only. Philosophy functions within this structure of deferral as forbidden knowledge. 53. Bourdieu maintains this in the article discussed in the last chapter on philosophy and the social sciences. He states that ‘la nature même du discours philosophique qui, au moins dans ses formes non dérivées, ne peut être découpé en séquences de difficulté ou de complexité croissante’ (Bourdieu, ‘Les Sciences sociales et la philosophie’, p. 45). 54. Muglioni, in ‘L’Enseignement philosophique et l’avenir de l’Europe’, p. 775, claims that GREPH was in favour of the Haby reforms. 55. Louis-Marie Morfaux, a founder member of the APPEP and inspecteur général, made this comment in 1975; it is cited by Brunet in QP, p. 145. 56. Roy, ‘Sophie va au lycée’, p. 11. 57. Discussed in the same vein by Bernard Pautrat and Alain Delormes in QP: see in particular pp. 272–76. 58. The work was undertaken by the GREPHON group, headed by Michèle Le Dœuff at the ENS at Fontenay aux Roses, and published as ‘Le Discours philosophique des lycéens’, in Les Cahiers

138

The Extension of Philosophy

de Fontenay, 3 May 1976. I have been unable to consult this directly, and therefore rely on Le Dœuff ’s account and the translated extracts reprinted a year later in Le Dœuff, ‘The Philosopher in the Classroom’. Michael Ryan discusses this work in his QP essay ‘Mise en cause’. 59. Le Dœuff, ‘The Philosopher in the Classroom’, p. 5. 60. Le Dœuff considers this again in ‘La Philosophie renseignée’, her contribution to Philosopher, the two-volume collection edited by Christain Delacampagne and Robert Maggiori (1980). This collection invited a series of well-known philosophers to produce essays geared to lycée pupils on various topics within philosophy in order to provide a more up-to-date starting point than the traditional cramming manuals. Le Dœuff ’s essay thus presents some of the ref lections produced by working with GREPH to pupils. She warns here of the teachers’s resistance to any potential loss of this aura, the source of pupils’s apprehension, and struggle in the class (Le Dœuff, ‘La Philosophie renseignée’, pp. 201–02). Conversely, as Brunet points out in ‘Table Ronde’, p. 70 this ‘aura’ may give pupils a misleadingly idyllic expectation of philosophy. 61. Lyotard, ‘Le Cours philosophique’, in GP. Reprinted with one additional sentence to Patrice Vermeren’s son, which I will return to below: Lyotard, ‘Adresse au sujet du cours philosophique’, p. 145. 62. Milner, p. 143: like Muglioni and Haby, he claims, without naming it directly, that GREPH was on the side of the reforms, listing their efforts as sharing the aims of Haby’s proposals. 63. Reprinted in Debray, Contretemps, p. 63. This essay was a tribute essay to Debray’s former prof de philo, Jacques Muglioni, and as such is still within the genre discussed in the previous section. Debray’s homage to what he terms, in acolyte fashion, ‘mon année Muglioni’ (p. 60) incorporates the same kind of eulogistic testimony seen above, with the same stress on the personal inf luence by example of the teacher and the life-long effects, ‘the indelible imprint’, of the year of philosophy under that particular teacher’s tutelage. 64. Debray, Le Pouvoir intellectuel en France, p. 67. 65. Pena-Ruiz, L’École, pp. 70–71. Pena-Ruiz also includes, alongside a complete set of unchanged rhetorical defences of philosophy teaching, its critical function which is underwritten by its position in terminale, by the freedom of the teacher which guarantees the philosophical status of his activity and enables the emancipation of the pupils, and by the irreplaceable role of the dissertation as the start of the pupils’s ‘propre pensée’. 66. Le Dœuff, ‘La Philosophie renseignée’, pp. 214–15. 67. Muglioni, ‘L’Enseignement philosophique et l’avenir de l’Europe’, pp. 769–70. He compares this French tradition favourably with Germany, whose illustrious philosophical tradition is not matched by an equally notable tradition of pre-university philosophy teaching as is the case in France. 68. J. Rancière, 1986, p. 112. 69. The second arena, after education, in which it circulates as a discourse is Vincent Descombes’s account of its importance in French culture, which was referred to in the first chapter: see Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, pp. 5–8. 70. Coq, ‘Qui a peur de la philosophie?’, p. 54. 71. Keith Reader makes this point in Régis Debray, p. 52. 72. Cf. also La Nouvelle Critique, May 1975, p. 71. 73. ‘La minorisation traditionnelle des textes de ce type’ (Derrida, QP, p. 93). According to the same logic, the texts produced by GREPH and by Derrida as part of GREPH are of localized interest only, and not properly ‘philosophical’ because concrete and practical, responding to a particular situation. This, as the first chapter demonstrated, is the way that these texts have in fact been treated, in the footnote/mention pattern outlined there. 74. Including one on women and philosophy, only brief ly reported on by Christine BuciGlucksmann. 75. Lévy, p. 19 who claimed that he had been beaten up and censured at the ‘États-Généraux’. For Derrida’s unimpressed response, see ‘Table ronde’. In ‘Les Média saisis par les intellectuels’, p. 14, Olivier Mongin argued that the nouveaux philosophes were being scapegoated and blamed for the current difficulties of philosophy teaching at the États-Généraux and that Debray’s attitude to the media was not sufficiently differentiated. On the ‘phenomenon’ of the nouveaux philosophes, cf. Aubral and Delcourt.

The Extension of Philosophy

139

76. J. Rancière, 1986, p. 115. 77. Roy, ‘Les États-Généraux ou l’apologie de nous-mêmes par nous-mêmes’, p. 7; cf. the entirely unsympathetic account of Ferry and Renaut, La Pensée 68, pp. 39–41. 78. Le Dœuff, ‘Ants and Women, or Philosophy without Borders’, p. 44. 79. Derrida, Points de suspension: entretiens, p. 72. Derrida warns of the dangers of construing philosophy as ideology-critique given that the whole notion of ‘ideology’ remains ‘ou bien massivement pré-psychoanalytique où insuffisament articulée avec une problématique psychoanalytique (là encore je parle à dessein de problématique et non du contenu doctrinal) ou bien totalement dominée par une philosophie de la psychoanalyse dont il importe telle ou telle notion simplifiée’ (p. 80). 80. Le Dœuff, ‘The Philosopher in the Classroom’, p. 4. Le Dœuff links the exclusion of children from philosophy with that of women elsewhere in her work at this time. Both are classified as irrational by philosophy. She analyses ‘Women and Philosophy’ in her 1977 essay of that title, in terms of women’s relation to philosophical institutions. They are kept as outsiders, and, in both senses, philosophical amateurs, through eroticized individual mentor relationships. Cf. Le Dœuff, ‘La Philosophie renseignée’. 81. The Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children at Montclair State College, New Jersey was founded by Matthew Lipman: see Lipman et al. For a discussion of a programme in Glasgow, headed by one of Lipman’s former colleagues, see P. Barnard. White offers a critique of the notion of children as natural philosophers, comparing this claim to the no less plausible mid-century claim of Herbert Read that young children are natural artists. 82. Cf. Mathews, p. vii. Lyotard seems to adopt a related position by reversing the idea of childhood as an irrational state in the additional sentence added to his ‘Adresse au sujet du cours philosophique’ (first given in 1984, printed in 1985, and reprinted in Le Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants in 1988), exhorting ‘la pensée didactique’ to ‘chercher son enfance n’importe où, même hors de l’enfance’. The reversal of the opposition — children as not philosophical subjects, outlawed by their irrationality — leads to the implied revalorization of childlike states, if not childhood literally, and thus of the naturalization of philosophy. 83. Nancy, ‘ “Fin de la métaphysique” ou fin de l’enseignement?’, p. 304. 84. Cf. Agacinski in QP, p. 54. 85. Nancy, ‘ “Fin de la métaphysique” ou fin de l’enseignement?’, pp. 303–04. 86. This is not simply, then, a question of linguistic habitus, in Bourdieu’s sense — of the pupils’ lack of preparation for the alien ground of philosophy, the experience described by GREPHON’s work on the copies. Rather, for Nancy and Gromer, it is a function of philosophy’s isolation from the rest of the cursus which leads to an effect of difficulty and of distinctness from other subjects taught, and in particular literature. The structure of teaching is responsible for this effect rather than simply the way the subject is taught. On this aspect of Bourdieu’s work, see Collins, and also Demonque. 87. Originally published in QP, and reprinted in DP.

Chapter 5

v

The Insistence on Philosophy The demand for extending philosophy teaching was an assault on the conceptions implicit in philosophy’s position within compulsory education and its most crucial aspect was the attempt to dislodge once and for all the idea that philosophy must come at the end of schooling in order to synthesize and critique what had preceded it, and thereby render explicit the whole point of education. According to this view, an engagement with philosophy could only be undertaken once the inert, pre-philosophical contents of other subjects had been accumulated by pupils in the previous years of study. Then and only then could philosophy rightfully take hold and fulfil its task of introducing pupils to the possibility of questioning those ‘contents’, initiating them in to the possibility of thinking, and of thinking critically. This conception was drawn out and attacked by GREPH members, both for its presupposition of a threshold of maturity necessary for coping with philosophy at all, because it was simply too difficult to be taught earlier on, and for the idea that ‘philosophical’ questions would not arise in the study of other subjects, or, if they did, that they could be put on hold and deferred throughout the course of school education. This deferral was encapsulated in Nancy’s tart summary: ‘ “Vous penserez après, à la fin”; autant dire: jamais’ (QP, p. 304). Even then, as Nancy and Gromer indicated, the philosophy class itself, as taught at the time, offered up a list of philosophical ‘contents’ — themes and topics — without tackling the general problematic of theoretical language, which was construed simply as a question of ‘difficulty’ and inaccessibility as such, precluding the possibility of engaging with philo­sophy until the very end of the cursus. As already discussed, however, the validity of GREPH’s attempts to overturn the outdated and useless prestige of philosophy as crown is rendered more problematic by their own approach to other disciplines, in particular the social sciences, which were originally allowed into the institution of French education on terms dictated by academic philosophy and tolerated as its adjunct but which by the 1970s were perceived as a threat. GREPH’s argument for the need to introduce philosophy earlier in order to make better sense of its relations with other disciplines left GREPH apparently upholding a schema of philosophy as critique and as metadiscipline required by the other disciplines whose procedures could only remain unquestioned and opaque to themselves. This went against their aim of rethinking the effects of the divisions between disciplines instituted by the education system. The aim of introducing it earlier was not ultimately an argument about the suitability

The Insistence on Philosophy

141

of a particular age-group for its study, nor the suitability of any or all age-groups. Rather, what was at stake was the role and self-perception of philosophy itself within the ‘ordre des savoirs’. But GREPH’s position risked sounding very much like philosophy’s traditional role as critique or as legitimation of positive knowledge. For a movement which set out to rethink philosophy and its role within education, this seems less than radical in terms of philosophy’s role and relationship to other disciplines. And after all, why would Derrida and GREPH remain so insistent on philosophy as such? Why not outline a demand for reform of the methodology of other subjects under the aegis of a more radical, reciprocal conception of greater interdisciplinarity? In short, what was at stake in the continued insistence upon philosophy as such? In order to deal with these questions, I now turn to the creation of the Collège International de Philosophie (CIPh), which represented the continuation of GREPH’s work in a different guise and under a different political regime and set out to be a new institutional locus for philosophy in France, and to Derrida’s work on philosophy and the university as an institution. The Founding of the Collège International de Philosophie The election of François Mitterrand and the inception of a left-wing government in 1981 did not signify a complete cessation of hostilities in the ‘bataille de la philo­ sophie’, but the immediate threat posed by Haby and Beullac’s reforms disappeared. The possibility of philosophy dwindling and then vanishing altogether from second­ary education in France diminished as a threat. Mitterrand sent a letter to GREPH, published in Le Monde on 27 May 1983 which reiterated sympathetic pre-election statements that philosophy teaching should be both maintained and developed, and stated that philosophy should be a part of all sections of the second cycle of secondary education.1 However, after his election this promise rece­ ded from view and the struggle on behalf of philosophy continued, focusing on philosophy’s shrinking presence in teacher training colleges.2 The fight for philo­ sophy’s extension continued. In an interview with Libération published in November 1981, Derrida, as head of GREPH, argued for the extension demanded in QP and voted on at the ‘États-Généraux’, from seconde level upwards, with a suggested class-time of two hours a week.3 Even the APPEP started to claim that it was, and had been for thirty years, an advocate of extension. This unacknowledged volte-face by GREPH’s former antagonists was greeted sardonically by Derrida. GREPH’s attempt to extend philosophy to younger pupils was, in this regard at least, a failure since it was never taken up by this or any government, albeit one which Derrida designated as worthwhile despite this — ‘a good war’.4 Derrida’s involvement with GREPH, and GREPH itself, did not continue in the same way. This chapter addresses the next stage: the ‘after-life’ of GREPH as a theoretical and politicized campaign for philosophy, and how the problematics opened up by its activities in that time were pursued subsequently. Further campaigns continued to be launched regarding philosophy’s institutional fate, most notably that of December 1983 which was initiated by the philosophers Joel Roman and Étienne Tassin in response to proposed reforms of the first two

142

The Insistence on Philosophy

years of university teaching. Their appeal was linked to the grouping ‘École et Philosophie’ which organized the Nanterre colloquium of the same name in 1984, sponsored by the Collège and published as La Grève des philosophes (GP).5 Vermeren and Douailler were part of this, and Derrida’s contribution, ‘Les Antinomies de la discipline philosophique’, was published in GP. This publication was not by GREPH or Le Doctrinal, but the campaigning impetus behind the conference and the collective spirit of the contributions represented a continuation of their aims and ref lections. The appeal was backed by GREPH, the embryonic version of the Collège, and the APPEP, together with representatives of philosophy teachers in teacher training colleges, and the national union of psychologists.6 Their principal objection was to what they diagnosed as philosophy’s unenviable choice between becoming even more shut off and enclosed within its own, marginalized domain, or being faced with ‘dilution’ within other disciplines, reduced to a kind of ‘ “supplément d’âme” transdisciplinaire’ (GP, p. 180). Tassin and Roman stated their opposition boldly: Or, il n’y a pas d’Université sans philosophie. La philosophie est non seulement une des disciplines que doit enseigner l’Université, mais elle est indissociable de l’idée même d’Université et de ses missions. (GP, p. 180)

The questions raised by GREPH’s work on philosophy’s place within the educa­ tional system, and its relation to other disciplines, were thus extended out to the new terrain of the university, initially in response to the embattled position of philo­sophy in the universities, and subsequently by Derrida in his work on the uni­ ver­sity and philosophy and in the establishment of the CIPh. The formulation of Tassin and Roman’s appeal just quoted gives a new twist to the indissociability view of philosophy and education. Here, philosophy has not just the right to a place within the university, but is crucially linked to the idea of the university itself. Questions of the legitimacy of disciplinary divisions, the need for crossing between them, and critical ref lection on different forms of knowledge and their social and professional uses must be recognized as essentially philosophical questions. Above all, without philosophy, any kind of professionalization inevitably leads to a purely utilitarian view of the different forms of knowledge. Philosophy’s unique and irreplaceable contribution to education and the interrelations of the disciplines is thus its ‘valeur formatrice’ (GP, p. 181). Philosophy needs to be more open to subjects with different traditions, but this openness is understood in terms of a kind of permanent, prior indebtedness to the philosophical tradition by these other areas of knowledge, which remained in need of the formative value of the philosophical tradition. This is, then, GREPH’s project transferred and extended directly on to higher education. Unlike GREPH, however, there is no simultaneous strategy of defence and attack, no examination of levels of presupposition in the debate in which they are operating. This formulation of the fundamental link between the university and philosophy, and philosophy’s overarching role in relation to the other disciplines is at the heart of Derrida’s own involvement with the CIPh and the attempt to create an additional, different place for philosophy. Roman and Tassin’s claim that the university cannot function without philosophy, is intrinsically linked to philosophy, and will somehow

The Insistence on Philosophy

143

lose its distinctive mission and ethos without philosophy, is what Derrida takes as the starting-point for ref lection on the creation of the CIPh, one which needed to be examined philosophically and historically in order to understand the possible role and aims of the collège. Both in his reports on the creation of the collège, and in the essays on the university which are examined below, Derrida is interested in what Roman and Tassin state unproblematically and directly, in response to a perceived external threat to philosophy’s survival in a given, institutional location: the intimate link between the ‘idea of the university’ and philosophy. The Collège represented a continuation of GREPH’s aims and interests. Like GREPH, it was not the result of Derrida’s work alone, but in both cases he was the most prominent figure, and both are importantly related to his work. Their shared lineage is crucial to Derrida, and part of his ongoing work on philosophy and institutions.7 As referred to already, whilst Derrida was involved in the setting up and initial running of the collège, he was also elected to the EHESS — whose titular identity was of course the social sciences — and his ‘direction d’études’ there was designated by him as ‘Les institutions philosophiques’.8 Some of the seminar strands and publications undertaken under the auspices of the collège represented a second stage of gestation of GREPH’s project. The ‘École et philosophie’ conference of 1984, and the publication of the ‘petits écrits’ on philosophy teaching in the nineteenth century by Patrice Vermeren and Stéphane Douailler, continued the large-scale research programme on philosophy and its teaching, and the historical inscriptions of its place in French education which had originally been mapped by Derrida with GREPH in the ‘Avant-projet’ after the first protest against the Capès report and before the emergence of the Haby proposals into the public domain.9 The CIPh also, from the outset, included school-teachers of philosophy, inviting them to participate in the consultation process on its establishment, and subsequently offering an institutional location for lycée teachers wishing to undertake a research project. This possibility of sabbaticals for teachers aimed to help break down the divide between secondary and university philosophy teachers, and the resentment of the former for the privileges of the latter. The work and establishment of the collège thus represents an important chapter in the afterlife of GREPH and its fight ‘pour la philosophie’, and in Derrida’s involvement with philosophy and institutions.10 The Socialists were welcomed by GREPH as, at the very least, not obvious enemies of their cause; they were not to be classed amongst those ‘[qui] ont peur de la philosophie’. However, in the 1981 Libération interview referred to above, in which Derrida is still speaking as the head of GREPH, he expresses due caution at how much the political climate had really changed in terms of education. The Socialists, he hoped, would attempt to grapple with the contradictions of ‘la programmation techno-économique du marché’ which the Giscard administration had so wholeheartedly embraced. The ‘technologism’ which had characterized the preceding years now needed to be accommodated but also interrogated (DP, pp. 504–05). The concerted resistance shown by GREPH to the pseudo-democrati­ zation of the educational system, as they saw it, and their alarm at a view of education as servicing the needs of the national economy alone, was now allowed

144

The Insistence on Philosophy

a more measured and hopeful expression. Derrida in this interview stresses this technologism, and only to a lesser extent the repressive intentions of the previous government post-’68, as the distinguishing factor of the preceding period and the one which might and should now change. However, he also registered his reservations with regard to the Colloque national sur la Recherche et la Technologie organized by the new Minister of Research and Technology, Jean-Pierre Chevènement. The protest against technocratism of the preparatory material was, he suggested, rather drowned out, ‘perdue au milieu d’un hymne à l’humanisme techno-démocratique le plus assuré dans sa légitimité, sa nécessité, son optimisme et son progressime’ (DP, p. 508). The work of analysing this technocratic discourse was not, therefore, at an end.11 The ongoing task was still that of interrogating its foundations, limits, presuppositions, ‘sa vieille et nouvelle histoire’. This, in effect, is a statement of Derrida’s programme of institutional critique, including his wariness with regard to notions of a pre-set ‘programme’ and of a straightforward understanding of ‘critique’. In setting up the CIPh he sought to examine the ‘vieille et nouvelle histoire’ of the university, not by producing a historical narrative overview of the university in the last two hundred years in France, Europe, or the United States but by examining the historical and philosophical model of the university, and its foundations, limits, and presuppositions. The essays on the university and on the collège focus on the model of the University of Berlin, founded in 1810. Derrida does not attempt to produce an authoritative account of the permutations of this model, nor an account tracing its specific inf luence in, for example, France in the nineteenth century. He is interested in the sedimented nature of the model, and the tenacity of its hold as the provenance of an ideal of the university and of the unification and legitimation of knowledge in the face of specialization through philosophy. He explores this and elaborates this problematic in order to be able to draw up the plans for the new institutional site for philosophy which the collège represents, and the new relation of philosophy, both to itself and to other forms of knowledge, which it aims to incarnate. The more favourable political climate which Derrida noted in the Libération interview was marked by the promise to provide state funding for this new philo­ sophy college. In May 1982 the task of establishing a charter for the Collège was entrusted to Derrida, together with three other philosophers, François Châtelet, Jean-Pierre Faye, and Dominique Lecourt, by Chevènement. The Collège was thus from the start placed outside the immediate province of the Ministry of Education. Derrida sent out an open letter on 18 May 1982, co-signed by the other three men, which invited other researchers both in France and abroad to affiliate with and collaborate in the project.12 In this letter, CIPh was named as a new ‘site of provocation’ in the sense of provoking new research and selecting what Derrida termed ‘des incursions inaugurales’.13 As recorded in Le Rapport bleu, a collection of documents pertaining to the Collège which had originally been published in pamphlet form, more than seven hundred and fifty written contributions were received in response to this.14 In September the joint report was submitted to the minister. This comprised two, jointly-written parts: firstly, the regulatory idea and general mission of the college, which was that it should be open to research

The Insistence on Philosophy

145

which could not find institutional backing elsewhere because it was ‘insufficiently legitimated’; secondly, its constitution.15 The third part, ‘Projections’, consisted of four chapters, one written by each of the four enlisted philosophers. The CIPh was officially founded in Paris on 10 October 1983, with Derrida as its first, elected director for a term of one year. After this first term, Jean-François Lyotard became director, again for a year only. The international aspect of the college entailed not simply the kind of research collaborations which the open letter invited, but also the more unusual step of deliberately including foreign academics in the administrative, decision-making process of the running of the college. The administrative structure aimed at f luid­ ity: fixed-term occupancy of the directorship, contracts of association for teaching seminar programmes, and self-auditing undertaken by a commission inclu­d ing students and members of other, linked institutions. Involvement in it at any level was therefore fixed-term only, and it thus consciously stood apart from the professional system of tenure and imposed curricula, deliberately remaining at a distance from the large-scale operations of the national institution of the educational system as such. The aim was to maximize open-endedness and mobility in terms of both what was to be taught and researched, and who was to work there and study there: its operating research structure was to be ‘à la fois en diaspora et en réseau’.16 No form of prior accreditation was required to enrol. The work of GREPH was strongly endorsed at various points in these initial documents.17 Researching philosophy and its institutions in France was designated from the outset as important, representing a direct continuation of GREPH’s initial work in this area, and in effect creating a specific institutional space for the work which members of GREPH had previously undertaken in their own time, without any kind of official recognition or support.18 Their previous position of ‘oppo­ sitionality’ to the forces of control both external and internal to their professional activities, was now brought within the compass of a new institution, and authorized as part of ‘philosophy’. Although the Collège was and is an ancillary institution, and did not therefore change the position of philosophy teachers in mainstream education, this was a significant ‘officialization’ of GREPH’s programme, granting it the resources of a recognized forum. The understanding of collegiality as a kind of productive looseness and f luctuating mode of interaction, and the international dimension, explain the new institution’s title. The other aim was the creation of new interactions, ‘intersections or crossings’, between different subject areas and topics, ones which are ‘off the institutional map’ at present, and a new kind of interdisciplinarity altogether, to be captured under the rubric of ‘intersciences’.19 This aim seems at first sight less well served by the retention of ‘philosophy’. The fundamental tension inherent in GREPH’s project is foregrounded here in the question of the ‘insistence upon philosophy’, and what is at stake in the relationship between philosophy and the university, and philosophy and other disciplines. The question of retaining ‘philosophy’ as the name for their activities had not been at issue for GREPH. They were campaigning for the institutional survival of philosophy after all, and could not advocate anything but an institutionally specific location, if not an institutionally specific role for it, if

146

The Insistence on Philosophy

they were not to find themselves ranged alongside those who wanted to replace it. With the Collège, and the foregrounding of interdisciplinarity and a ‘new relation’ of philosophy to itself, the problems of transformation and renewal were what principally concerned Derrida. After all, if the college set out to be omnivorous and uncharted in its attitude to new possibilities of research — ‘megalomaniac in response to mediocrity’, as one contemporaneous report put it — a broader or newer key term in its titular identity would seem more apt.20 To understand this better, it is necessary to turn to Derrida’s work on the founding of the Collège in relation to his work on philosophy and the university. The ‘regulatory idea’ section of the joint report on the founding of the CIPh is entitled ‘Titres’.21 This section was co-signed, but its theoretical matrix is distinctively Derridean. I will therefore refer to ‘Derrida’ as the sole author since, as with GREPH’s ‘Avant-projet’, though collectively agreed and worked through, it remains part of his corpus. In it, Derrida poses the question of ‘why philosophy?’22 He invokes a return to philosophy (p. 20), a current reawakening, not in terms of a ‘return of the repressed’, although he stresses that the techno-politics of education of the 1970s did indeed actively seek to repress philosophy as inimical to its view of the correct ends and contents of education. What this ‘return’ consists of is not simply a period of institutional re-emergence and f lourishing after a period of official disfavour, but rather a new relationship to ‘la philosophie comme telle’ (p. 21). This renewal means that the limits of philosophy can be apprehended differently. No longer is it a matter of announcing the death of philosophy and its replacement by something different, a repeated move which, in Derrida’s view, can never fail to remain within the boundaries of philosophy without realizing it. Philosophy can only be replaced by a more implicit philosophy concealed by new names, he argues, and to render the latter explicit is to philosophize.23 Announcing the death of philosophy, whether as a metaphysical problem, or in terms of its having been overtaken and supplanted — whether by empiricism, technocracy, morality or religion — remains a philosophical move.24 His use of the ‘death of philosophy’ thus relies on an alternation of meanings: both the announce­ ment of a going beyond philosophy, which has been made from within philosophy by, for example, Heidegger, and its institutional defeat, announced by rival concerns — whether the struggle with the Church in the nineteenth century, or its reduction at the hands of instrumentalist technocrats like René Haby. If announ­cing its demise is always necessarily premature and naïve, philosophy cannot simply retain its sense of hegemony, overseeing and commanding the ‘champ encyclopédique’ of the totality of forms of knowledge. Derrida asserts that these two conceptions of philosophy — the announcement of its imminent demise, and the reaffirmation of its role of hegemonic overseer — form an indissociable pairing which is the key to pronouncements on the role and place of philosophy over the last two hundred years (p. 21). This was the crux which GREPH sought to negotiate, arguing for philosophy’s survival, but in a new guise. Their attempts to consider the possible transformation of philosophy were contradictory, as we have seen. Even as they argued for its extension, they had to argue for its specificity in order to justify it in institutional terms. Expressing its relation to other disciplines — notably literature

The Insistence on Philosophy

147

and the social sciences — as one of critique did not dislodge the hegemonic selfconception which they were against in principle. Derrida is still grappling with this, as an institutional possibility, in his work on the college. This schema is disappearing, he announces in Le Rapport bleu, allowing a new relationship to philosophy. To understand this, Derrida argues, it is necessary to trace this schema back to a certain concept of ‘universitas’, which presupposes it; he deems this to be the dominant model of the University in modern, Western societies, represented by the model of the University of Berlin. The logic of creating the Collège is determined by this renewal of philosophy, and by this new relationship. A space will be created in and from which to re-affirm philosophy’s role, and define what it can and should do in all aspects of society, from politics, languages, and culture, to military strategy and power (p. 22), but also a space where philosophy would itself be questioned (PR, p. 16), a space in which to think philosophy itself: désigner un lieu de pensée où se déploierait la question de la philosophie: sur le sens ou la destination du philosophique, ses origines, son avenir, sa condition. (Le Rapport bleu, p. 21)

Derrida and Institutional Critique: The Model of the University of Berlin Derrida’s contributions to the report on the creation of the CIPh were written in 1982. Two years previously, and a year after the report, he published two essays — on the founding of the University of Berlin, and on philosophy and the university — in which he develops the problematic referred to in abbreviated form in ‘Titres’, and underlying his connection with the CIPh. This is therefore the second stage of his work on deconstruction and institutions and with GREPH. The problem of ‘critique’ came to the fore there in two ways: in terms of the designation of GREPH’s transformative and critical project of maintaining and changing philo­ sophy institutionally, and what Derrida termed the problematic of the frame; and in terms of designating the specificity of philosophy’s role in education. The reserve shown by Derrida with regard to employing the concepts of ‘legitimation’ (philosophy’s traditional self-understanding) and ‘critique’ (its self-understanding, and the undoing of that conception) is crucial here.25 Having examined his first essay, OC, in institutional analysis, and those of other GREPH members in QP in the last two chapters, the question remains of how to understand this project, outlined in the ‘Avant-projet’ as that of a ‘double strategy’ which rejects a simply external position. I will now examine Derrida’s procedures in these two essays in order to trace further the possibility of an institutional ‘critique’ which refuses that designation. Here, he pursues what he subsequently termed his ‘philosophical’, rather than historical or sociological, interpretation of a particular chapter in the history of academic models.26 The first of these two essays, ‘Mochlos; or, the Conf lict of the Faculties’, was originally given in English as a paper at Columbia University on 17 April 1980 on the occasion of the centenary of Columbia’s Graduate School.27 This paper gave rise to a conference in 1987 entitled ‘Our Academic Contract: The Conflict of the Faculties

148

The Insistence on Philosophy

in America’ which focused, as Derrida had, on Kant’s 1798 essay ‘The Conf lict of the Faculties’. Contributors to the conference, which was organized by the English Department of the University of Alabama, included Timothy Bahti, Peggy Kamuf, and Robert Young, all of whom subsequently produced further work on the subject of ‘deconstruction and the university’.28 Derrida’s second article explicitly dealing with this problematic, ‘The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils’, was written in 1983 after the report for the creation of the CIPh, and again it appeared first in English.29 The American context of delivery for these essays has led to their relationship to his work on the report for the college, and their continuance of the problematics opened up by GREPH going more or less entirely unremarked. As pointed out in the first chapter, these essays have been focused on as the expression of Derrida’s concern with institutions mainly because they were published in English. Of course, unlike GREPH, their reference points are not specifically French. Derrida is examining the work of German philosophers in relation to German institutions, and relating this to ‘the modern university’ within European and American countries, although, as stated already, he is not producing a comparative history of the university in several countries over a certain period. Therefore, it has been easier for Anglophone critics to latch on to this material, because of its availability in English, and because it is apparently less tied in to a specifically French context, dealing with ‘the university’ rather than the presence of philosophy in schools. The topic of ‘deconstruction and the university’ attracted increasing interest from Anglophone theorists and exponents of Derrida from the early 1990s onwards, a good ten years after the founding of the Collège.30 The relevance of the CIPh to Derrida’s concern with philosophy and the university is sometimes, although not always, included in this work. Christopher Norris adduced the ‘Principle of Reason’ essay as crucial evidence of the political consequences of Derrida’s philosophy, the ‘answer’ to the perceived need for a politics-and-deconstruction pairing, but the significance of the founding of the CIPh does not figure at all in his account.31 This is the same pattern as that discussed in the first chapter, above: the ‘urgent’ question of deconstruction and politics misses out the actual institutional context, even as it insists on the important links between deconstruction and institutional questions. John D. Caputo’s 1997 presentation of the work of the college is unusual in that it does discuss the CIPh as importantly related to Derrida’s work on the university and philosophy and to GREPH. However, this account was written and published as an adjunct to Derrida’s own presentation of his work on institutions, and takes its cue directly from his own reiteration on that occasion of how his work with GREPH, with the CIPh, and on the university, is part of a single problematic.32 Thus, despite vigorous proclamations of the importance of institutions and institutional critique to Derrida’s work, not least by Derrida himself, the very specific institutional project of the creation of the Collège which was inextricably linked to his exploration of philosophy and the university at this point tends to be omitted from the critical reckoning. Equally, without gainsaying the interest of some of this work on deconstruction and the university, none of these critics situate it as the continuation of the problematic, which Derrida in conjunction with GREPH had worked to

The Insistence on Philosophy

149

delineate, of philosophy and its institution in relation to school education. As a result of this, the significance of this work to Derrida’s simultaneous involvement with the setting up of the Collège and continuation of his work with GREPH has gone unexplored and unnoticed. They are, however, both strongly related — in the case of PR (p. 16), explicitly — to this emerging institution. Derrida had by this time taught a year-long seminar on the ‘question of the university’ at the ENS (PR, p. 6). The essays are directly linked to remarks made in ‘Où commence et comment finit un corps enseignant’, the first essay which he published on the question of philosophy and its institutionalization, and on deconstruction and institutions, as part of his work with GREPH.33 Both MO and PR affirm, in exactly the same way as OC, and Derrida’s contributions to QP, the importance of the relationship between philosophy and institutions, and between philosophy and its institution, and therefore, also, deconstruction and institutional questions. This kind of work must not be seen as an additional, separate activity: it is not merely an ‘external complement to teaching and research’ (PR, p. 3). Deconstruction, he states, ‘must not be separable from this politico-institutional problematic’ (MO, p. 23). Both represent a continuation of Derrida’s work on philosophy and institutions with GREPH. The problematic of philosophy’s institutional location and disciplinary role is carried over from the consideration of schools to that of universities. Since both are related to the project of setting up the CIPh, they also have a ‘practical’ institutional dimension: they are not just theoretical ref lections. The two, intertwined topics which concern Derrida in both these essays are the idea of the university and the notion of academic freedom. In the first, ‘Mochlos; or, The Conf lict of the Faculties’, Derrida concentrates on Kant’s essay, ‘The Conf lict of the Faculties’, written in 1798. Kant’s essay is described as ‘little-known’, even to Kant specialists, by Richard Rand in his introduction to the collection of papers from the 1987 Alabama conference.34 However, as discussed in the last chapter, Roland Brunet had drawn attention to this essay in his contribution to QP as the philosophical locus for the grounding of philosophy, institutionally, as queen of the disciplines.35 As Brunet argued there, this led to the danger of ‘l’enseignement sacerdotal’ of philosophy, of a surrogate religion of philosophy as critique, the ‘contre-pouvoir vigilant’ within the institution as a whole. This led directly to the problems of viewing philosophy’s institutional mission within French mass education as subversion, a view eminently recuperable as contentfree, purportedly neutral ‘critical skills’. Thus elements of Kant’s schema for the university and philosophy are present in philosophy’s institutionalization in French schools, where philosophy’s role shifts from guarantor of pedagogical coherence and supplier of morality — and therefore the crown at the end of school education — to critique of what has preceded it, with sole jurisdiction over the whole of education. In both the École-Republique argument, and the Kantian university, philosophy becomes a kind of ‘institutional telos’, as Rancière warned in his essay in La Grève des philosophes.36 This is the problematic which concerns Derrida here. In both of these essays, as in his contribution to the report for the CIPh, Derrida invokes the academic model of the University of Berlin, which was created on 10 October 1810 by Frederick William III, then king of Prussia, on the basis of

150

The Insistence on Philosophy

founding documents produced by Schelling, Schleiermacher, Fichte, and Humboldt (MO, p. 10). At the time, Humboldt was responsible for the reform of the entire educational system of Prussia.37 He had been placed in overall charge of the mission to found a new university, after a period of widely perceived terminal decline of the university as a viable institution. It had been thought that the university could be superseded by the work of the already existing research academies on the one hand, and the creation of vocational schools for ‘practical’ education on the other, in a complete separation of both research and teaching, and ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ knowledge.38 The Humboldtian university, in defiance of this prognosis, yoked together teaching and research into a combined mission and idea of the university, and it is this which marks it out as the inception of the distinctively modern, as opposed to the medieval, conception of the university.39 Kant’s essay was of central importance to the work of the German Idealists on the university because of its argument for academic freedom and state noninterference in the workings of the university, and for its conception of the primacy of philosophy.40 By ‘philosophy’ Kant was referring to the Faculty of Philosophy, which was equivalent at the time to both philosophy, narrowly understood, and all the humanities. Pure mathematics would also have been included in this faculty. It is important to realize that, as Ian Hunter points out, Kant’s essay to some extent exploits this ambiguity, apparently speaking on behalf of the entire lower faculty, but his explanation of the latter expounds its purpose and function in terms of ‘pure rational knowledge’, effectively philosophy understood narrowly, excluding the historical subjects.41 Kant’s account has been taken up by subsequent defenders of the humanities as a useful precedent, but the relationship between philosophy and other subjects is problematic.42 The German Idealists strongly endorsed Kant’s defence of academic freedom, but their discussion of the university and its role in society, and of the cultural role of education in general, hinges, most interestingly for Derrida’s purposes, on their consideration of the inter-relationships and organization of the disciplines, and their understanding of philosophy within this. Derrida is interested in Kant’s essay as the first draft of the model of the University of Berlin, and thus of the modern university. Kant’s essay was written as a polemical response to the king, Frederick William II, and his attempt to censor Kant himself, by forbidding him from giving further lectures on religion — but only in public. As Richard Rand points out, Kant’s essay is in effect a charter for the founding of the modern university because it marks the inauguration of the principle of academic freedom.43 This principle was then taken up by the philosopher-founders of the University of Berlin and thus became the core of the modern model. Kant writes this charter at a moment of censorship, ‘working [...] it as a lever of opportunity’ (Rand, p. vii). Hence the title of Derrida’s essay, since ‘mochlos’ is the Greek word for lever. From this occasion, Kant derives a kind of ‘blueprint for the modern research university [...] a site for those who would pursue the work of reason’ (p. vii). The potential ‘conf licts’ which Kant addresses are both internal and external: between the state and the state-supported institution, on the one hand, and between the separate internal domains of the university, on the other. The University as governed by the idea of reason was the model founded between Kant’s essay and

The Insistence on Philosophy

151

the completion of Humboldt’s mission (MO, p. 10), and led to the re-instituting of all ‘great, Western universities’ in emulation of this model in the first half of the nineteenth century in Europe and, in the second half, in America (PR, p. 8).44 Why, then, is Derrida interested in pursuing this model? After all, as he points out, Kant’s entire problematic of the university is ‘organised around the exercise of censorship’ (PR, p. 13), and this is not the chief cause for concern in today’s university. The chief concern today is the current politics of research and teaching whose matrix is ‘finalization’ or orientation (PR, p. 11). As Jacques Rancière commented, the conf lict of the faculties today is not a struggle between freedom and direct censorship, but it rather takes place in terms of the ‘frontiers of critical function’ and the ref lection on the ‘ends’ of knowledge and technology.45 In this ‘techno-political’ dispensation, research and teaching must be if not immediately applicable, ‘end-oriented’ (PR, p. 12), and ‘censorship’ takes place in terms of the regulation of support in view of those ends (PR, p. 13). Some areas of study are deemed unacceptable or illegitimate, and these are precisely the ones which the CIPh will aim to provide a space for as its regulatory idea. In an interview in 1989, Derrida declared one of the founding purposes of the CIPh to be a counter-response to Chevènement’s colloquium on science and technology.46 The re-emerging ‘technocratism’ of this event had caused alarm, as pointed out in the comments he made as head of GREPH in Libération in 1981 (DP, p. 505), referred to above, and this marks the distancing from the term ‘sciences humaines’ developed in the GREPH media interventions and the use of ‘nouvelles humanités’ instead.47 In PR, two years later, Derrida positions himself and the college against this all-encroaching ‘goal-orientation’ of research. Whilst querying the possibility of a clear-cut distinction between ‘pure’ or fundamental and applied or useful knowledge and teaching, since to an extent everything can be recuperated as ‘goaloriented’, Derrida points out that he is not seeking to repeat the Kantian gesture of demarcating professional education from the philosophical. His own teaching, he says, involves a double gesture, of training — in his case future teachers — whilst simultaneously raising the problems of this kind of professionalization.48 Philosophy does not exist in a pure, neutral form within the institution, as he had already argued in OC. Therefore the Kantian formula — internal jurisdiction with no external effects — cannot hold. But at the same time, Derrida is still arguing for philosophy in the face of continuing threats to its institutional survival. As with the Haby reform, therefore, questioning oppositions does not circumvent the need to take up a position: even as he questions the opposition between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’, he is forced to take up a position against goal-orientation. Unlike GREPH’s campaign against the Haby reforms, of course, he is questioning a government which has directly funded and supported the collective efforts of himself and his colleagues. What is striking and characteristic in these essays and in his contributions to the report for the college is Derrida’s modus operandi, which is, in effect, to interrogate contemporary institutions through past texts. At the beginning of MO he pauses to consider both the import of possible approaches to the study of academic models and his own approach. Derrida is resistant to a ‘philosophical’ approach which would set itself apart from political and institutional determinants, and to its

152

The Insistence on Philosophy

converse, a straightforwardly historicist approach. Speaking on the occasion of an academic centenary, he is careful to reject the generic style and approach of such an occasion which he terms ‘commemorative aesthetics’ (MO, p. 9). This approach is endemic not just to speech day homilies invoking the glory of past ideals, but to the history of academic institutions in general.49 For Derrida, this can only result in the exhibiting of prior conceptions and earlier ideas of the university in a circumscribed, purely ‘historicist’ fashion — as having their place in history, to be understood in terms of that place, and as having no relation to the present. He refers to this use of an institution’s past as the exhuming of ‘the archived topos, whose code would no longer be our own’, the listing of an ‘inventory of what was and no longer is’, which is presented as sealed off from the present and of antiquarian interest only.50 The other alternative which such an occasion invites, Derrida suggests, is that of re-invigorative, reconstructive affirmation of a model and its tradition, defending its continuity and ongoing viability. This is not a possibility either, he argues. Rather, the encounter must be a deconstructive one, a re-elaboration of the ties of university to society, [...] the production, structure, archivisation and transmission of knowledges and technology, [in] the political stakes of knowledge, [in] the very idea of knowledge and truth. (MO, p. 9)

This is not, then, a ‘critique’ in the sense of retaining the conviction that the ground of past conceptions can and must be cleared in order to make way for something altogether new and separate from it. Rather, it is a re-elaboration of the past, asking whether the university has a ‘reason for being’ (PR, p. 5), in order to determine the position in which we find ourselves today, and how the unacknowledged determinations of this present themselves offer possibilities of rewriting and of transformation. This kind of re-elaboration takes place in the space of sociology of knowledge, but sociology of knowledge cannot be sufficient for his purpose since it remains internal to the university, a demarcated zone of study within it which fails to question the university itself, only adding to our knowledge about its historical determinants (PR, p. 16). Furthermore, the college is situated in an interrogative relation to the concept of legitimation itself. Questioning disciplinary legitimation must exceed sociological work, since it needs to question the ‘finalité et la stratégie’ of sociology no less than philosophy, as Derrida stresses in ‘Coups d’envoi’, part of the report for the college (DP, p. 584).51 The radical claim of producing this kind of deconstructive encounter with the institution’s past is that we cannot simply move on, abandoning the previous ground. As Derrida warned: abandonner le terrain sous prétexte qu’on ne peut plus défendre la vieille machine (et qu’on a même contribué à la disloquer), ce serait donc ne rien comprendre à la stratégie déconstructrice. (OC, p. 120)

Understanding the hold which a prior model still has makes it possible to be in a position to re-write and re-elaborate it. He is neither providing an outline of a prehistory as a contained episode from the past, nor simply critiquing the ideological basis of the current system — ‘techno-politics’ and the instrumental approach to

The Insistence on Philosophy

153

knowledge, as already mentioned, and not the idea of the university as founded on reason. He is, rather, producing a kind of chiasmic reversal of both these possibilities. He is drawing out the problematic as it has taken hold over time, examining it critically in philosophical terms in order to understand present possibilities, rather than trying to understand the past in order to critique the present. In a sense, the history of the institution, in this kind of re-examination becomes its theory, just as GREPH’s effort to foreground the overlooked history of philosophy in education in France derived its theorization of philosophy’s role from that history, in a self-doubling move. This form of critique which is not critique, which does not attempt to ‘clear the ground’ of past misconceptions in order to start afresh, involves examining these past conceptions philosophically rather than historically. The point of Derrida’s work here is to ‘awaken or resituate a responsibility’, that of the university and of philosophy (PR, p. 14). This is what Peggy Kamuf, in her study of the university and deconstruction, defines as the ‘historicality’ of institutions: they have been bequeathed to us by a specific history and are not naturally occurring phenomena [...] whatever stablilised forms they may assume in the present remain open to the transformations of a future. (Kamuf, p. 4)

As Derrida states in MO (p. 3), the university is a ‘relatively recent idea. We have yet to escape it’. As such, its institutional form must be denaturalized through an examination of its historical determinations, in order then to go beyond this. ‘Historicality’ as opposed to historicism — simply seeking to understand the past on its own terms, uncritically — is thus the specific history of the / an institution, examined critically and philosophically, and the possibility of change which arises from this. This is the sense in which Derrida pursues his deconstructive encounter with the history of institutions, and the possibility of transformation. As he made clear in the interview discussion of 1981 (DP, pp. 509–10), the aim of deconstructing this academic model and demonstrating its constitutive aporias is undertaken in the awareness that it can now only be seen as residual and weakened.52 Derrida is therefore deconstructing not the overarching ideological power structure of the educational system as currently experienced but, rather, staging a deconstructive encounter with elements of its history and, therefore, its determining philosophical strands. As he puts it in MO, the University of Berlin ‘remains the most imposing reference for what has been left us of the concept of the university’ (p. 5). He chooses to deconstruct an already vanquished model rather than criticizing the encroachments of instrumental thinking about education and knowledge. This is because the possibility of the university today cannot be thought without reference to this event, the institution of the principle of reason, ‘rendering’ reason, which is not thought through at present (PR, pp. 8 and 11). We need to follow through what is at stake in this principle of foundation, to understand the defence of philosophy, and of the arts faculty or humanities in general, as the only place where foundational critique is or remains possible and current as an overlooked historical sedimentation. In an interview a few years later, Derrida suggested a kind of salvaging operation of these notions. The place of the humanities and of philosophy is one of relative

154

The Insistence on Philosophy

freedom, he said, and this means that it is the place from which to endeavour to ‘think what the university is’.53 This is our position now, and one which we must act upon. The functions of teaching and research are becoming increasingly separated, and treated as separate by the state. In the interview in 1981, he had already suggested that, even in its elderly, outworn condition, the Kantian model of ‘rationalité étatique’ could become a kind of refuge for the non-instrumentalizing humanities against technocratic constraints of research segregated from teaching and measured in terms of productivity outcomes (DP, p. 510). To do this would require rewriting Kant and the German Idealists for now, however: not just invoking the idea of pure, disinterested scholarship and the benefits of the study of the arts, but in effect re-elaborating the whole question of the responsibility of the university. Again, therefore, the pattern is the same, institutionally, as that produced by GREPH — arguing for institutional survival means holding onto the idea of philosophy’s specificity in institutional terms, in the university as in schools. Having deconstructed Kant’s proposed model of internal conf lict-resolution, the specificity of philosophy is still retained. The question of philosophy’s role and renewal within this remains, therefore, in terms of the institutional possibilities which Derrida derives from his deconstructive encounter with the history of the model of the modern university. The University and Philosophy The fundamental question raised by the model of the university as the incarnation of reason is that of the relation of the university to the state. The university’s founding is, in Kant’s terms, heteronomous, in that it is authorized by a ‘power which is not its own’ (MO, p. 4), yet it must exist and function autonomously, being answerable to reason alone. The function and aim of Kant’s intervention is thus to authorize the university on the basis of the founding principle of reason in order to ensure this autonomy. Kant has to argue for this foundation on behalf of something which was already in existence and whose right to continue had been in question for the previous decade. To do this, he uses a rhetorical ploy, introducing us to the topic and the idea of the university as if he had happened upon it, and then proceeding to account for it in terms of the principle of reason.54 He is forced to justify a de facto organisation determined by the government of his day, as if by accident its king were a philosopher. (MO, p. 5)

This is extremely necessary f lattery, but is not simply an expedience on Kant’s part in order to persuade a forgetful monarch that what he proposes was in fact, all along, his own idea. Even if internal autonomy is guaranteed, with only scholars evaluating other scholars, the university as a whole remains answerable to, and responsible to, a power outside it (MO, p. 6). As Derrida remarks, the terms and relation of power were so tangible for Kant that it is possible to feel almost nostalgic for his situation, for the ‘reassuring localisation’ of knowing exactly whom one was addressing (the king) and where to situate power (the state). A debate on ‘the topics of teaching, knowledge and philosophy’ (p. 7) was overtly and unavoidably couched in terms of responsibility, whereas now this ‘stable reference to the one

The Insistence on Philosophy

155

idea of knowledge, the state and the nation’ (p. 8) is no longer unproblematically available to us. Even, or perhaps especially, the reference to the idea of the university is no longer readily available to us. Jürgen Habermas in a reconsideration of the University of Berlin, ‘The Idea of the University — Learning Processes’, which was published a few years after Derrida’s essays, reviews this governing ethos or purpose caustically, comparing its vaulting ambition and attempt at guaranteeing the unity of knowledge and institutional autonomy with its practical unrealizability.55 This unrealizability results in the decline of the Humboldtian vision and the ‘neo-humanist educational ideal’ (Habermas, p. 13) to nothing more than the self-serving ideology of prestige of an elite sector, with its ideal of internal autonomy reduced to inwardness, apoliticism, and conformism. Habermas is concerned with the historical reality of the fortunes of the Idealist conception of the university. The ‘idea’ of a university, whether the founding principle of reason or an alternative conception, is an impossibility according to Habermas, since it implies a ‘mode of thought’ which must be shared by all members of the organization, permeating the entire system. Habermas dismisses this as involving an untenable pathos regarding institutions, one which ascribes a ‘vital spirit’ to them, without which they become a merely ‘mechanical [...] soulless organism’.56 Habermas’s charges of untenability and pathos are convincing. Nonetheless, this kind of pathos or idealism, depending on how it is viewed, forms an undeniably intrinsic part of the history of the university. Sheldon Rothblatt remarks that the history of ‘the idea of the university’ can be more adequately recast as the history of ‘the idea of the idea of the university’.57 Though other institutions, such as the state, have been explored in terms of a single core idea, none of them have fed upon this mode of questioning in such an essential, self-referring way: [none] of them has inspired a literature that continually builds upon itself, repeats itself almost desperately and is itself an inextricable and living part of the institution to which it refers.58 (Rothblatt, p. 3)

Thus Habermas’s comments were themselves directed in part to the philosopher Karl Jaspers’s post-war ref lections on the possible mission of the university in Germany, which in turn were written in the guise of a re-affirmation of loyalty to the era of Humboldt.59 Derrida is not seeking a critical renewal or reaffirmation of this idea of an idea of the university, nor is he mostly concerned with its impracticality or subsequent abuse, like Habermas.60 Derrida, in contrast to Habermas, is concerned with Kant’s essay and its role as regulative ideal of the University of Berlin, not historically or practically in this sense; he is not concerned with the question of whether this was viable or with the gap between the ideal and the reality. The significance of the model is that of perceiving the rigour of a plan or structure through the breaches of an uninhabitable edifice, unable to decide whether it is in ruins or simply never existed, having only even been able to shelter the discourse of its non-accomplishment. (MO, p. 12)

156

The Insistence on Philosophy

It is not simply a model which has fallen on hard times and is now ‘in ruins’ — Derrida would resist the pathos of this idea. Bill Readings’s account echoes Derrida’s argument that the modernity of the university — its coming in to being as a specifically modern institution — is distinguishable by the subsumption of all its activities and forms under a ‘single, regulatory idea’ which for Kant is the principle of reason as the organizing principle of all the disciplines. However, he argues that this ‘idea of an idea’ is no longer tenable: the university is ‘in ruins’ since it has lost what he calls its ‘historical raison d’être’.61 This is not the force of Derrida’s account. For Derrida, this regulatory idea was never strictly realizable in empirical terms within a given historical situation which has now shifted. As suggested by the remarks cited in the 1981 interview, he still views the rewriting of this idea as holding out a strategic possibility, that of re-thinking the university, an aim which is both theoretical and practical and therefore exceeds Kant’s schema of internal and external powers. His intent is to draw out the model as a problematic which retains both ideological and critical force today — it is still ‘at work’ today, even if it is not workable. Moreover, his interest is not so much in tackling the institution of the university head on — its changing nature, role, and ideology analysed in sociological terms — but rather in the concept of philosophy within this, just as previously he and GREPH pursued the question of philosophy within education, rather than that of education in general, notwithstanding the more generalizing rhetoric of questioning the purposes of education as a whole used at times by GREPH.62 In both cases, the ‘political’ aspect of the accounts does not mean producing a sociological or historical account as such. Derrida is arguing that even the university now, as an institution of modern ‘techno-science’ (PR, p. 10), is built on the principle of reason which is its guiding idea, but it does not think through this origin or what remains hidden in that principle.63 In order, then, to effect a tricky justification of state-sponsored academic freedom, Kant draws a sharp dividing line between the ‘higher’ faculties of the university and the ‘lower’. The University itself is regulated by the idea of the totality of what is teachable. Within this, the higher faculties are those which are responsible for professional education and which train the agents of government — medicine, law, and theology — and the ‘lower’ is philosophy. Kant states that ‘a faculty is considered higher only if its teachings [...] interest the government itself ’.64 As Samuel Weber points out, Kant needs to argue for the autonomy of the university structure as constituting in itself a ‘decisive service to society’ rather than a necessary counterbalance to the nefarious operations of power.65 These two classes of faculty are distinguished by one factor alone: proximity to governmental power, but the division between them must issue from reason and not from power: The division between the two classes of faculties must be pure, inaugural and rigorous. Instituted by the government, it must still proceed from pure reason. It does not permit, in principle, any confusion of boundary, any parasitism. (MO, p. 25)

Derrida’s reading resists this pure division on two counts. Firstly, he says, the university is heteronomously founded, by a power not its own: its autonomy and its determination of a clear inside / outside demarcation is at best an operative illusion.

The Insistence on Philosophy

157

Secondly, he refers to the strict separation of the operations of the two classes of faculties, which he views as impossible. He follows the reversal at work in Kant’s hierarchy of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ according to which ‘the last becomes first’ (MO, p. 23). In this reversal, the lower faculty — philosophy — which is answerable only to reason, but whose operations are subordinated to those of the other faculties and which remains outside of governmental power, is instituted as the overseer of all the other faculties. Superficially, this is an intra-university freedom only — an absolute freedom of judgement and speech, but only on theoretical matters (p. 24), and not in public. Philosophy will remain in its place, and not become caught up in ‘outside’ practical matters. This is not possible, however, if it is to act as tribunal for the other faculties at the same time. In his ‘report on knowledge’ for the Quebec government in 1979, entitled La Condition postmoderne, Lyotard diagnoses this attempted quarantine of the two functions as the ‘split introduced by the Kantian critique between knowing and willing’, between a discourse, or in Lyotard’s Wittgensteinian terms, a language game, answerable to truth, and that of decision, the decisions and obligations neces­sarily involved in ‘ethical, social and political practice’ which remain outside the domain of knowledge. Humboldt’s project, as Lyotard notes, was to take on Kant’s demarcation, and to attempt to unify these two discursive realms in order to effect a totality of knowledge and learning, a role awarded to philosophy. In both attempts to resolve the conf lict of the faculties, everything is answerable to philosophy. Derrida couches this kind of segregation, like Lyotard, in terms of twentieth-century linguistic philosophy, in his case that of J. L. Austin rather than that of Wittgenstein. The attempted split is, Derrida argues, between different types of statements, constative or theoretical, and performative or pertaining to action and decision.66 He rejects this as an impossibility: not just a false epistemology, but a false ‘political ideal’ on Kant’s part (p. 23; my emphasis). The political autonomy of the philosophy faculty cannot be guaranteed by this kind of absolute separation since such a separation is not possible. Kant proposes that philosophy will be a perma­nent left-wing opposition party within the parliament of thinkers, yet its founda­tional critique must legitimate everything and still exercise no external, public power. Kant’s demarcation is not possible because of the unavoidable contamination of these discursive modes or realms, and because it entails what Derrida terms a ‘hyperjudicialism’ of philosophy as the absolute source of legitimation of everything (DP, pp. 96–97). As Derrida puts it in the preface to Du droit à la philosophie, Kant’s schema means that: la philosophie n’est pas seulement [...] une légitimité particulière autorisant des légitimités particulières, un pouvoir de légitimation parmi d’autres: c’est [...] la source absolue de toute légitimation. (DP, p. 97)

In effect, Kant creates a ‘kind of antinomy of university reason’, according to which conf lict between the faculties cannot fail to ensue since the two modes, of action and of truth, are not intrinsically separable. The resolution and judgement of this unavoidable conf lict can only then be effected by philosophy. Both modes, Derrida argues, are ‘somehow in excess of themselves, covering each time the whole

158

The Insistence on Philosophy

of which they should figure only a part or sub-set’ (MO, p. 26) They necessarily overrun one another’s appointed spheres, even before philosophy is paradoxically instated at the top of the pyramid with overall jurisdiction. This position at the top of the pyramid means that philosophy, although confined to its own circumscribed, subordinate location within the university, answers for the institution as a whole: without a philosophy department in a university, there is no university. The concept of universitas is more than the philosophical concept of a research and teaching institution; it is the concept of philosophy itself, and is Reason, or rather the principle of reason as an institution. (MO, p. 26)

The work of the lower faculty is thus, in Kant’s account, of a higher order to that of the ostensibly higher, powerful faculties.67 Its role as critical overseer gives it a privileged though contained place — the forerunner of the ‘reine des sciences / couronnement des études’ formula for school philosophy which GREPH sought to dismantle and overturn. As with the debate at the time of the Réforme Haby, this leads to the question, ‘if philosophy is everywhere, and is the very essence of the university, why must it then have a particular place ascribed to it?’68 This was precisely Schelling’s objection to Kant in 1802, which Derrida cites: Something which is everything cannot, for that very reason, be anything in particular. (cit., MO, p. 26)

Derrida refers to this as a paradox of topology, of space and relative location. This becomes a lever in his own view of philosophy’s place and role. By the time of a roundtable held in 1994, the proceedings of which were publi­ shed in 1996, Derrida designates this as a ‘paradox of the topology of the disci­pline’ of philosophy, one that is essential to his view of how philosophy should and can operate within the institution.69 There is not a choice between these two logics, philosophy in an untenably privileged yet subordinate position, or philosophy as requiring no assigned place of its own. Rather philosophy ‘is and must be everywhere’ (p. 11), in the media, for example, and ‘at work’ in the other disciplines. But this formulation risks tipping over into the use of ‘philosophy’ as the term for inert ideology outside philosophy itself, the problem found in GREPH’s discourse. Derrida states that a specialized, professional training for philosophy is still necessary, since otherwise ‘this philosophy everywhere could become a terrible dogmatic weapon’ (p. 12). The ‘everywhere’ of philosophy shifts from being the essential and distinctive philosophical nature, intent, and mission of a particular institution, as in Schelling’s view, underwriting the ‘Uni-totalité’, the totalizing guarantee of unity in the face of multiplicity, of the ‘uni-versity’.70 The ‘everywhere’ becomes a discursive entirety not limited to the interior of an institution, and from there, another name for congealed doxa in need of critique — by trained philosophers. At the same time, as Derrida pointed out two years after the CIPh’s creation, the joint proposals made to the French government were, in an important sense, ‘Schellingian’, given their emphasis on ‘la philosophie décloisonnée’, on philosophy moving out of its compartmentalized allocation of space and opening out via the interfaces of the proposed ‘intersciences’.71 This problem, as seen in relation to

The Insistence on Philosophy

159

GREPH in the previous chapter, arises from the perception of the relation between philosophy and the other disciplines which essentially derives from the splitting off of former provinces of philosophy into rival social science areas such as sociology and psychology. This problem was one experienced by the founders of the University of Berlin, as that of the multiplicity and fragmentation of knowledge. Their model represents the attempt to respond institutionally to the ‘problem’ of specialization and the division of academic labour. To solve this confusion of the diversity of forms of knowledge, the founders attempted a unification of knowledge, understood in terms of philosophy, and a resolution of the Kantian split between truth and action, but in terms of the university’s internal organization and mission and not in terms of its external ends or power. Where Kant had tried to demarcate this split in terms of the appropriate domains of the faculties in order to justify the university and guarantee its continuation, Humboldt sought to resolve this dichotomy precisely in order to achieve the same end. Lyotard, in PMC, provides a brief account of this attempt and its vital forging of the link between what had previously been two separate activities: the pursuit of disinterested knowledge for its own sake (or, research) and what Humboldt termed the spiritual and moral training of the nation (in other words, teaching).72 The indifference of the state and those beyond the university to knowledge for its own sake could be circumvented by linking it directly to what would concern them — ‘le caractère et l’action’.73 Hence the formulation of his theory of Bildung, which emphasized the individual’s spiritual and intellectual perfectibility through learning and culture, and which linked teaching closely to scholarship, in terms of both methodology and ideal outcomes.74 The two were to be reconceived in terms of an intimate and essential link. To be able to teach properly, teachers must themselves be researchers. Thus Schelling maintained that the actual construction of philosophical thought in its unfolding would give rise to the form of its presentation in teaching. The idea of direct usefulness of learning and training, to the state or society more generally was to be avoided.75 The problem of the fragmentation of knowledge and the internal organization of the disciplines was to be dealt with specifically by allocating a place for each form of knowledge within a single overarching system whose crown was philosophical speculation (PMC, p. 52). The diversity of knowledges would be overseen, as in the Kantian set-up, by philosophy as the metadiscipline. Philosophy would not just preside over questions of a foundational nature arising from border conf licts: it was encyclopaedic in structure and could therefore unify the multiplicity of the forms of knowledge.76 The value of these different forms of knowledge relative to each other could be determined and assigned in terms of their place within this, in a relationship of part to whole. The totalizing power of philosophical ref lection was to underwrite the university, the disciplines, learning, teaching, and research. Philosophy, positioned at the apex of the pyramid of knowledge, and charged with legitimation and critique, as argued for by Kant, was now to be synthesizing and totalizing in addition.77 This is what Derrida, in the CIPh report, terms the ‘structure ontologico-encyclopédique verticale’ of this combined (Kant plus the German Idealists) model of the university.78 Whilst this hierarchical principle

160

The Insistence on Philosophy

still operates in inverse relation to power, philosophy’s dominion over the other disciplines is complete. The positive knowledge of the disciplines is provided by the ‘system’ of the world, and philosophy is the encyclopaedia of this system of knowledge, vouchsafing the essence of those disciplines, even if ignorant of their contents: La philosophie y est censée organiser et commander tout l’espace de la connaissance et toutes les régions de l’encyclopédie. (Le Rapport bleu, p. 39)

In both the starting point (Kant) and the end point (the University of Berlin) of the foundation of this model, philosophy’s institutional destiny is to be powerless, yet paradoxically all-powerful. In both, philosophy fundamentally guarantees the university and acts as its ultimate court, whilst presiding over the division of intellectual labour. This is the force of Derrida’s claim that it is not just a question of the institutional primacy of a particular, historically determined conception, but that the university, in its modern form, owes its very concept to philosophy, both in terms of the idea of the university and of the principle of academic freedom as a transcendental principle, that Reason is answerable only to Reason: l’université est une institution philosophique, elle doit son concept à la réf lexion philosophique.79

This is the ultimate combined force of this pair of essays, which serve to extend and provide the full-scale examination which his remarks, published in OC in 1976, on the essential relationship between deconstruction and the institution and teaching elliptically gestured towards four years earlier.80 There, he made clear that the university could not survive an institutional deconstructive encounter since this would ‘attack it at the root’, displaying the model which defined the univer­sity and philosophy in a ‘conjoint’ way: the university as a philosophical institution in both its organization and in its concept because the single discipline of philosophy is supposed to simultaneously ‘think and have the concept of the whole academic space’.81 Kant is forced to delimit philosophy in order to protect it, but at the same time awards it ‘le droit de regard critique et panoptique’ over all other forms of knowledge (DP, p. 383). The question of philosophy’s new mode of selfapprehension is not merely internal to the institution, Derrida argues: Questionnant, critique ou déconstructif, le rapport à soi de la philosophie, c’est l’épreuve de l’institution.82

The hegemonic authority of philosophy is institutionalized in this arrangement, yet at the same time philosophy is consigned to a subordinate department. The history of philosophy as an institution over the last two hundred years is one in which this specific space allocated to it has decreased, to the point where its very survival has come in to question and its ‘death’ has been announced. This is the philosophical re-elaboration of the history of the ‘indissociable pairing’ of the death / hegemony of philosophy referred to in Derrida’s exposition in ‘Titres’. What can no longer be allowed is for philosophy to remain, either explicitly or implicitly, in the transcendental position instituted by Kant, legislating on the conditions of possibility of the other disciplines.

The Insistence on Philosophy

161

Having followed through Derrida’s understanding of the link between philosophy and the university, and how he deals with the possibility of institutional critique in this area, the question can now be returned to of where this leaves Derrida in relation to philosophy and its institution now, and how his retracing of the problematic of the model of the University of Berlin relates to the diagnosis of a ‘new relationship to philosophy as such’ which is to be inscribed within the project of the Collège International de Philosophie. The aim of the Collège was, as stated above in the outline of its creation, to displace and transform this kind of situation in which philosophy can only take itself seriously, or be taken seriously, according to this inherited, traditional conception of its serene hegemony ‘sur l’ensemble du champ théorico-pratique’.83 One means of carrying out this transformation is represented by the continued interest in the history and structure of the ‘philosophical institution as such, and of philosophical teaching as such’84 — in effect, the combination of what GREPH set out to do, and what Derrida is doing in both his essays on philosophy and the university. The other aspect of this question of a return to philosophy made possible by philosophy’s new relationship to itself remains to be examined — that of philosophy’s current and future place in relation to other disciplines. Philosophy and the Question of Interdisciplinarity These two strands of argument at issue here — philosophy and the other disciplines, the new institution of the Collège, and the ‘ruined’ one of the university — come together in the problematic of interdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinarity itself is far from being a new concept, however, and is not being advanced as such. Rather, the term designates the ground on which this attempted mise en relation will occur. As a label it was initially introduced in the first half of the twentieth century for ‘merger’ scientific combinations such as social psychology or biochemistry, which have since gained disciplinary autonomy of their own. As such it marked a transitional phase during which new forms of knowledge split off and attained independent credibility and institutional itemization. In France, its usage spread after the demands for radical reform of the university structure of 1968.85 As seen already, GREPH, in its attempts to dethrone philosophy, was accused of wanting to dilute philosophy into a form of interdisciplinary study based on structuralism, an accusation which was based on the association of Derrida with both, rather than on an engagement with GREPH’s work. Derrida does not turn to it as an ‘answer’ to the problem of philosophy’s relationship to other disciplines, or as the model for the CIPh. Rather than reaffirmation, it is itself in need of further radicalization as a concept. In his 1989 presentation of the CIPh to a non-French audience, Derrida comments that interdisciplinarity is well-established, and is itself ‘a classical concept and has been a classical concept for some time’, since it derives from the model of the University of Berlin.86 ‘Interdisciplinarity’ is thus not a radical new name which the college can employ to designate its aims and activities. For Derrida, it is already a ‘traditional’ conception. What he is resistant to becomes clearer if we consider one attempt to provide a book-length overview of the history and potential of the concept of

162

The Insistence on Philosophy

interdisciplinarity written by the American academic Julie Thompson Klein in 1990. Her account delineates the general aspects of the area but is most significant in trying to determine what the distinctive content of the term might be. As she argues, one of the main problems with the use of the term is that it tends to evoke vague praise and approval from all quarters in direct response to the elusiveness of its definitional content, which is variously understood in terms ranging from a ‘nostalgia for lost wholeness’ to representing the forefront of a radical new stage in the revolution of science.87 Klein herself endorses the example of the University of Berlin as a model which self-consciously sought to grapple with the problem of the fragmentation of knowledge, and argues that the problems confronted by the German idealists have not changed: the structural organisation of universities, the politics of individual disciplines, the question of whether connections can be made between them, and whether any one concept could be so general as to include all the disciplines.88 In fact, her own account remains compatible with the aims of the founders of the University of Berlin, even though she does not privilege philosophy in the same way since she conceives of interdisciplinarity entirely in terms of synthesis, unity, and the production of harmony. For her, the adjectives ‘interdisciplinary’ and ‘integrative’ can be used interchangeably, since both ‘signify the attempt or desire to integrate different perspectives’ (p. 15). While she warns that there is a broad tendency to treat the accelerating specialization attendant upon the fragmentation of knowledge as a disease and interdisciplinarity as the ‘antidote’ (p. 81), her own approach is not itself immune from this tendency. This kind of synthesis and reconciliation in the guise of a ‘fiction of unity’ was the converse of the CIPh’s aims.89 The open structure of the CIPh targeted a more deliberate, all-encompassing re-alignment of forms of knowledge and lines of research. The proposed ‘diaspora and network’ structure of research and researchers aimed at a kind of creative dispersal of previous knowledge formations in order to achieve different configurations. This kind of structure was established in order to further what Jean-Pierre Faye called ‘transferts entre sciences’.90 As Derrida makes clear, however, the idea of exchange and transferral, which implies a direct transferral of pre-packaged contents, must be treated with as much suspicion and care as that of ‘philosophy’ itself. In terms of the latter, one of the most immediate ways of questioning philosophy and enabling new lines of research to be produced was the exposure of different kinds of mutually ignorant philosophy to one another: for example, analytic philosophy with psychoanalysis; or what Faye designates as the three strands of German-language philosophy, critical and transcendental analysis, Vienna Circle logical positivism, and Marxist criticism and criticism of Marxism; or the re-examination of American philosophy, hitherto largely neglected in France.91 This kind of work in philosophy is clearly extremely valuable, only very rarely made possible elsewhere, and even then often only by default. However, this only goes part of the way to explaining how the displacement of the old conception of philosophy can be institutionalized. Pluralizing and broadening the operative conception of philosophy to include clashing constituencies and different traditions is highly necessary and overdue but does not essentially shift its relationship to other disciplines to what is called in the report a mode of ‘transversality’, moving

The Insistence on Philosophy

163

from relations based on ‘verticality’ to ‘horizontality’, and displacing the pyramidal structure of the encyclopaedic model which is the legacy of the University of Berlin.92 As Fynsk argues, throughout DP and especially in the CIPh documents there is a call for translation and transference — multiple passages (of thought) across institutional boundaries and into entirely new problematic and institutional (or extra-institutional) spaces.93

The original six intersections devised in the ministerial report comprised the bringing together, without a particular end in view, of philosophy with philosophy, and with psychoanalysis; then, additionally, with science, art and literature, politics, and ‘internationalities’.94 Interdisciplinarity cannot go far enough in order to achieve this kind of displacement. Derrida argues in his ICA presentation of 1985 that it implies that ‘we have already identified objects and competences [...] which require a multi-theoretical competence’.95 As an umbrella-term it suggests ‘attested competences and already legitimated objects’.96 This can only lead to contentraiding between disciplines and the complacent view that such unthought-out ‘borrowing’ is a useful way of gaining time for the individual researcher or team and increased productivity for the institution’s research rates.97 As one commentator had pointed out, as a practice this is perhaps most widespread in the humanities in so-called ‘theory’ where no attempt to ‘acquire an overall sense’ of other disciplines is made.98 The sharp contrast between this and the careful construal of provenance as a philosophical question by Derrida is a crucial one, and one which distinguishes philosophy, understood as a continuing possibility by GREPH and by Derrida, from ‘theory’ as such. The theoretical or philosophical question of interdisciplinarity becomes that of ‘provenance’, as Roland Brunet emphasizes in his contribution to the colloquium ‘École et philosophie’: Ce qui peut s’apprendre en philosophie, c’est l’accession à la compréhension que tout ce qui se dit, tout ce qui se fait, provient de quelque chose. (GP, pp. 130–31)

The question is one of from where relationships are being established, and on what terms, as Andrew Benjamin comments, and deconstruction ‘puts the onus back on philosophy’ to take responsibility for this question.99 But this does not mean that philosophy is once again vainly assuming it will take charge. As Derrida replied in response to this comment, the attempt is to think about these relations from within philosophy in order to question philosophy in turn. In other words, philosophy must rethink ‘its relation to [the] multiple orders of knowledge and practice’, in Fynsk’s formulation.100 One of the significant ways of pursuing this at the college is by enabling a myriad of short-term projects which do not solidify into permanent formations, thus keeping open not just the possibility of new configurations but the question of these relations permanently foregrounded. Interdisciplinarity, by contrast, lays no claim to modifying the recognized structure and frontiers of fields and approaches.101 The interfaces which the Collège created aim above all to open philosophy to other disciplines by not collaborating on already specified, identifiable objects. Simply reappropriating other areas under the rubric of ‘Philosophy and Its

164

The Insistence on Philosophy

Others’ would still define these others in terms of philosophy and fail to open the way to new themes and possibilities. The indispensable corollary of this is the questioning of the possibility of ‘discipline’ as such. This does not mean, however, that disciplines will not or should not figure at all. Bill Readings, in his discussion of to where the humanities can proceed within the ‘ruined’ university advocates an abandonment of disciplinary grounding but an abandonment that retains as structurally essential the question of the disciplinary form that can be given to knowledges.102

Like the Collège, then, this envisages an ongoing questioning of disciplines as such — what Readings terms the ‘installation of disciplinarity as a permanent question’, but unlike Derrida he proposes an actual abandonment of disciplines. The structure of the CIPh does not endorse such a proposal. The intersciences are all intersections with philosophy, and it is after all a college of philosophy. So why is philosophy retained in this way, and why not a more inclusive, or differently resonant title? This hinges on what Derrida terms ‘palaeonymy’. Palaeonymy or a ‘palaeonymyic logic’ is the name he gives to the strategic retention of a particular term. As he explains in response to the question of why ‘philosophy’ is still used in relation to the Collège, he uses the term palaeonymy to signal the way in which we should not simply [to] give up the word, but [to] analyse what in the old word has been buried or hidden or forgotten. And what has been hidden or forgotten may be totally heterogeneous to what has been kept. This would mean that under the name of philosophy, something could have been totally forgotten in a very strong sense of ‘forgotten’, and using the word ‘philosophy’ would help us to remember what has been totally forgotten.103

Institutionally, this means not dissolving philosophy into other disciplines. Derrida states in his 1997 consideration of the work of the Collège that it is not a question of choosing between the two. Rigorous training of philosophers must continue, even as borders are crossed, and ‘audacious’ new connections made.104 Thus it is not just the name of philosophy which will be retained. Derrida states in the report that the open question, the ‘trial’ of the institution of the CIPh, will be, ‘can philosophy, unrecognisable to itself in these new intersections, survive this new “topology of limits”?’105 But in his subsequent presentations he continues to insist that the specificity of philosophy must be maintained in the way that it is taught.106 The final section turns to this continuing argument for philosophical specificity, in order to examine its logic — the paleonymic logic of the strategic retention of a term and its sedimentations, and the institutional logic, of the need to delimit in order to protect a discipline, even within the dual strategy of defence and attack. Philosophy and ‘Theory’ The CIPh has been presented by the American deconstructionist critic Vincent B. Leitch as a kind of ‘institutionalisation of poststructuralism’.107 In his ‘report’ on

The Insistence on Philosophy

165

the work of the college for an American readership, ‘Research and Education at the Crossroads’, Leitch argues that the significance of the college is as a ‘postmodern institution’. This ‘postmodernity’ resides in the structural value it places upon ‘temporary alignments’ in place of permanence, which is characteristic of the postmodern transformation of social relations, which favour ‘suppleness, lightness, economy, and mobility’ (p. 113). The institutional space which it constitutes ‘resists recuperation and produces disciplinary disarray’ (p. 106) and is therefore characteristically poststructuralist. Leitch does acknowledge the college’s links with GREPH (pp. 111–12) but he does not relate the two. The work of GREPH on the institutionalization of philosophy in France and on philosophy as a discipline is referred to separately from the generalizing characterizations he provides of ‘the poststructuralist project’. Rather than linking the two as an instantiation of the political validity of deconstruction, he keeps them entirely separate. The College is ‘postmodern’ in relation to research, but linked to the French context of philosophy teaching through the continuation of GREPH’s aims. In other words, Leitch misses out the substantive link, present through Derrida’s work with both projects, and the work of other GREPH contributors considered in the previous chapter, of the rethinking of philosophy through its institutions. He separates off the latter as a distinct zone of ‘pedagogical research on the teaching of philosophy’ (p. 111), not substantively related therefore to his characterization of a ‘wild non-institution’. This is precisely the opposition which GREPH most fundamentally opposed, and the one analyzed at length by Derrida in OC. The idea of a gap or delay between the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, or research, and its transmission or teaching examined there was, as we have seen in the last two chapters, counterposed to the idea of philosophy as uniquely embodied in its teaching. The radicalization of the latter view then cast philosophy as anti-pedagogy, subverting the hidebound constraints of the dull, authoritarian pedagogue, both politically and philosophically. Derrida, in OC, refused both idealizations, and generalized the ‘gap’ between research and teaching to that of the structure of repetition at work in language. He thus took the humble figure of the répétiteur, rather than the mythicized one of Socrates as representative of philosophy and its teaching, and diagnosed possibilities within this of continuing to work within the institution and simultaneously rethinking it. Derrida’s work on the idea of the university and philosophy is an extension of GREPH’s delegitimating critique (with both those terms used strategically only) of philosophy’s place within education. They refused the idealization of philosophy’s one true incarnation in the fantasmal relation between master and disciple, but retained the significance of philosophy’s material inscription. Unlike with Bourdieu, this was not readmitted as the single, invariant motive, the interested struggle for supremacy within contested and enclosed ‘fields’ of knowledge, to be unmasked again and again. Insisting on the non-neutrality of philosophy and its teaching marked their opposition to the official APPEPled discourse of philosophy as an institution. They reclaimed it as a politicized, contestatory force within education, and hence society. To separate this off from the programme and constitution of the college as elaborated in Le Rapport bleu is to omit completely their double strategy, the deconstructive and political strategy

166

The Insistence on Philosophy

of defence and attack which aimed to rethink and thereby transform philosophy in mass education, and not just elaborate a programme of research for a small caucus of the like-minded. Within France, the Collège has been attacked for just such an ‘épigonalisme sectaire’ by those who were already the chief detractors of Derrida’s work.108 Louis Pinto has analyzed the Collège as the social and intellectual consecration of the ‘philosophical avant-garde’, in exactly the same way in which he wrote off GREPH.109 He dismisses the entire project out of hand. The college is simply a refuge for a certain kind of philosopher just as Vincennes was.110 Avant-garde French philosophers — in other words, and above all, Derrida — have, Pinto asserts, capitalized on their American reception. The translation into a different discipline and a different national context has decontextualized their work and enabled them to pass themselves off as ‘subversive’ and ‘political’. On this view, the institutional strand of Derrida’s work is reduced to a mirage, which trades on the ignorance of his American admirers. Needless to say, Pinto’s lack of interest in the actual work of those associated with the CIPh is total. He groups them together as an academic sub-tribe, and the only ‘institutional analysis’ provided is of their movement from one marginal institutional location to another. Pinto notices the importance of interdisciplinarity and of political concerns to the college, but only in order to dismiss the whole as the characteristic concerns of the avant-garde. The results of Leitch’s favourable presentation and Pinto’s scornful one are effect­ ively the same, because both fail to engage philosophically or institutionally with the foundation of the college and its continuing work. Part of its ongoing mission, as emphasized by its director François Jullien in 1998 was to give philo­sophy a more public dimension, and within that the defence of philosophy in schools.111 As such, it represented both an acknowledgement by the government of the impor­ tance of philosophy in French culture, as even its critic Monique Canto-Sperber acknowledges in Le Débat but, also, according to Jullien, a re-negotiation of the public role of the philosopher in France, and therefore the changing status and nature of the figure of the intellectual more generally.112 It seeks to make visible the work of philosophy not by courting media attention nor by abjuring it but by creating a new kind of interface with the public. This is not simply a profileraising exercise, but part of what Derrida is invoking in the title of his collection of work on philosophical institutions, Du droit à la philosophie. This title, as Christina Howells points out, entails both the ‘relationship between law and philosophy’, and thus Derrida’s work on Kantian questions of jurisdiction and the question of a right to philosophy.113 Originally the title of Derrida’s seminar in the year in which he moved from the ENS to the EHESS, and was elected as first director of the CIPh, it is invoked by Patrice Vermeren in his account of how he came to work on Cousin and the institution of French philosophy. Those who participated in GREPH and in Le Doctrinal de Sapience, including of course Derrida himself, saw philosophy’s defence as a determination for renewal, and for ‘la démocratie dans la pensée, pour la communauté des esprits’.114 This political, democratizing intention is no less a part of the creation of the college, and its modes of operation. The ‘disciplinary disarray’ which Leitch sees incarnated in the CIPh as the future

The Insistence on Philosophy

167

of ‘poststructuralism institutionalised’ fails to register the French context. Not, as we have seen, because he is ignorant of GREPH, but because he fails to make the connection with GREPH’s concern to dethrone philosophy, philosophically, and institutionally. At stake here is Derrida’s own view of deconstruction and institutions, and the philosophical institution itself, but his work on its foundation throughout the 1980s, up to and including the publication of DP, represents a culmination of the work which began with GREPH and was pursued in his seminar teaching at the ENS and EHESS. The insistence on philosophy within this is, first of all, a mark of resistance to the kind of facile labelling of both critics and admirers, who are both keen to underscore what they perceive as the abandonment of disciplines and hence disciplinary rigour/constraint. For those hostile to the college, the result can only be an ‘anything goes’ interdisciplinary free-for-all, of interest to a small group only but merely tangential to the context of French philosophy and education in general.115 Derrida’s paleonymic logic resists this kind of hasty appropriation, by either admirers or detractors. The retention of ‘philosophy’ enables the ‘installation of disciplinarity as a permanent question’, in Readings formulation which was cited above, but not the abandonment of disciplines or disciplinary provenance.116 As noted in the Introduction, above, Derrida states in the Preface to DP that ce qu’on a appelé la “déconstruction”, c’est aussi l’exposition de cette identité institutionelle de la discipline philosophique. (p. 22)

This is part of its ongoing work and its relation to the institution. The principle of academic freedom which founded the Kantian, and then Humboldtian, model of the university could only operate, as Timothy Clark points out, in terms of disciplinary divisions. As a principle it rests on public sanction of expertise, which can only be underwritten by disciplinary peers.117 The politics of knowledge produced by GREPH and by Derrida disallows this kind of ‘cloisonnement’, according to which each form of rational enquiry is pursued adjacently and in isolation, and its relationship to other kinds of knowledge is not considered. Equally, the ‘necessary practice’ of interdisciplinarity is itself in need of further radicalization if it is not simply to entrench further these putative divides.118 The unifying power of philosophy to oversee this division, and to legitimate conf licting discourses is deconstructed by Derrida, but, as indicated in his 1981 remarks, he retains the idea of a place within the university from which to examine the idea of the university. This would seem to be still the role of philosophy, even as it shifts its relations to other forms of knowledge. The relationship to the university and to disciplinarity form a key part of the problematic elaborated by Derrida in the report documents for the college. The college is not a utopian space entirely set apart from the rest of the system, however, in which the leisure of critical thinking can be allowed in ways which are not possible in the system as a whole. If it is to have an impact on philosophy and its teaching, in general, then it has to remain closely involved with the institutional problematic which Derrida developed through GREPH. The theoretical understanding of Derrida’s work, outlined at the start here, failed to consider the question of context. As is well-known, the habitual modes of teaching of ‘theory’ in literature departments in the United States and the United

168

The Insistence on Philosophy

Kingdom involve its apprehension outside a particular language and also outside of intellectual and cultural context, in comparison with literary texts which, even if taught in translation, would not be treated as ‘naturalized’ in this way — in other words, as if this was not problematic. The ‘reception’ of GREPH discussed at the outset demonstrates the limitations of this kind of institutionalization. However, the problems found in this reception, and in the institutionalization of Derrida’s work in the United States in particular, are not merely the result of context-free importation and hence distortion.119 Such ‘translations’ can in themselves have creative effects: it is not a question of the obstruction of the one true interpretive trajectory, after all. What is most significant in terms of the institutional concerns foregrounded by Derrida in his work over a period of twenty years is theory’s lack of concern with the question of disciplinarity.120 Seeing itself as already situated on the other side of such boundaries, within a productive intellectual matrix of ‘interdisciplinarity’, this kind of work is unable to take seriously Derrida’s concern with philosophy as an academic discipline. This is the result of the annexation of his work for literary critical purposes, and the insistence that literary studies offer the most radical, disruptive force within the humanities and that this is the ‘lesson’ of Derrida’s work.121 This is not to suggest nonsensically that Derrida is in fact a philosopher who is interested only in canonical philosophical texts rather than literary ones. After all, his initial coinage of the term ‘paleonymy’ to designate his operations in relation to ‘philosophy’, in Positions in 1972, was an attempt to situate himself in relation to both philosophy and literature.122 But what the monolingual, non-contextualizing approach is unable to grasp can be illustrated by the deceptively similar situation of philosophy teaching. There, as has been discussed, texts are dealt with in particular ways: translation is merely a practical hindrance of no intellectual consequence; philosophy transcends the specificities of a particular culture, and of historical determination. The cardinal difference, of course, between philosophy and ‘theory’ here is that in the case of philosophy this amounts to a regulative ideal (disallowing its significance) rather than a limitation of practice (merely ignoring it). The institutional aspect of Derrida’s work, whether in GREPH or his work on the university, is caught up in this failure to allow for ‘context’ in all its multiple but not totalizable layerings. The political project of both GREPH and Derrida of interrogating philosophy as a practice, and as an institution in France, are not therefore evident to the writers of this type of account. They thus evidence the problem of facile interdisciplinarity to which Gillian Beer draws attention in her study of ‘science in cultural encounter’: The key questions in another discipline may at first glance seem banal, since the incomer is ignorant of the resistances that have produced and shaped them.123

The philosophical question of context, and its denial by academic philosophy, does not register in their accounts. The relationship of GREPH and of Derrida to philosophy is inevitably a function of their own institutional location at the time. In order to gauge the radicality of their project of engaging with philosophy as a practice it is necessary to connect this with the interrelated nexus of philosophy within a given context, as outlined in the first chapter. The ‘scandal’ of translation for philosophy which Derrida identifies is

The Insistence on Philosophy

169

also the scandal of material inscription as such.124 This in turn leads to the question of philosophy’s relation to itself, to its own tradition perceived as a tradition, which can only be fully grasped if its practice is taken into consideration in terms of the conception of its teaching, and its relation to other forms of knowledge. This tradition must be understood not in terms of an all-determining, prescriptive authority, but must be reactivated and questioned.125 Derrida’s collection, Du droit à la philosophie, poses the question in relation to its title: Est-il toujours possible, comme certains le croient, de philosopher tout droit, directement, immédiatement, sans la médiation de la formation, de l’enseignement, des institutions philosophiques, sans même celle de l’autre ou de la langue, de telle ou telle langue? (DP, p. 14)

The work of the collection, and the work of GREPH provides a clear answer to this. This is not to argue, however, that the ‘answer’ to the lack diagnosed in theoretical approaches to Derrida’s work is simply an espousal of an historicist approach. ‘Institutionality’ represents historicity in Genette’s formulation (discussed in Chapter 3), and it must be uncovered in order to ‘de-neutralize’ the institution and calculate its determinable effects. But this does not mean that philosophy can be reduced to these determinations and ‘explained’ by them, as Bourdieu and his disciples claim. It is necessary, Derrida argues, to pay attention to history, to history in general and to the original historicity of culture, language, and above all of theory, of the institutions which theorems are.126

A particular sequence must be followed through, as Derrida traced the model of the university ideal, philosophically and historically, neither just one nor simply the other. This is a reciprocal process. The practice of philosophy — its teaching — is not external to it, belonging to the realm of sociological and historical enquiry alone, but it can be used to transform and renew philosophy itself, as was the mission of both GREPH and the CIPh. If this does not take place, then ‘tradition’ becomes simply the self-critical reproduction of philosophy’s own, ultimately unquestioned, authority, as Derrida argued in OC. The institutional problematic is required to displace this mode of questioning, and to enable transformative practice. The linguistic analogy which Derrida set up in OC between teaching as transmission of ‘content’ and a view of language as transparent tool of communication alone mirrors the homology to which Genette also pointed. However, the ‘philosophical’ aim of GREPH and Derrida does not stop short at reversing the hierarchy. Derrida’s remarks on the constitutive scandal translation poses for philosophy do not seek to ‘expose’, on a once-and-for-all basis, the ‘fundamental idealism of philosophy’.127 The logic of paleonymy encapsulates the sedimented nature of tradition which Derrida sees as its opportunity. The institutional logic of delimiting philosophy, of retaining not just the name but also a strong sense of its specificity in order to be in a position to defend its survival, suggests a rearguard position in relation to this. Derrida’s work for the 1989 report on philosophy teaching conveys the difficulty of combining both. The antinomy of philosophy is that it is its own disavowed institutional identity, but is also more than this, since this location and inscription is changing and contingent: it has both an ‘identité localisable’ and an ‘ubiquité

170

The Insistence on Philosophy

débordante’ (GP, p. 14).128 A historical and theoretical awareness of disciplinarity is retained in the retention of the term ‘philosophy’ in the CIPh’s title, and it marks the resistance to an interdisciplinarity which could only ultimately result in an even more rigidly imposed, unthought-out disciplinary grid of divisions, and exclusions — the ‘séries d’interdits’ which Nancy focused on in QP. Unlike Richard Rorty’s ‘demystifying’ account of the philosophical tradition, Derrida is not aiming to dis-empower philosophy; his is not a def lationary account.129 Institutionally, with GREPH, the insistence on philosophy led to a suspicion of the social sciences that fell short of their avowed desire to displace philosophy’s sovereignty. The reasons for the insistence on ‘philosophy’ are clear, however: it is not just a defensive usage; it marks the relationship to the philosophical tradition which includes institutional and material determinations, and it combines, therefore, both institutional and paleonymic logics. Notes to Chapter 5 1. DP, p. 502. This was in response to the demand that philosophy should be taught in the technical sections of the baccalauréat: cf. Godet, ‘Sur l’enseignement philosophique dans les lycées techniques’, and Brunet, p. 818. 2. The battleground had already emerged in the work referred to in the last chapter: see the Groupe de travail des professeurs de philosophie en écoles normales’s La Philosophie dans le mouroir; and it was the underlying focus for the ‘École et philosophie’ conference at Nanterre (see La Grève des philosophes: école et philosophie). 3. The designation of Libération, 21–22 November 1981, reprinted in DP as ‘Éloge de la philosophie’ (see p. 499). The interviewers were Didier Eribon, Robert Maggiori and Jean-Pierre Salgas. Cf. Derrida’s interview with Jean-Loup Thébaut, originally published as ‘Derrida, philosophe au Collège’ in Libération, 11 August 1983, and reprinted in Derrida, Points de suspension: entretiens. 4. For Derrida’s sardonic remarks on the APPEP’s change of approach, see DP, p. 503. The retrospective remarks on GREPH can be found in Derrida, ‘The Villanova Roundtable’, p. 7. 5. Derrida’s was unable to attend in person and his contribution was read out on his behalf. 6. The appeal sought to draw attention to philosophy’s position in relation to the proposals and demanded an extension of philosophy in the university, in parallel to GREPH’s earlier campaign on behalf of school philosophy. The appeal was drawn up in December 1983 and it was published in Le Monde and Libération in the spring of 1984, with the signatures of two hundred teachers, both school and university (a tiny figure compared to the two thousand who signed the appeal of the États-Généraux five years earlier). The appeal appears GP, pp. 180–81. 7. For example, the 1983 interview referred to above, in which Derrida states that GREPH and the États-Généraux were amongst the premises of the Collège (see Derrida, Points… Interviews, 1974–1994, 1995, p. 112, and ‘L’Autre nom du Collège’, p. 23). 8. Elected in 1983, Derrida transferred to the EHESS from the ENS in 1984. 9. See Douailler et al., eds. 10. GREPH continued to exist as a nameable entity for some time. At the time of the report on philosophy produced for the government by Derrida in 1989, it is still referred to and François Godet is named as its contact. However, its main campaigning activities were over and it no longer had the prominence which it had gained in the mid- to late 1970s. Derrida’s own theoretical and practical involvement with questions of philosophy and its institutions were now focused on the founding of the CIPh and subsequently on the Rapport de la Commission de Philosophie et d’Épistémologie, the result of a commission which he chaired with Bouveresse, his long-time critic, over a period of six months in 1989 as part of a commission on curricular reform instigated by Lionel Jospin, as minister of Education, and directed by Bourdieu and François Gros. The report, published as an appendix to DP, insists upon the ‘unity of the philosophical discipline’, in the face of the risk of dispersal and dissolution, and specific ‘professional identity’

The Insistence on Philosophy

171

dependent upon this. With regard to philosophy’s relations to other disciplines, caution is expressed institutionally. Teaching philosophy over at least three years in schools is still advocated as the only realistic way of enabling this. On the furious response of traditionalists to a report which they saw as an attack on the dissertation exercise, and therefore on philosophy teaching and philosophy in general, see Ogilvie, L’Enseignement de la philosophie à la croisée des chemins’, Carsin and Rizk, and Marchal. 11. Cf. Derrida’s contribution to GP the publication of the conference held in 1984, where he re-emphasizes his suspicion with regard to the technocratic management of education and research (pp. 11–12). 12. The letter was published in La Quinzaine littéraire, 374 (1 July 1982), p. 374, and the American journal SubStance, 35 (1982), pp. 80–81. 13. DP, p. 586. Derrida’s own chapter of the report, ‘Coups d’envoi’, was published in English as ‘Sendoffs’, and reprinted in DP. 14. Derrida, Faye, and Lecourt (henceforth referred to as Le Rapport bleu), p. 3. 15. Derrida, Points de suspension, p. 210. 16. Faye, ‘Réseaux’, in Le Rapport bleu, p. 171. 17. For example, Lecourt, ‘Dénouements’, in Le Rapport bleu, p. 199. 18. Le Rapport bleu, p. 20. 19. Source for ‘intersections or crossings’: Le Rapport bleu, p. 36. The term ‘intersciences’ was taken from Fernand Braudel, who had come across it in Einstein’s work and incorporated it into the work of group in the VI Section of the EHESS (Faye, ‘Réseaux’, in Le Rapport bleu, p. 169). The term was then taken up by the sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein to capture the interface between anthropology and the modern working of the economy in his concept of the ‘worldsystem’. Cf. ‘Pour un collège international’, Le Monde, 2 July 1982, p. 2. As Derrida notes, the term’s usage by Einstein is turned against its context by the CIPh, since he originally used it in terms of God, the ‘guarantor of the interscience like the God-Substance of Spinoza’ (Le Rapport bleu, p. 31). 20. ‘Pour un collège international’, Le Monde, 2 July 1982, p. 2. This attempt at a ‘megalomaniac’ reach was likened by Alain and Danièle Guillerm, both researchers at the CNRS and prospective participants in the new venture, to the approach of Bataille’s Collège de Sociologie. On the latter, see Hollier, ed.. 21. Published in both DP and Le Rapport bleu. Pagination is taken from the latter. 22. Le Rapport bleu, p. 19. 23. Derrida, ‘On Colleges and Philosophy’, p. 218 a presentation of the CIPh in an interview with Geoff Bennington conducted as part of an ICA conference in London on ‘Postmodernism’ in 1985 and published in 1989. As Nehamas argues in an essay on Richard Rorty’s announcement of the superannuation of philosophy, this kind of move forms a fundamental part of the history of philosophy, rather than a means of overcoming it or going beyond it. He traces it back to Aristotle’s exhortation to love and practice philosophy, in the Protrepticus, where Aristotle argues that there can be no escape from philosophy, since even as we reject it we must enquire in to the possibility of this rejection, and in so doing, are philosophising. Nehamas contends that the argument ‘depends on taking philosophy to be f lexible enough to include as its own proper parts even attempts to show that it is an impossible or a worthless endeavour’ (p. 396). Derrida’s argument does not hinge on what can be deemed to be ‘properly’ philosophical in quite this way. Rather, attempts to ‘escape’ from philosophy and to go beyond its terms are least able to do so, because of their constitutive blindness to their own reliance upon the philosophical tradition and its terms. Derrida explores this in relation to Benveniste’s linguistics in ‘Le Supplément de la Copule’, in Derrida, Marges de la Philosophie, 1972. Châtelet echoes Derrida’s point in his individual contribution to Le Rapport bleu, ‘Modes d’emploi’, p. 76. 24. Derrida enumerates this list in a truncated reference to the same area in OC in 1976, reprinted in DP: see pp. 119–20. 25. DP, p. 25. 26. ‘We have to interpret the history of academic models [...] from a philosophical point of view’ (Derrida, ‘The Villanova Roundtable’, 1996, p. 3). 27. Henceforth abbreviated as MO. The conference papers, including Derrida’s, are published in

172

The Insistence on Philosophy

Rand, ed. I take pagination for, and quotations from, this published version since it was first delivered in English. The essay was published in French in 1984, in the journal Philosophie. 28. Bahti, ‘Histories of the University’, Kamuf, and Young, Torn Halves. 29. It was reprinted in French in DP. Henceforth abbreviated as PR. Pagination and quotation are taken from the English version, published in Diacritics, again because it first appeared in English. 30. Notably, Readings, in articles published in the Oxford Literary Review (1993), and in the special issue, ‘The University in Ruins’ (1995), which culminated in his posthumously published book, The University in Ruins (1996). Also, T. Clark, ‘Literary Force; Institutional Values’, Wortham, Rethinking the University, and the work of Samuel Weber whose interest in the topics of professionalism, institutions, and deconstruction dates back to his 1982 article ‘The Limits of Professionalism’ and his 1987 book Institution and Interpretation, in addition to his later articles ‘The Vaulted Eye: Remarks on Knowledge and Professionalism’ (1990) and ‘The Future of the University: The Cutting Edge’ (1996). See also the recent work by Fynsk, The Claim of Language: A Case for the Humanities, and Thomas, The Reception of Derrida: Translation and Transformation. Recent work in cultural studies has taken up Readings’s work to focus on, in the formulation of Stefan Herbrechter, p. 5, ‘a certain understanding of cultural studies as “the contemporary institutions’s way of thinking about itself ’. See Hall, Culture in Bits: The Monstrous Future of Theory, , as well as Bowman; Hall and Birchall, eds.; Wortham, Counter-Institutions: Jacques Derrida and the Question of the University and 2008; and the contributions to the volume ‘Deconstruction is/in Cultural Studies’ (= Culture Machine, 6 (2004)). On the terrain of cultural studies and the university see also the special issue of Diacritics, published in 2001. 31. Norris, Jacques Derrida. Norris entitles his chapter, ‘Politics and the Principle of Reason’. On Norris’s attempt to ‘prove’ the philosophical and political seriousness of deconstruction and, more importantly, why he should think that this is what in fact needs to be proved, see P. Jay, p. 55. 32. Derrida, ‘The Villanova Roundtable’. 33. J. Derrida, 1976, reprinted in DP, abbreviated as OC. This essay was examined at length in Chapter 3. 34. Rand, ed., p. vii. 35. Brunet, QP, p. 118, and also pp. 119 and 124–25. 36. Rancière, GP, p. 116. 37. Schelling’s contribution was originally given as lectures in 1802 in Jena (published in 1803, and in English in 1966); Schleiermacher’s essay was published in 1808 and Fichte’s in 1807 (in English in 1970); and Humboldt’s contribution was published in 1809 (in English in 1970). For some of the contextual details relating to the University of Berlin, I am indebted to the extremely useful account given by Shaffer: see in particular pp. 38–39. These essays had been collected and published with an introduction in France just before Derrida wrote his essays in 1979, under the auspices of Jean Wahl’s Collège de Philosophie: see Ferry, Pesront, and Renaut, eds.. 38. Bahti, ‘Histories of the University: Kant and Humboldt’, pp. 438–39. See also Thomas, pp. 82 ff. 39. On Humboldt’s shift over the fifteen year period following this from champion of the principle of academic freedom for both student and professor to the upholder of state regulation of culture and all cultural activity, see McClelland, p. 141. McClelland comments that the ideal view of scholarship of these philosophers, particularly Fichte, has been, on the one hand, castigated as either amusingly impractical or arrogantly utopian, and, on the other, taken as a vision against which to judge and attack a ‘corrupt, bourgeois, materialistic “society” for not living up to this Platonic dream’ (p. 126). The force and contradictory nature of these charges convey the importance of this model, however unrealized and unrealizable, and its tenacious legacy — which is what interests Derrida most. 40. Cf. Shaffer, pp. 39–40. 41. Hunter, p. 81. It is not therefore the case that what Kant calls ‘philosophy’ is what is now called the humanities, as stated by Readings, The University in Ruins, p. 15. The current relationship between philosophy and the humanities will be discussed in relation to Derrida’s work, philosophy and ‘theory’ later in this chapter.

The Insistence on Philosophy

173

42. I will return to the importance of philosophy’s conception of its distinctive identity in relation to other humanities subjects below. 43. Rand, ed., p. vii. 44. This is hardly an unproblematic claim in terms of the University as the incarnation of the principle of reason, and the importance of philosophy to its ethos and internal organization. Philosophy never played nor purported to play this kind of unifying role in the English university, though the Scottish case is interestingly different. On the latter, see Davie, The Democratic Intellect and The Crisis of the Democratic Intellect. Equally, the relations between the faculties was, in France in the Third Republic, rather a problem of their complete — physical and intellectual — separation from one another (Digeon, pp. 364–84; Verger, ed.; and Renaut, p. 102). On the inf luence of the German model in America, see Touraine, and Oleson and Voss, eds. However, other aspects of the model were almost ubiquitously inf luential, as Shaffer, p. 40 notes: the idea of the ‘clerisy’, the secular intellectuals, which Coleridge took from Fichte, comes from the idea of a ‘church of reason’, the direct secular equivalent of the dominion of theology and the Church (see Knights). There is also an important sense in which the ‘idea of the university’ has been the idea of the German university (‘The Direction of the Disciplines’, p. 51). The emergence of a recognizably research-oriented university began only in the last part of the nineteenth century in the context of rapidly increasing specialization (see Wittrock, and also Rothblatt, The Modern University and its Discontents). 45. Rancière, in GP, pp. 111–12. 46. Derrida, ‘On Colleges and Philosophy’, 1989, p. 214. 47. Cf. Derrida, L’Université sans condition. Rajan, p. 145 notes this change, although without reference to GREPH. 48. Derrida, ‘Interview with Imre Saluzinski’, pp. 17–18. 49. As the historian of the German university C. E. M. McClelland warns, this generic style more or less characterizes the history of specific educational institutions. He terms it ‘the jubilee syndrome’, a blend of ‘particularist pride and celebratory intent’, which marks anniversaries by appealing to illustrious origins in order to furnish an edifying narrative of previous historic ideals (p. 16). 50. MO, pp. 9 and 12–13. 51. Derrida refers to Marxist, Weberian, and Mannheimian approaches in the sociology of knowledge which fail to question the ‘essential foundation’ of the university on reason by not questioning the values ‘of objectivity or objectivation’ in their work (PR, p. 16). Although he does not name Bourdieu here, this chimes with the remarks made subsequently in DP, cited in Chapter 3, about the structurally impossible aim of complete objectivation, and the difficulties of ‘unmasking’ the legitimation strategies of others in these terms (see DP, p. 105). 52. Cf. MO, p. 9: ‘we already sense that its [the Western university] model is finished’. 53. Derrida, ‘Interview with Imre Saluzinski’, p. 19. 54. Readings, The University in Ruins, pp. 58–59 incorrectly reads this literally. 55. See again McClelland; cf. Habermas, pp. 10–13. On Habermas’s account of the University of Berlin, see Hunter, pp. 52–55. 56. Habermas, pp. 3–4. 57. Rothblatt, The Modern University and its Discontents, p. 1. The work of Sheldon Rothblatt, the American historian of liberal education and of the university, was referred to in the previous chapter. 58. Rothblatt’s other examples of institutions other than the university which have inspired this kind of examination for their ‘underlying idea’ work less well: the Church, however, is qualified as ‘a national Church’ and thus not viewed in fundamental terms, as essentially analysable beyond its locally accrued characteristics and context, but rather a particular, national version of it; he also examines the intelligentsia, but this is not a circumscribable institution in the same way. 59. On Jaspers’s The Idea of the University (1946) see Lepenies, ‘The Direction of the Disciplines’. As Lepenies, p. 55 points out, Jaspers retained the German Idealist conception of philosophy’s role, ‘encompass[ing] the entire university, and [...] as court of guidance for all the other faculties’, the discipline of orientation for all the others. Ringer quotes Jaspers as follows: ‘It is the object

174

The Insistence on Philosophy

of the university to instil in its pupils the idea of the whole of knowledge [...] In the idea of universitas, in the philosophical totality, lies the spiritual aspect of scholarship’ (Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins, p. 106). On Jaspers’s attempt to re-enshrine academic freedom as a transcendent principle and re-affirm the unity of knowledge as a totality, see Docherty, p. 228. 60. Surprisingly, an instance of the ongoing survival and perpetuation of this idea of ‘vital spirit’ can be found in an approach to the topic which explicitly takes its starting-point from Derrida’s work on the university. Wlad Godzich, in his Afterword to Samuel Weber’s book on deconstruction and the institution, Institution and Interpretation (1987), maintains that the institution is not just ‘an apparatus’ but ‘first and foremost a guiding idea’ without which we would only ‘have forms of social behaviour like all others’ (p. 156). Rothblatt argues that the idea of the guiding idea was in fact a stabilizing move at a time of revolutionary upheaval, which aimed to be a defence against the argument that existing institutions merely ‘served narrow vested interests’ (The Modern University and its Discontents, p. 5). 61. Readings, The University in Ruins, pp. 14–15 and 19. 62. On the sociological critique of the university produced out of the radical politics of 1968 and after, see Touraine; see also Sites of Knowledge Production: The University, a special issue of Social Epistemology (1998). 63. The 1986 French version, printed in DP, is entitled ‘Le Principe de raison et l’idée de l’Université’: see p. 461. 64. Kant, p. 25. 65. Weber, ‘The Future of the University: The Cutting Edge’, p. 54. Kant, p. 59; MO, p. 23. 66. Derrida at this point gestures to his earlier work on Austin’s speech-act theory; on the ‘vulnerability’ of this kind of clear-cut distinction between performatives and constatives, see Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’, 1972. Kant’s distinction is seen as no less vulnerable. 67. Kant, p. 45, cit. MO, p. 33: ‘her [the philosophy faculty] very modesty — merely being free, and leaving others free, to find the truth for the benefit of all the sciences and to set it before the higher faculties to use as they will — must commend it to the government as above suspicion, indeed, as indispensable’. 68. The intervention of Henri Duméry in the 1975 ‘bataille de la presse’ followed exactly this pattern, that ‘philosophy is everywhere already’ and therefore requires no assigned place of its own within the institution. But arguing with a view to its institutional survival disallows this argument — it has to have an assigned place to continue at all. 69. J. Derrida, ‘Of the Humanities and the Philosophical Discipline: The Right to Philosophy from the Cosmopolitical Point of View (the Example of an International Institution)’, 1994, pp. 11–12. 70. On Schelling’s conception of philosophy and the university, see Renaut, pp. 117–19 and Shaffer, pp. 41–45. 71. DP, pp. 385–86. 72. W. von Humboldt, cited in Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne, pp. 54–55. Lyotard is interested in Humboldt’s project as a ‘narrative of the legitimation of knowledge’ and he locates the political force of this narrative in the demand that ‘all peoples have a right to science’, or knowledge, which results in a ‘politics of primary education’. He suggests, in passing, that GREPH’s demand for the extension of philosophy can be linked to this, but he is wrong on both counts. The politics of primary education which took shape in the second half of the nineteenth century in France were based on the necessity of certain sections of the population having access to, and the ‘right’ to, certain, severely limited levels of knowledge and education (as outlined in Chapter 1), and as such was as much a strategy of containment as of enlightenment. GREPH’s arguments for extension targeted the overturning of this outmoded ideology of education (as discussed in Chapter 4), and not its reinforcement. 73. Humboldt in Ferry, Pesront, and Renaut, eds., p. 321, cited by Lyotard, PMC, p. 56. This brief summary is indebted to Lyotard’s exegesis in PMC as well as to the following accounts: Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins, Rothblatt, The Modern University and its Discontents, and Shaffer. 74. Cf. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins, and Rothblatt, The Modern University and its Discontents, pp. 22–26. 75. Schelling (1802), cited in Habermas, p. 10; Humboldt, cited in Ferry, Pesront, and Renaut, eds., p. 324.

The Insistence on Philosophy

175

76. On the Idealist conception of Bildung and philosophy, see Habermas, p.10. On the allencompassing framework of a ‘unified, encyclopaedic rationality’, see MacIntyre, ‘Reconceiving the University’, pp. 41–44. 77. Cf. Habermas, p. 11 who, again, as with his comments on the idea of the university referred to above, evaluates this conception of philosophy in terms of its historical, practical unrealizability. 78. Le Rapport bleu, p. 39. 79. Derrida and Bennington, p. 240. 80. OC, in DP, p. 119. Derrida makes a compacted reference here to the problematic which MO and PR explore fully, stating that ‘l’université, c’est la philosophie, une université est toujours la construction d’une philosophie’, and referring to the ‘onto-encyclopaedic model’ which subordinates all fields of enquiry. He does not at this point explain the reference to the Conflict of the Faculties or to the University of Berlin which lies behind these remarks. The talk ‘La crise de l’enseignement philosophique’, given in Benin in December 1978 and published in DP, also includes this as a reference, stating that the ‘era’ of deconstruction is when the authority of philosophy ‘viendrait à vaciller [...], son autorité à la fois autocritique et onto-encyclopédique’ (DP, p. 159). These remarks, both in essays produced as part of his involvement with GREPH on philosophy in schools, prefigure the fuller elaboration of the philosophy-university model of PR and MO. 81. Derrida reiterates this in ‘On Colleges and Philosophy’, 1989, p. 211. 82. Derrida, interview with Robert Maggiori, ‘Le Programme philosophique de Derrida’, published in Libération, 15 November 1990, on the occasion of Derrida’s report on the philosophy curriculum commissioned by Lionel Jospin, then Minister of Education, reprinted in Derrida, ‘Du droit à la philosophie’, 1992, p. 338. 83. Châtelet in Le Rapport bleu, p. 75. 84. Derrida, ‘On Colleges and Philosophy’, 1989, p. 211. 85. As referred to already in Chapter 2 in relation to the ‘Université critique’ report produced by the strike committee of the Law Faculty. Cf. PMC, p. 72. On the interdisciplinarity of the University of Vincennes in this context see Dosse, II, pp. 151–53 86. Derrida, ‘On Colleges and Philosophy’, 1989, p. 213. 87. Thompson Klein, p. 12. As she indicates, the kind of constitutive prejudices and differences of approach inherent in national traditions also play an important part in initial reactions to it. Examples of this kind of difference given by her include the fact that in the United States, unlike in Europe, it has been primarily associated with the organization of undergraduate education, whilst contributors to a 1975 symposium on the subject organized by the Society for Research in Higher Education in England viewed the term with characteristic mistrust as somehow ‘continental’ and ‘theoretical’. 88. Thompson Klein, p. 22 89. The term used by Habermas, p. 15 in his discussion of the University of Berlin. 90. Faye, in Le Rapport bleu, p. 174. 91. Ibid., p. 176. Derrida suggests producing an interface between psychiatry and psychoanalysis, as much as the already established one between philosophy and psychoanalysis (Le Rapport bleu, pp. 110–11). 92. Derrida, ‘On Colleges and Philosophy’, 1989, p. 213. 93. Fynsk, ‘Derrida and Philosophy’, p. 156. 94. Cf. Derrida, ‘Coups d’envoi’, in Le Rapport bleu, and also Caputo, ed., p. 68. 95. Derrida, ‘On Colleges and Philosophy’, 1989, p. 213. 96. Derrida, ‘Fifty-Two Aphorisms for a Foreword’, p. 67. 97. A scenario which Lyotard discusses as the de-legitimation of knowledge in terms of performativity, which becomes the sole criterion of further research (PMC, p. 72). Thompson Klein, in a chapter of her book called ‘Borrowing’, notes with approval the view that importing a model is valuable because it ‘represents an area that has already been analysed’, meaning it can be taken as a given (p. 85). This is precisely the kind of interdisciplinarity which Derrida is arguing against. 98. Levin, p. 92. 99. Benjamin, in Papadakis, Cooke, and Benjamin, eds.

176

The Insistence on Philosophy

100. Fynsk, ‘Derrida and Philosophy’, p. 156. 101. Derrida, ‘Fifty-Two Aphorisms for a Foreword’, p. 68, and Le Rapport bleu, p. 36. Although he is critical in his remarks on the Collège, this seems to be the force of Stanley Cavell’s remark about ‘going back to school to one another’ (Cavell, 1985, p. 532). 102. Readings, The University in Ruins, p. 177. 103. Derrida, ‘On Colleges and Philosophy’, p. 224. 104. Derrida, ‘The Villanova Roundtable’, pp. 7–8. 105. Derrida, in Le Rapport bleu, p. 38. Derrida, ‘On Colleges and Philosophy’, 1989, pp. 214–15. 106. Cf. the remarks on the need for a ‘specialised training’ in philosophy from 1996, p. 11, and in 1997, pp. 7–8. 107. Leitch, ‘Research and Education at the Crossroads’, p. 101; cf. Leitch, Postmodernism. 108. Cf. the dossier ‘Que faire du Collège International de Philosophie?’, in Le Débat, 1998, p. 118. The CIPh was accused of employing a ‘ruse’ of official marginality by Jacques Bouveresse, Le Philosophe chez les Autophages, p. 120. 109. Pinto is the member of Bourdieu’s group, mentioned already in Chapter 3, who attacked GREPH. For his comments on the CIPh, see his ‘L’Inconscient scolaire des philosophes’, pp. 51 ff. 110. These philosophers are grouped by Pinto as ‘difficult’: ‘difficiles à classer sinon à caser’ (‘L’Inconscient scolaire des philosophes’, p. 52). On the safe refuge idea, see Collier, p. 203, who terms the CIPh a ‘safe ghetto for interdisciplinary studies’. 111. F. Jullien, interview in the Le Débat dossier, pp. 119 and 121. Jullien is both a philosopher and a sinologist. The current director, as already noted, is Jean-Claude Milner, the linguistics academic. Neither is primarily or solely a philosopher. 112. Le Débat, pp. 119 and 125. 113. Howells, p. 153. 114. Vermeren, p. 9. 115. The critical voices, in particular Canto-Sperber and Renaut, aired in Le Débat, accuse the college of becoming an ‘American style’ cultural studies department, and of trading on a posture of marginality. This line of attack is the same as Pinto’s: Derrida is now more an American ‘theorist’ than a French philosopher. What is shared by its opponents is the facile criticism that it is simply a ‘Derridean’ institution. 116. Readings, The University in Ruins, p. 177. See also Samuel Weber, who sees the ‘transgressive’ potential of the CIPh as residing in its questioning of ‘the defining limits of the established disciplines’ (Institution and Interpretation, p. 152). 117. T. Clark, ‘Literary Force; Institutional Values’, p. 2. Michael Ryan, in his consideration of the politics of the university, views the notion of academic freedom as untenably defensive, in its implied separation of the academy from the social world (see p. 151). The problematic of the institutional frame works in two ways to complicate this suggestion: firstly, in agreement, that the university apparatus is not itself the neutral protector of pure knowledge, but secondly, that whilst there is no simple external/internal division, the ‘framing’ of the university, including the principle of academic freedom, must itself be examined in its historical and philosophical history — it cannot simply be collapsed to the point of vanishing. 118. Derrida, Points de suspension: entretiens, p. 110. 119. Cf. Bourdieu who in ‘Les Conditions sociales de la circulation internationale des idées’ argues that this is always the effect of such border-crossings. 120. There has been a wave of interest amongst theorists over the last five to ten years in questions of disciplinarity, as part of the study of cultural formations, with a rise in examples of selfconscious disciplinary history: see, for example, Nelson and Parameshwar Gaonkar, eds., and the special issue of Poetics Today, edited by D. R. Shumway and E. Messer-Davidow (1991). This does not alter the general tendency to treat deconstruction as anti-disciplinary, and Derrida’s work as literary, without giving due weight to its philosophical provenance, in terms of either tradition or discipline. 121. See, for example, Carroll, Paraesthetics, p. 83 who states that literature is the most important concern for Derrida; Holquist, p. 23, who argues that literature departments deal with ‘the most sensitive values’ and are therefore the modern-day equivalent of Kant’s philosophy faculty, as a ‘protected zone of free interrogation’; and T. Clark, p. 3 who argues for literature as the ‘force of disruption’ within the university.

The Insistence on Philosophy

177

122. Derrida, Positions, p. 95. 123. Beer, p. 115. 124. Derrida, ‘La Langue et le discours de la méthode’, p. 38, cited in Chapter 1. 125. On Derrida and tradition, see Critchley, Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity, p. 136 and R. Gasché, Inventions of Difference, pp. 66–67. See also Derrida’s insistence that ‘even if we have to deconstruct some tradition, at the same time we have to insist that these traditions be taught, and taught more than ever’, in contrast to the disciplinary dissolution of ‘theory’ per se (Derrida, ‘Villanova Roundtable’, 1996, p. 6). 126. Derrida, ‘Some Statements’, p. 92. 127. The express aim of an article on philosophy’s denial of translation by the translation theorist Lawrence Venuti (1996, p. 24). 128. Cf. ‘Table Ronde’, 1980, p. 68, where Derrida again comments on the need to argue for and burst out of the unity of philosophy as a discipline. 129. Cf. Dews, p. 65.

Concluding Remarks v

GREPH was not, ultimately, successful in its aim of securing a radical transformation of philosophy teaching in French schools by moving it out of its ‘incarceration’ in the bygone glory of the terminale year alone. Extending it to run throughout secondary education was not taken up either by the Giscard administration, nor subsequently. As stated in the introduction, the work of the group has become obscure, and can be dismissed as merely symptomatic: of professional protectionism, on the one hand, and of post-’68 unwarranted radical hope, on the other. The significance of the group is not simply as a kind of ‘applied’, activist form of deconstruction or poststructuralism, which demonstrates the political relevance of Derrida’s work overall, but more specifically, on its own terms, in relation to the questions and problematics which it itself sought to bring to the fore. That is to say, the entire problematic of a ‘context’ for philosophy — national, linguistic, cultural, political, historical, disciplinary, and material. This disciplinary re-inscription of Derrida’s work, both the texts considered here in relation to GREPH, and the subsequent work produced in relation to the Collège International de Philosophie, should not be seen as final or reductive, but rather as an overlooked strand within the better known problematics of tradition and translation of his work. Questions of the teaching of philosophy cannot be appropriated in order to ‘de-etherealize’ theory, by re-situating it concretely, nor used to produce a radical, entirely other form of pedagogy — ‘teaching deconstructively’. For Derrida, the fact of philosophy teaching in French schools represented ‘une chance historique’ (DP, p. 629): a curious and singular institutionalization which required further examination. The activities of GREPH represented an engagement with this institution, and with the doubled institution of philosophy: its material inscription and historical and social determinations, but also its relationship to its own history. This is not to ‘re-contextualize’ Derrida, nor to suggest that there are empirical explanations from which his concerns and practices can be read. The campaigning work produced by GREPH and by Derrida is significant not in terms of simplistically ‘proving’ a pre-determined political set of requirements, but in relation to the context of French philosophy more generally. Their demands were not directly met, but the corpus of theoretical work they produced, and their after-life in the work of Derrida with the collège, represents an important set of ref lections on philosophy’s relation to a particular institutionalization, and to questions of material determination as such. This is a relation which has to be considered both philosophically and historically in order to unravel what is at stake both in the work of the group, and in philosophy’s relation to its own institution.

Bibliography v

Abensour, Miguel, ‘Philosophie politique et socialisme: Pierre Leroux ou du “style barbare” en philosophie’, Le Cahier du Collège International de Philosophie, 1 (October 1985), 9–24 —— and Pierre-Jean Labarrière, ‘Parasites appointés, qu’avez-vous fait de la vérité?’, Preface to Arthur Schopenhauer, Contre la philosophie universitaire, translated by Auguste Dietrich, new edn (Paris: Payot & Rivages, 1994), 2–5 ACIREPH (Association pour la Création d’Instituts de Recherche sur l’Enseignement de la Philosophie), [accessed 24 April 2010] Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 47–48 (1983): special issue, Éducation et philosophie Adams, Hazard, et al., ‘Jacques Derrida’s “Des humanités et de la discipline philo­ soph­ique” / “Of the Humanities and Philosophical Disciplines”: Roundtable Discus­ sion’, Surfaces, 6.108 (1996), http://www.pum.umontreal.ca/revues/surfaces/vol6/derrida. html> [accessed12 May 2010] Adorno, Theodor W., Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. by Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) —— ‘Philosophy and Teachers’ (first published as ‘Lehrer und Philosophie’, Neue Sammlung 2 (1962)), in Adorno, Critical Models, 19–35 —— ‘Taboos on the Teaching Vocation’ (a 1965 radio lecture), in Adorno, Critical Models, 177–85 Alain [= Émile Chartier], Souvenirs concernant Jules Lagneau (Paris: Editions de la Nouvelle Revue française, 1925) Allen, Graham, ‘Transparency and Teaching’, Theory, Culture & Society, 23.2–3 (2006), 568–70 Althusser, Louis, ‘La Classe de philosophie’, Esprit, 215 ( June 1954), 858–64 —— ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ (first published in La Pensée, 1970), in Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, 127–86 —— Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. by Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971) —— Lénine et la philosophie suivi de Marx et Lénine devant Hegel (Paris: Maspero, 1972) Anderson, R. D., ‘The Conf lict in Education: Catholic Secondary Schools (1850–70): A Reappraisal’, in Conflicts in French Society, ed. by Theodore Zeldin, 51–93 —— Education in France, 1848–1870 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975) —— Universities and Elites in Britain since 1800 (London: Macmillan, 1992; repr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) Anon., ‘Un meeting du GREPH’, Le Monde, 23 April 1975 Anthropos, 13 (March 1989): special issue, Jacques Derrida, including a presentation of the Collège International de Philosophie, 147–52 Appignanesi, Lisa, ed., Ideas from France: The Legacy of French Theory, ICA Documents, 3 (London: Free Association Books, 1989) —— ed., Postmodernism, ICA Documents, 4–5, new edn (London: Free Association, 1989) Arac, Jonathan, Wlad Godzich, and Wallace Martin, eds., The Yale Critics: Decon­ struction in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1983)

Bibliography

181

Archer, Margaret S., ‘Bourdieu’s Theory of Cultural Reproduction: French or Uni­ versal?’, French Cultural Studies, 4 (1993), 225–40 —— ‘Education’, in France Today: Introductory Studies, ed. by John Flower (London: Methuen, 1971), 67–79 Ardagh, John, France Today, new and rev. edn of France in the 1980s (London: Penguin, 1987) Arendt, Hannah, ‘The Crisis in Education’, in Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Viking Press, 1961), 125–44 Aronowitz, Stanley, and Henry A. Giroux, Postmodern Education: Politics, Culture, and Social Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991) Atack, Margaret, May 68 in French Fiction and Film: Rethinking Society, Rethinking Repre­ sentation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) Atkins, G. Douglas, and Michael L. Johnson, eds., Writing and Reading Differently: De­con­struction and the Teaching of Composition and Literature (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985) Attridge, Derek, Geoff Bennington, and Robert Young, eds., Post-Structuralism and the Question of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) Aubral, François, and Xavier Delcourt, Contre la nouvelle philosophie, (Paris: Gallimard, 1977) Augendre, Jean-Claude, ‘A propos de l’enseignement de la philosophie’, Revue de l’enseigne­ment philosophique, 37.1 (1986), 42–56 Aviram, Aharon, ‘The Nature of University Education Reconsidered (A Response to Ronald Barnett’s The Idea of Higher Education)’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 26.2 (1992), 183–99 Azouvi, François, ‘Descartes’, in Les Lieux de mémoire, ed. by Pierre Nora, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), III, 398–411 Bahti, Timothy, ‘Histories of the University: Kant and Humboldt’, Modern Language Notes, 102 (1987), 437–60 —— ‘The Injured University’, in Logomachia, ed. by Richard Rand, 57–76 Balibar, Renée, Les français fictifs: le rapport des styles littéraires au français national (Paris: Hachette, 1974) —— Histoire de la littérature française (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991) —— and Dominique Laporte, Le français national: politique et pratiques de la langue nationale sous la Révolution française (Paris: Hachette, 1974) Ball, Stephen J., ed., Foucault and Education: Disciplines and Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1990) Barnard, H. C., Education and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969) Barnard, Peter, ‘Little People, Big Ideas’, The Times, 12 April 1997, Weekend Section, 1–2 Barnett, Ronald, The Idea of Higher Education (Buckingham: Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press, 1990) Barrès, Maurice, Les Déracinés: le roman de l’énergie nationale (Paris: Gallimard, 1988; first published 1898) Barrett, Michèle, The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991) Barthélémy-Madaule, Madeleine, ‘L’Enseignement de la philosophie’, Les Études philosophiques, 3 (1979), 275–86 —— ‘Pour la philosophie’ , Nouvelle Critique, 7 (May 1975), 2–3 Barthes, Roland, L’Aventure sémiologique (Paris: Seuil, 1985) —— ‘Écrivains, intellectuels, professeurs’, Tel Quel, 47 (1971), 19–28 —— Leçon (Paris: Seuil, 1978)

182

Bibliography

Baudelot, Christian, and Roger Establet, L’École capitaliste en France (Paris: Maspéro, 1972) Baynes, Kenneth, James Bohman, and Thomas Mccarthy, eds., After Philosophy: End or Transformation? (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1987) Beardsworth, Richard, ‘Deconstruction and Tradition: Catachresis and Techne’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 26.3 (1995), 279–92 —— Derrida and the Political (London: Routledge, 1996) Beaune, Jean-Claude, et al., eds., Les Sauvages dans la cité: auto-émancipation du peuple et instruction des prolétaires au XIXe siècle (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1985) Becher, Tony, Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Inquiry and the Culture of Disciplines (Buckingham: Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press, 1989) Beer, Gillian, Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) Bell, D., D. Johnson, and P. Morris, eds., A Biographical Dictionary of French Political Leaders (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990) Benda, Julien, La Trahison des clercs (Paris: Grasset, 1975) Benjamin, Andrew, Translation and the Nature of Philosophy: A New Theory of Words (London: Routledge, 1989) Bennington, Geoffrey, Interrupting Derrida (London: Routledge, 2000) —— ‘Outside Language’, Oxford Literary Review, 2 (1989), 189–212 —— Legislations: The Politics of Deconstruction (London: Verso, 1994) —— ‘Derrida and Politics’, in Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), ed. by Tom Cohen, 193–212 Bernardi, Bruno, Jean-Pierre Fussler, Béatrice Henry, and Alain Lhomme, ‘Philo­ sophie de la réforme et réforme de la philosophie’, Nouvelle Critique, 85 (1975), 68–73 Bernstein, Richard J., The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity / Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1992) Besnier, Jean-Michel, ‘Essai pour donner à la philosophie la pédagoie qu’elle mérite’, Esprit, 71–72 (December 1982), 217–31 Besse, Guy, ‘La Philosophie en question’, L’Humanité, 7 February 1975 Bevir, Mark, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) Biesta, Gert J. J., and Denise Egea-Kuehne, eds., Derrida and Education (London: Routledge, 2001) Blanchot, Maurice, L’Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969) Bledstein, Burton J., The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York: Norton, 1976) Bloom, Allan, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987) Bolgar, R. R., ‘From Humanism to the Humanities’, Twentieth Century Studies, 9 (1973), 8–21 —— ‘Victor Cousin and Nineteenth-Century Education’, Cambridge Journal, 2 (1949), 357–68 Bompaire-Evesque, Claire-Françoise, Un débat sur l’université au temps de la Troisième République: la lutte contre la Nouvelle Sorbonne (Paris: Aux Amateurs des livres, 1988) Borne, Étienne, ‘Pour la philosophie, contre un masochisme suicidaire’, La Croix, 13 March 1975, 10–11 Boschetti, Anna, Sartre et ‘les Temps Modernes’: une entreprise intellectuelle (Paris: Minuit, 1985) Bourdieu, Pierre, ‘Aspirant philosophe: un point de vue sur le champ universitaire dans les années 50’, in Les Enjeux philosophiques des années 50 (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1991), 15–24 —— ‘Les Conditions sociales de la circulation internationale des idées’, Cahiers de l’histoire des littératures romanes, 14 (1990), 1–10

Bibliography

183

—— La Distinction: critique sociale du jugement (Paris: Minuit, 1979) —— ‘Fieldwork in Philosophy’, in Pierre Bourdieu, Choses dites (Paris: Minuit, 1987), 13–47 —— Homo Academicus (Paris: Minuit, 1984) —— Homo Academicus, trans. by Peter Collier, with Preface by Pierre Bourdieu (Cambridge: Polity, 1988) —— ‘L’Inconscient d’école’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 135 (2000), 3–5 —— Leçon sur la leçon (Paris: Minuit, 1982) —— L’Ontologie politique de Martin Heidegger (Paris: Minuit, 1988) —— ‘Passport to Duke’, Metaphilosophy, 28.4 (1997): special issue, Internationalism in Philosophy, 449–55 —— ‘The Philosophical Institution’, in Philosophy in France Today, ed. by Alan Montefiore, 1–8 —— ‘Principles for Ref lecting on the Curriculum’, in Education in France, ed. by Anne Corbett and Bob Moon, 327–34 —— Réponses. Pour une anthropologie reflexive (Paris: Seuil, 1992) —— ‘Les Sciences sociales et la philosophie’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 47–48 (1983), 43–52 —— ‘Systems of Education and Systems of Thought’, International Social Science Journal, 19 (1967), 338–58 —— and Jean-Claude Passeron, Les Héritiers: les étudiants et la culture (Paris: Minuit, 1964) ———— La Reproduction (Paris: Minuit, 1970) ———— ‘Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945: Death and Resurrection of a Philosophy without Subject’, Social Research, 34.1 (1967), 162–212 Bourg, Julian, ed., After the Deluge: New Perspectives on the Intellectual and Cultural History of Postwar France (Lanham: Lexington, 2004) —— ‘Introduction’, in After the Deluge, ed. by Julian Bourg, 1–18 Bourget, Paul, Le Disciple (Paris: Fayard, 1953; first published 1889) Bouveresse, Jacques, ‘Une différence sans distinction?’, Philosophie, 35 (1992), 65–91 —— Le Philosophe chez les Autophages (Paris: Minuit, 1984) —— ‘Pourquoi pas des philosophes?’, Critique, 368 (1978), 97–122 Bowman, Paul, ‘Alterdisciplinarity’, Culture, Theory and Critique, 49.1 (2008), 93–110 Brannigan, John, Ruth Robbins, and Julian Wolfreys, eds., Applying: To Derrida (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996) Braun, Lucien, Histoire de l’histoire de la philosophie (Paris: Ophrys, 1973) Brewer, Walter Vance, Victor Cousin as a Comparative Educator (New York: Teachers College Press, 1971) Brooks, John I., The Eclectic Legacy: Academic Philosophy and the Human Sciences in NineteenthCentury France (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998) Brunet, Roland, ‘La Place de la philosophie dans le système éducatif français’, in Encyclo­ pédie philosophique universelle, ed. by André Jacob, I (1989), 670–76 Bruns, Gerald L., ‘What is Tradition?’, New Literary History, 22 (1991), 1–21 Cahen, Didier, ‘La Question de l’enseignement’, Magazine littéraire, 286 (March 1991), dossier: ‘Jacques Derrida: la déconstruction de la philosophie’, 54–58 Cahiers philosophiques, hors série ( June 1993), ‘Le Temps des philosophes’ (philosophy broadcasts for Radio-Télévision scolaire, 1965–66) Canguilhem, Georges, ‘Pour la philosophie’, Nouvelle Critique, 84 (May 1975) Canivez, André, Jules Lagneau, professeur de philosophie: essai sur la condition du professeur de philosophie jusqu’à la fin du XIXe siècle, 2 vols, Publication de la faculté des lettres de l’Université de Strasbourg, 148 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres,1965) Canivez, Patrice, Éduquer le citoyen? (Paris: Hatier, 1995)

184

Bibliography

Caputo, John D., ed., Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997) Carroll, David, Paraesthetics: Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida (New York: Methuen, 1987) —— ed., The States of ‘Theory’: History, Art and Critical Discourse (Stanford: Stanford Uni­ versity Press, 1990) Carsin, Didier, and Hadi Rizk, ‘La Singularité exemplaire de l’enseignement français de la philosophie dans les lycées’, Les Temps modernes, 539 ( June 1991), 168–84 Cartledge, Paul, ‘Classics: From Discipline in Crisis to (Multi-)Cultural Capital?’, in Pedagogy and Power: Rhetorics of Classical Learning, ed. by Yun Lee Too and Niall Livingstone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 16–28 Caveing, Maurice, ‘La Philosophie doit-elle être enseignée?’, Raison présente, 35 ( JulySeptember 1975), 31–48 Cavell, Stanley, Must We Mean What We Say? (New York: Scribner, 1969) —— Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984) —— A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994) Chadwick, Kay, ‘Education in Secular France: (Re)defining laïcité’, Modern and Contem­ porary France, 5 (1997), 47–59 Chaitin, Gilbert D., ‘Education and Political Identity: The Universalist Controversy’, Yale French Studies, 113 (2008), 77–93: special issue, French Education: Fifty Years Later, ed. by Ralph Albanese and M. Martin Guiney Chaplin, Tamara, Turning on the Mind: French Philosophers on Television (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007) Charle, Christophe, Les Élites de la République, 1880–1900 (Paris: Fayard, 1987) —— La République des universitaires, 1870–1940 (Paris: Seuil, 1994) Charlton, D. G., Secular Religions in France, 1815–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the University of Hull, 1963) Châtelet, François, La Philosophie des professeurs (Paris: Grasset, 1970) ——, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Pierre Faye, and Dominique Lecourt, Le Rapport bleu: les sources historiques et théoriques du Collège international de philosophie (Paris: Presses Universi­ taires de France, 1998) Chirpaz, François, ‘La Philosophie et son institution’, Esprit, 397 (November 1970), 785–92 Citron, Suzanne, Le Mythe national: l’histoire de France en question (Paris: Éditions Ouv­ rières, 1988) Clark, Burton R., The Higher Education System: Academic Organisation in Cross-National Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983) Clark, Terry Nicholls, Prophets and Patrons: The French University and the Emergence of the Social Sciences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973) Clark, Timothy, ‘Literary Force; Institutional Values’, Culture Machine, 1 (1999), [accessed 6 May 2010] —— and Nicholas Royle, ‘Editorial Audit’, in Oxford Literary Review, 17.1–2 (1995): special issue, The University in Ruins, ed. by Timothy Clark and Nicholas Royle —— eds., Derridas, special issue of Oxford Literary Review, 18.1–2 (1996) Coady, Tony, ‘The Justification of Philosophy’, in The Relevance of the Humanities, ed. by A. M. Gibbs (Canberra: The Australian Academy of the Humanities, 1990), 37–60 Cockburn, Alexander, and Robin Blackburn, eds., Student Power: Problems, Diagnosis, Action (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969) Cohen, Tom, ed., Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 2001) Collectif ‘Révoltes Logiques’, L’Empire du sociologue (Paris: Découverte, 1984)

Bibliography

185

Collier, Peter, ‘A New Educational Ethos? The Great Non-Debate’, in France during the Socialist Years, ed. by Gino Raymond (Aldershot: Dartmouth Publishing Company, 1994), 172–93 Collini, Stefan, ‘ “Discipline history” and “Intellectual history”: Ref lections on the His­ tory of the Social Sciences in Britain and France’, Revue de synthèse, 3–4 (1988), 387–99 —— ‘Intellectuals in Britain and France’, in Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century France, ed. by Jeremy Jennings, 110–32 Collins, James, ‘Determination and Contradiction: An Appreciation and Critique of the Work of Pierre Bourdieu on Language and Education’, in Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives, ed. by Craig Calhoun, Edward LiPuma, and Moishe Postone (Cambridge: Polity, 1993), 116–38 Colombel, Jeannette, ‘A propos de l’enseignement philosophique’, Les Temps modernes, 38 (March 1966), 1714–26 Compagnon, Antoine, La Troisième République des lettres: de Flaubert à Proust (Paris: Seuil, 1983) Cook, Patricia, ed., Philosophical Imagination and Cultural Memory: Appropriating Historical Traditions (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993) Cooper, David E., Authenticity and Learning: Nietzsche’s Educational Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1983) —— ‘The Presidential Address: Analytical and Continental Philosophy’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 94 (1994), 1–18 Coq, Guy, ‘Alerte sur la philosophie?’, Esprit, 158 (1990), 127–28 —— ‘L’Enseignant, bouc émissaire?’, Esprit, 167 (1990), 147–50 —— ‘La Philosophie dans l’enseignement’, Cahiers pédagogiques, 159 (1977), 5–7 —— ‘Propositions aux enseignants’, Esprit, 3 (1979), 3–17 —— ‘Qui a peur de la philosophie?’, Esprit, 1 (1980), 52–59 —— review of Qui a peur de la philosophie?, Cahiers pédagogiques, 159 (1977), 39 —— ‘Le Témoignage d’un bouleversement’, Esprit, 12 (1977), 79–82 Corbett, Anne, ‘Secular, Free, Compulsory: Republican Values in French Education’, in Education in France: Continuity and Change in the Mitterrand Years, 1981–1995, ed. by Anne Corbett and Bob Moon (London: Routledge, 1996) Cornu, Laurence, ed., L’Enseignement de la philosophie à la croisée des chemins (Paris: Centre national de documentation pédagogique, 1994) —— Le Métier d’instruire: philosophie et pédagogie. Actes du colloque de La Rochelle (Poitiers: Centre Régional de Documentation Pédagogique, 1990) Corpus, 18/19 (1991), special issue: Victor Cousin Cousin, Victor, Défense de l’Université et de la philosophie, ed. with introduction by Danièle Rancière (Paris: Solin, 1977; first published 1844) Critchley, Simon, Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas and Contemporary French Thought (London: Verso, 1999) —— ‘Introduction: What is Continental Philosophy?’, in A Companion to Continental Philo­ sophy, ed. by Simon Critchley and William R. Schroeder (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 1–17 —— Continental Philosophy. A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) Critique, 369 (February 1978), special issue: La philosophie malgré tout Culler, Jonathan, ‘Criticism and Institutions: The American University’, in Post-Struc­ turalism and the Question of History, ed. by Derek Attridge, et al., 82–98 —— Framing the Sign: Criticism and its Institutions (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988) —— On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (London: Routledge, 1983) —— ‘The Politics of Culture: Quarrelling over the Canon’, The Cornell Political Forum, 4.2 (1989), 6–9

186

Bibliography

—— The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981) —— Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (London: Routledge, 1975) Culture Machine, 2 (2000), special issue: The University Culture Machine, ed. by Gary Hall and Simon Wortham, [accessed 6 May 2010] Curtis, Sarah, Educating the Faithful: Religion, Schooling, and Society in Nineteenth-Century France (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000) Cusset, François, French Theory: Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & cie et les mutations de la vie intellectuelle aux États-Unis (Paris: Découverte, 2003) Cuvillier, Armand, Manuel de philosophie (Paris: Colin, 1927) D’Amico, Robert, Historicism and Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1989) Davie, G. E., The Crisis of the Democratic Intellect: The Problem of Generalism and Specialism in Twentieth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1986) —— The Democratic Intellect: Scotland and her Universities in the Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1961) Davis, Colin, After Poststructuralism: Reading, Stories and Theory (London: Routledge, 2004) —— Levinas: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 1996) de Vries, Hent, ‘Deconstruction and America’, in Travelling Theory: France and the United States, ed. by Ieme van der Poel and Sophie Bertho (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1999), 72–98 Deacon, Roger, ‘From Confinement to Attachment: Michel Foucault on the Rise of the School’, The European Legacy, 11.2 (2006), 121–38 Debray, Régis, Contretemps: éloges des idéaux perdus (Paris: Gallimard, 1992) —— Le Pouvoir intellectuel en France (Paris: Ramsay, 1979) Delacampagne, Christian, ‘The Politics of Derrida: Revisiting the Past’, Modern Language Notes, 121 (2006), 862–71 —— and Robert Maggiori, eds., Philosopher: les interrogations contemporaines. Matériaux pour un enseignement, 2 vols (Paris: Fayard, 1980) Déloye, Yves, Ecole et citoyenneté (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 1994) Derrida, Jacques, ‘L’Autre nom du Collège’, Rue Descartes, 7 (1993), 9–25 —— ‘Avant-propos’ and ‘Préface’, in Les Sauvages dans la cité, ed. by Jean-Claude Beaune, et al., eds., 3–7, 8–11 —— ‘Between Brackets I’, in Points… Interviews, 1974-1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, translated by Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 5-29 —— ‘Coups d’envoi’ and ‘Letter to Colleagues, May 18, 1982’, Sub-Stance, 35 (1982), 2 and 80–81 —— ‘Deconstruction and the Other: Interview with Richard Kearney’, in Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers, ed. by Richard Kearney (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 107–26 —— De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967) —— ‘Droit de réponse: à propos de l’enseignement philosophique. J. Derrida répond à Guy Coq’, Esprit, 6.6 (1990), 167–69 —— Du droit à la philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1990) —— ‘L’école à été un enfer pour moi. Entretien avec B. Defrance’, Cahiers Pédagogiques no. 270 (1989), 66-71 —— L’Écriture et la difference (Paris: Seuil, 1967) —— ‘L’Enseignement philosophique’ (meeting with Bernard Bourgeois on 24 November 1990), Bulletin de la société française de philosophie, 85.1 (1991), 5–6 —— ‘Entretien avec Roger-Pol Droit’, Le Monde, 16 November 1990

Bibliography

187

—— Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy II, trans. by Jan Plug, et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004) —— ‘Fifty-Two Aphorisms for a Foreword’, in Deconstruction, ed. by Andreas Papadakis, Catherine Cooke, and Andrew Benjamin, 67–69 —— Glas (Paris: Galilée, 1974) —— ‘Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida’, in Questioning Ethics, ed. by Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley, 65–75 —— ‘Interview’, in French Philosophers in Conversation, ed. by Raoul Mortley (London: Routledge, 1991), 92–108 —— ‘Interview with Imre Saluzinski’, in Criticism in Society, ed. by Imre Saluzinski (London: Methuen, 1987), 9–24 —— ‘An Interview with J. Kearns and K. Newton’, The Literary Review, 14 (April-May 1980), 21–22; reprinted in Anthony Easthope, British Post-Structuralism since 1968 (London: Routledge, 1988), 236–40 —— Interview with Roger Pol-Droit, Le Monde, 15 July 1982 —— ‘Ja, or the faux-bond II’, in Points… Interviews, 1974-1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans­ lated by Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 30-77 —— ‘La Langue et le discours de la méthode’, Recherches sur la philosophie et le langage, 3, special issue: La Philosophie dans sa langue (1983), 35–51 —— ‘Le facteur de la vérité’ in La Carte postale. De Socrate à Freud et au-delà (Paris: Flam­ marion, 1980), 90-210 —— ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’, in Derrida and différance, ed. by David Wood and Robert Bernasconi (Coventry: Parousia, 1985), 1–5 —— ‘Une lettre de Jacques Derrida’, Libération, 3 March 1988, 4 —— ‘Lettre préface: les antinomies de la discipline philosophique’, in Jacques Derrida, La Gréve des philosophes école et philosophie (Paris: Osiris, 1986), 9–31 —— ‘Living On/Border Lines’, translated by James Hulbert, in Deconstruction and Criticism, by Harold Bloom et al. (New York: Continuum, 1979), 75–176 —— Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972) —— ‘Mochlos; or, The Conf lict of the Faculties’, in Logomachia, ed. by Richard Rand, 1–34 —— Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001, ed., trans. and with an introduction by Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002) —— ‘Of the Humanities and the Philosophical Discipline: The Right to Philosophy from the Cosmopolitical Point of View (the Example of an International Institution)’, trans. Thomas Dutoit, Surfaces, 4.309 (1994), [accessed12 May 2010] —— ‘On Colleges and Philosophy’, interview with Geoff Bennington, in Postmodernism: ICA Documents, ed. by Lisa Appignanesi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 208–28 —— ‘Onto-Theology of National-Humanism (Prolegomena to a Hypothesis)’, Oxford Literary Review, 14 (1992), 3–23 —— L’Oreille de l’autre: otobiographies, transferts, traductions. Textes et débats avec Jacques Derrida, ed. by Claude Lévesque and Christie V. McDonald (Montreal: VLB, 1982) —— ‘Où commence et comment finit un corps enseignant’, in Politiques de la philosophie, ed. by Dominique Grisoni (Paris: Grasset, 1976), 60–89 —— Points de suspension: entretiens, ed. by Elisabeth Weber (Paris: Galilee, 1992) —— Positions: entretiens avec Henri Ronse, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Louis Houdebine, Guy Scarpetta (Paris: Minuit, 1972) —— ‘The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils’, Diacritics, 13.3 (1983), 2–20 —— ‘Racism’s Last Word’, Critical Inquiry, 12 (1985), 290–99

188

Bibliography

—— ‘Sendoffs’, trans. by Thomas Pepper, Yale French Studies, 77 (1990), 7–43 —— ‘Signature Event Context’, Glyph I (1977), 127–97 —— ‘Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and Other Small Seismisms’, in The States of ‘Theory’, ed. by David Carroll, 63–94 —— Spectres de Marx: l’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle internationale (Paris: Galilée, 1993) —— ‘The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations’, in Philosophy in France Today, ed. by Alan Montefiore, 34–50 —— ‘Des tours de Babel’, in Difference in Translation, ed. by Joseph F. Graham (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 218–27 —— L’Université sans condition (Paris: Galilée, 2001) —— ‘The University without Condition’, trans. by Peggy Kamuf, in Without Alibi, ed. by Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 202–37 —— La Vérité en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978) —— ‘The Villanova Roundtable: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida’, in Deconstruction in a Nutshell, ed. by John D. Caputo (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996), 4–28 —— Who’s Afraid of Philosophy? Right to Philosophy I, trans. by Jan Plug (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002) —— ‘Y a-t-il une langue philosophique?’, Autrement Revue, 102 (1988), 30–37 —— and Geoff Bennington, Jacques Derrida (Paris: Seuil, 1991) Descombes, Vincent, ‘An Essay in Philosophical Observation’, in Philosophy in France Today, ed. by Alan Montefiore, 67–81 —— Le Même et l’autre, quarante-cinq ans de philosophie française (1933–1978) (Paris: Minuit, 1979) —— Modern French Philosophy, trans. by L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) Dews, Peter, The Limits of Disenchantment: Essays on Contemporary European Philosophy (London: Verso, 1995) Diacritics, 31.3 (2001), special issue: Theory, Globalization, Cultural Studies and the Remains of the University, ed. by Marc Redfield Diacritics, 38.1–2 (2008), special issue: Derrida and Democracy, ed. by Jonathan Culler and Phillip E. Lewis Digeon, Claude, La Crise Allemande de la pensée française, 1870–1940 (Paris: Presses Univer­ sitaires de France, 1959) Docherty, Thomas, Criticism and Modernity: Aesthetics, Literature, and Nations in Europe and its Academies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) Dosse, François, Histoire du structuralisme, 2 vols (Paris: Découverte, 1991–92), I (1991), Le Champ du signe, 1945–1966, and II (1992), Le Chant du cygne, 1967 à nos jours Douailler, Stéphane, and Patrice Vermeren, ‘L’Institutionalisation de l’enseignement philosophique français’, in Encyclopédie philosophique universelle, ed. by André Jacob, I (1989), 808–14 —— Roger-Pol Droit, and Patrice Vermeren, eds., Philosophie, France, XIXe siècle. Écrits et opuscules (Paris: Poche, 1994) —— Christiane Mauve, Georges Navet, Jean-Claude Pompougnac, Patrice Vermeren, eds., La Philosophie saisie par l’État: les petits écrits sur l’enseignement philosophique en France (Paris: Aubier, 1989) Drake, David, Intellectuals and Politics in Post-War France (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002) Dreyfus, Dina, ‘Le Temps des philosophes’, Cahiers philosophiques, 55 ( June 1993), 97–108 (previously published as ‘Présentation des émissions de philosophie à la télévision’, L’Éducation nationale, 36 (1964)) —— and Françoise Khodoss, ‘L’Enseignement philosophique’, Les Temps modernes, 235 (1965), 1001–47

Bibliography

189

Drury, Shadia B., Alexandre Kojève: The Roots of Postmodern Politics (Basingstoke: Mac­ millan, 1994) Duméry, Henri, ‘Les Philosophes se rebiffent’, Le Figaro, 25 February 1975, 4 —— ‘La Philosophie et les pèse-lettres’, Le Figaro, 11 March 1975, 5 —— ‘Socrate renvoie son traitement’, Esprit, 396 (October 1970), 646–52 Dupouey, Patrick, and Jacqueline Brunet, Roland Brunet: un itinéraire philosophique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007) Durkheim, Émile, ‘L’Enseignement philosophique et l’agrégation’, in Émile Durkheim, Textes, 3: Fonctions sociales et institutions (Paris: Minuit, 1975), 380–412 Dutourd, Jean, ‘Faut-il supprimer la classe de philo?’, Paris-Match, 1347, 22 March 1975, 3 Duverger, Maurice, ‘Les Nouvelles Humanités’, Le Monde, 13 February 1975, 2 Eagleton, Terry, ‘Deconstruction and Human Rights’, in The Eagleton Reader, ed. by Stephen Regan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 212–27 —— ‘Frère Jacques: The Politics of Deconstruction’, in Terry Eagleton, Against the Grain: Essays, 1975–1985 (London: Verso, 1986), 79–88 Easterlin, Nancy, and Barbara Riebling, eds., After Poststructuralism: Interdisciplinarity and Literary Theory (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993) Elam, D., ‘Ms. en abyme: Deconstruction and Feminism’, Social Epistemology, 4.3 (1990), 293–308 Ellis, John M., Language, Thought and Logic (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993) Emmanuel, Pierre, ‘Mort de la philosophie’, Le Figaro, 18/2/75, 6 États-Généraux de la philosophie (16 et 17 juin 1979) (Paris: Flammarion, 1979) Fabbri, Lorenzo, The Domestication of Derrida: Rorty, Pragmatism and Deconstruction (London: Continuum, 2008) Fabiani, Jean-Louis, Les Philosophes de la République (Paris: Minuit, 1988) Felman, Shoshana, Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987) Ferrari, Joseph, Les Philosophes salaries (Paris: Payot, 1983; first published 1849) Ferry, Luc, J.-P. Pesront, and Alain Renaut, eds., Philosophies de l’université: l’idéalisme allemand et la question de l’université (Paris: Payot, 1979) —— and Alain Renaut, La Pensée 68: essai sur l’anti-humanisme contemporain (Paris: Gallimard, 1985) —— eds., Philosopher à 18 ans: faut-il réformer l’enseignement de la philosophie? (Paris: Grasset, 1999) Feuer, Lewis S., ‘Sociological Aspects of the Relation between Language and Philosophy’, Philosophy of Science, 20.2 (1953), 85–100 Fichant, Michel, and Denis Kambouchner, ‘On ne change pas une discipline par décret’, Le Monde, 9 February 2001, 3 Finkielkraut, Alain, La Défaite de la pensée (Paris: Gallimard, 1987) Finley, M. I., ‘Crisis in the Classics’, in Crisis in the Humanities, ed. by J. H. Plumb, 11–23 Fish, Stanley, ‘Anti-Professionalism’, New Literary History, 17 (1985), 89–108 Foley, Barbara, ‘The Politics of Deconstruction’, in Rhetoric and Form: Deconstruction at Yale, ed. by Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), 113–34 Foucault, Michel, ‘The Political Function of the Intellectual’, Radical Philosophy, 17 (1977), 11–14 Fouillée, Alfred, ‘La Réforme de l’enseignement par la philosophie’, in La Philosophie saisie par l’État, ed. by Stéphane Douailler et al., 519–71 Fraser, Nancy, ‘The French Derrideans: Politicizing Deconstruction or Deconstructing the Political?’, New German Critique, 33 (1984), 127–54

190

Bibliography

Fynsk, Christopher, The Claim of Language: A Case for the Humanities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004) —— ‘A Decelebration of Philosophy’, Diacritics, 8.2 (1978), 80–90 —— ‘Derrida and Philosophy: Acts of Engagement’, in Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), ed. by Tom Cohen, 152–71 —— ‘Legacies of May: On the Work of Le Doctrinal de Sapience’, Modern Language Notes, 93 (1978), 963–71 Gaillard, Jean-Michel, Un siècle d’école républicaine (Paris: Seuil, 2000) Gasché, Rodolphe, ‘Deconstruction as Criticism’, Glyph, 6 (1979), 177–216 —— Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994) Gaussen, Frédéric, ‘Mettre la “philo” à sa place’, Le Monde, 23 March 1975, 3 —— ‘M. Haby devant l’histoire’, Le Monde, 14 February 1975, 6 —— ed., Réussir la philosophie au bac (Paris: Le Monde-Éditions, 1994) Geertz, Clifford, ‘The Way we Think Now: Toward an Ethnography of Modern Thought’, in Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 147–63 Gellner, Ernest, Words and Things: A Critical Account of Linguistic Philosophy and a Study in Ideology (London: Gollancz, 1959) Genette, Gérard, ‘Rhétorique et enseignement’, in Gérard Genette, Figures II (Paris: Seuil, 1969), 23–42 George, François, Prof à T. (Paris: Galilée, 1973) Gerbod, Paul, ‘L’Université et la philosophie de 1789 à nos jours’, Actes du 95e Congrès national des sociétés savants (Reims, 1970) (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1974), 237–330 Ghosh, Peter, ‘Citizen or Subject? Michel Foucault in the History of Ideas’, History of European Ideas, 24.2 (1998), 113–59 Gildea, Robert, France since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) Glendinning, Simon, ‘The Ethics of Exclusion: Incorporating the Continent’, in Question­ ing Ethics, ed. by Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley, 120–32 —— The Idea of Continental Philosophy: A Philosophical Chronicle (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006) —— On Being with Others: Heidegger — Derrida — Wittgenstein (London: Routledge, 1998) —— and Robert Eaglestone, eds., Derrida’s Legacies: Literature and Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2008) Gless, Darryl J., and Barbara Hernstein Smith, eds., The Politics of Liberal Education (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992) Godet, François, ‘Mort et transfiguration’, Revue de l’enseignement philosophique, 37.3 (1987), 66–75 —— ‘Sur l’enseignement philosophique dans les lycées techniques’, Revue de l’enseignement philosophique, 39.2 (1989), 59–65 Goldstein, Doris S., ‘ “Official Philosophies” in Modern France: The Example of Victor Cousin’, Journal of Social History, 1.3 (1968), 259–79 Goldstein, Jan, ‘The Advent of Psychological Modernism in France: An Alternate Narrative’, in Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences, ed. by Dorothy Ross, 190–209 —— ‘Foucault among the Sociologists: The “Disciplines” and the History of the Pro­ fessions’, History and Theory, 23.2 (1984), 170–92 —— ‘Foucault and the Post-Revolutionary Self: The Uses of Cousinian Pedagogy in Nineteenth-Century France’, in Foucault and the Writing of History, ed. by Jan Goldstein, 99–115 —— ed., Foucault and the Writing of History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994)

Bibliography

191

Goodson, Ivor, ed., Social Histories of the Secondary Curriculum: Subjects for Study (London: Falmer, 1985) Gordon, Peter, and John White, Philosophers as Educational Reformers: The Influence of Idealism on British Educational Thought and Practice (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979) Graff, Gerald, ‘Interpretation on Tlön: A Response to Stanley Fish’, New Literary History, 17 (1985), 109–17 Graham, Loren, Wolf Lepenies, and Peter Weingart, eds., Functions and Uses of Disciplinary Histories (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983) Grateloup, L.-L., Notice pédagogique à l’usage du professeur de philosophie (Paris: Hachette, 1986) Green, Andy, Education and State-Formation: The Rise of Education Systems in England, France and the USA (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990) GREPH (Groupe de recherché sur l’enseignement de la philosophie), ed., Qui a peur de la philosophie? (Paris: Flammarion, 1977) Griffith, William B., ‘The Relevance of Professional Philosophy’, Metaphilosophy, 13.3–4 (1982), 181–200 Grisoni, Dominique, ed., Politiques de la philosophie (Paris: Grasset, 1976) Groupe école et philosophie, La Grève des philosophes (Paris: Editions Osiris, 1984) Groupe de travail des professeurs de philosophie en écoles normales, La Philosophie dans le mouroir (Paris: Solin, 1979) Guéhenno, Jean, ‘Les Soucis de M. Haby’, Le Figaro, 20 February 1975, 2 Guilloux, Louis, Le Sang noir (Paris: NRF, 1980) Gutting, Gary, French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 2001) Habermas, Jürgen, ‘The Idea of the University — Learning Processes’, New German Criti­ que, 41 (1987), 3–22 Haby, René, Combat pour les jeunes Français (Paris: Julliard, 1981) —— ‘On est allé trop loin dans certaines réformes’, Le Monde de l’éducation, 17 May 1976, 6–10 —— ‘Premières réf lexions sur la réforme’, Le Figaro, 3 March 1975, 2 Hacking, Ian, ‘Five Parables’, in Philosophy in History, ed. by Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner, 103–24 —— ‘Two Kinds of “New Historicism” for Philosophers’, New Literary History, 21.2 (1989– 90), 343–65 —— Why does Language Matter to Philosophy? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975) Hall, Gary, Culture in Bits: The Monstrous Future of Theory (London: Continuum, 2002) —— and Clare Birchall, eds., New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory (Athens: Uni­ versity of Georgia Press, 2007) Halls, W. D., Education, Culture and Politics in Modern France (Oxford: Pergamon, 1976) Hamon, Hervé, and Patrick Rotman, Génération 2. Les années de poudre (Seuil: Paris, 1988) Hamlyn, D. W., Being a Philosopher: The History of a Practice (London: Routledge, 1992) Hanley, David, and Anne P. Kerr, ‘Elusive May: The Paradox of a Moment in History’, in May ’68, ed. by David Hanley and Anne P. Kerr, 42–56 —— —— May ’68: Coming of Age (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989) —— —— and N. H. Waites, eds., Contemporary France: Politics and Society since 1945 (Lon­ don: Routledge, 1984) Harker, Richard, Mahar Cheleen, and Chris Wilkes, An Introduction to the Work of Pierre Bourdieu: The Practice of Theory (New York: St Martins Press, 1990) Hart, Kevin, ‘Jacques Derrida: “The Most Improbable Signature” ’, in The Judgement of Paris: Recent French Theory in a Local Context, ed. by Kevin D. S. Murray (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992), 78–94

192

Bibliography

Heath, Stephen, ‘Literary Theory, etc.’, Comparative Criticism, 9 (1988), 281–326 Herbrechter, Stefan, ‘Plus d’un — Deconstruction and the Translation of Cultural Studies’, Culture Machine, 6 (2004), [accessed 10 May 2010] Héry, Evelyne, Un siècle de leçons d’histoire: L’histoire enseignée en lycée de 1870 à 1970 (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 1999) Heyck, T. W., ‘The Idea of a University in Britain, 1870–1970’, History of European Ideas, 8 (1987), 205–19 Hobsbawm, Eric, ‘British and French Intellectuals in the “Short Twentieth Century”: A Historico-Sociological Discussion’, a dialogue with Pierre Bourdieu at the ‘British and French Intellectuals: Comparisons and Transfers (18th-20th centuries) Conference’, Institut français, London, 2–3 March 2001 Hobson, Marian, ‘Deconstruction, Empiricism and the Postal Services’, French Studies, 36.3 (1982), 290–314 —— Jacques Derrida: Opening Lines (London: Routledge, 1998) Hohendahl, Peter U., Building a National Literature: The Case of Germany, 1830–1870 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989) —— ‘Education after the Holocaust’, in P. U. Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 45–61 Holland, A. J., ed., Philosophy, its History and Historiography (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1985) Hollier, Denis, ed., Le Collège de sociologie, 1937–1939 (Paris: Gallimard, 1979) Hollis, Martin, and Steven Lukes, eds., Rationality and Relativism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982) Holquist, Michael, ‘Corrupt Originals: The Paradox of Censorship’, PMLA, 109.1 (1994), 14–25 Horton, Susan R. ‘The Institution of Literature and the Cultural Community’, in Literary Theory’s Future(s), ed. by Joseph Natoli (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 267–95 Horvarth-Peterson, Sandra, Victor Duruy and French Education: Liberal Reform in the Second Empire (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984) Howard, Dick, Defining the Political (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989) Howells, Christina, Derrida: Deconstruction from Phenomenology to Ethics (Cambridge: Polity, 1999) Hunter, Ian, ‘The Regimen of Reason: Kant’s Defence of the Philosophy Faculty’, Oxford Literary Review, 17.1–2 (1995), 51–85 Isambert-Jamati, Viviane, Crises de la société, crises de l’enseignement (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1970) Jacob, André, ed., Encyclopédie philosophique universelle, 4 vols (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989–98), I (1989): L’Univers philosophique Jankélévitch, Vladimir, ‘Assassiner la philosophie, c’est un crime contre la jeunesse ellemême’, Le Monde, 18 February 1975, 4 —— ‘Philosophes et Bovidés’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 17 March 1975, 21–22 —— ‘La Philosophie devient-elle une discipline secondaire?’, Le Monde, 18 February 1975 (extracts from the interview, ‘Assassiner la philosophie, c’est un crime contre la jeunesse elle-même’, Le Journal de Dimanche), 5 —— ‘Pour la philosophie’, in États généraux de la philosophie (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), 61–63 Jay, Gregory S., ‘Values and Deconstructions: Derrida, Saussure, Marx’, Cultural Critique, 8 (1987–88), 153–96 Jay, Paul, ‘Bridging the Gap: The Position of Politics in Deconstruction’, Cultural Critique, 22 (1992), 47–74

Bibliography

193

Jenkins, Richard, Pierre Bourdieu (London: Routledge, 1992) Jennings, Jeremy, ed., Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century France: Mandarins and Samourais (London: Macmillan, 1993) Joffrin, Laurent, Mai 68: histoire des évènements (Paris: Seuil, 1988) Johnson, Barbara, ‘Teaching Deconstructively’, in Writing and Reading Differently, ed. by G. Douglas Atkins and Michael L. Johnson, 140–48 —— ed., The Pedagogical Imperative: Teaching as a Literary Genre, special issue of Yale French Studies, 63 (1982) Johnson, Christopher, ‘Derrida and Technology’, in Derrida’s Legacies, ed. by Simon Glendinning and Robert Eaglestone , 54–65 Jordan, Mark, ‘Rhetorical Form in the Historiography of Philosophy’, New Literary History, 23 (1992), 483–504 Joutard, Philippe, ‘L’Enseignement de l’histoire’, in L’Histoire et le métier d’historien en France 1945–1995, ed. by François Bédarida et al. (Paris: Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1995), 45–55 Judt, Tony, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944–1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) Julia, Dominique, ‘Une réforme impossible: le changement de cursus dans la France du 18e siècle’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 47/48 (1983), 53–77 Julliard, Jacques and Michel Winock, eds., Dictionnaire des intellectuels français: les personnes, les lieux, les moments (Paris: Seuil, 1996) Kamuf, Peggy, The Division of Literature: or the University in Deconstruction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) Kant, Immanuel, The Conflict of the Faculties, transl. and introduced by Mary J. Gregor (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979) Kearney, Richard, and Mark Dooley, eds., Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1999) Keenan, Thomas, Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997) Kelly, Michael, Hegel in France (Birmingham: Birmingham Modern Languages Publi­ cations, 1992) —— ‘Materialism in Nineteenth-Century France’, in French Literature, Thought and Culture in the Nineteenth Century: A Material World. Essays in Honour of D. G. Charlton, ed. by Brian Rigby (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), 23–41 Keylor, William, Academy and Community: The Foundation of the French Historical Profession (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975) Khilnani, Sunil, Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Post-War France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993) Klibansky Raymond, and David Pears, eds., La Philosophie en Europe (Paris: Gallimard, 1993) Knights, Ben, The Idea of the Clerisy in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­versity Press, 1978) Kuklick, Bruce, ‘The Emergence of the Humanities’, in The Politics of Liberal Education, ed. by Darryl J. Gless and Barbara Hernstein Smith, 201–12 La Grève des philosophes: école et philosophie. Actes du colloque de Nanterre ‘École et philosophie’ (Paris: Osiris, 1986) La Nouvelle Critique, 84 (1975), dossier: ‘Pour la philosophie’ Laborde, Cécile, Critical Republicanism: The Hijab Controversy and Political Philosophy (Ox­ford: Oxford University Press, 2008) Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, and Jean-Luc Nancy, Retreating the Political, ed. by Simon Sparks (London: Routledge, 1997)

194

Bibliography

—— eds., Les Fins de l’homme: à partir du travail de Jacques Derrida. Colloque de Cérisy, 23 juillet-2 aout 1980 (Paris: Galilée, 1981) Lacroix, Jean, ‘Apprendre à réf léchir’, Le Monde, 4–5 May 1975 Lamont, Michèle, ‘How to Become a Dominant French Philosopher: The Case of Jacques Derrida’, The American Journal of Sociology, 93.3 (1987), 584–622 Lane, Jeremy F., Pierre Bourdieu: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto, 2000) Le Débat, 98 ( January-February 1998), dossier: ‘Que faire du Collège International de Philosophie?’ Le Dœuff, Michèle, ‘Ants and Women, or Philosophy without Borders’, in Contemporary French Philosophy, ed. by A. Phillips Griffiths, Royal Institute of Philosophy Lecture Series, 21 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 41–54 —— ‘La Philosophie renseignée’, in Philosopher, ed. by Christian Delacampagne and Robert Maggiori, 2 vols (Paris: Fayard, 1980), II, 200–16 —— ‘The Philosopher in the Classroom’, interview with GREPH and presentation by Jonathan Rée and Colin Gordon, Radical Philosophy, 21 (1977), 2–9 —— Recherches sur l’Imaginaire Philosophique (Paris: Payot, 1980) —— ‘Women and Philosophy’, Radical Philosophy, 17 (1977), 2–11 Lecourt, Dominique, A quoi sert donc la philosophie? Des sciences de la nature aux sciences politiques (Paris: Presses universitaires de la France, 1993) Lefebvre, Henri, La Vie quotidienne dans le monde moderne (Paris: Gallimard, 1968) Lefranc, Jean, L’Enseignement philosophique: éditoriaux, 1979–1994 (Paris: Aubier, 1995) Leitch, Vincent B., Deconstructive Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983) —— Postmodernism: Local Effects, Global Flows (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996) —— ‘Research and Education at the Crossroads: Report on the Collège International de Philosophie’, SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism, 50 (1986), 101–14 —— Theory Matters (London: Routledge, 2003) Leonard, Miriam, Athens in Paris: Ancient Greece and the Political in Post-War French Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) Lepenies, Wolf, Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) —— ‘The Direction of the Disciplines: The Future of the Universities’, Comparative Criticism, 11 (1990), 51–70 Leroux, Robert, Histoire et sociologie en France: de l’histoire-science à la sociologie durkheimienne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998) Les Études philosophiques, 3 (1979), special issue: Enseignement et philosophie Levi, A. W., Philosophy as Social Expression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974) Levin, R., ‘The New Interdisciplinarity in Literary Criticism’, in After Poststructuralism, ed. by Nancy Easterlin and Barbara Riebling, 13–43 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, Tristes tropiques (Paris: Plon, 1955) Lévy, Bernard-Henri, ‘C’est la guerre?’ (interview with Philippe Sollers), Tel Quel, 82 (1979), 19–28 Lewis, H. D., The French Educational System (London: Croom Helm, 1985) Lewis, Phillip, ‘The Post-Structuralist Condition’, Diacritics, 12 (1982), 2–24 Lilla, Mark, ‘The Politics of Jacques Derrida’, The New York Review of Books, 25 June 1998, 36–41 Lipman, Matthew, Ann Margaret Sharp, and Frederick S. Oscanyan, Philosophy in the Classroom (West Caldwell, NJ: published for the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children, Montclair State College, 1977) Loesberg, Jonathan, ‘Bourdieu’s Derrida’s Kant: The Aesthetics of Refusing Aesthetics’, Modern Language Quarterly 58.4 (1998), 417–36

Bibliography

195

Logue, William, From Philosophy to Sociology: The Evolution of French Liberalism, 1870–1914, (DeKalb: Northern Illinois Press, 1983) Lotringer, Sylvère, and Sande B. Cohen, French Theory in America (London: Routledge, 2001) Lyotard, Jean-François, ‘Adresse au sujet du cours philosophique’, in Jean-François Lyotard, Le Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants: correspondance, 1982–1985 (Paris: Galilée, 1988), 139–51 —— La Condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir (Paris: Minuit, 1979) —— ‘Le Cours philosophique’, in La Grève des philosophes, 34–40 —— Political Writings, transl. and ed. by Bill Readings and Kevin Paul Geiman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) Macherey, Pierre, ‘Faire de la philosophie en France aujourd’hui’, in L’Enseignement de la philosophie à la croisée des chemins, ed. by Laurence Cornu, 69–82 —— Histoires de dinosaur: faire de la philosophie, 1965–1997 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999) —— ‘La Philosophie à la française’, Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques, 74.1 (1990), 7–14 MacIntyre, Alasdair, ‘Are Philosophical Problems Insoluble? The Relevance of System and History’, in Philosophical Imagination and Cultural Memory, ed. by Patricia Cook, 65–82 —— ‘Philosophy, the “Other” Disciplines, and their Histories: A Rejoinder to Richard Rorty’, Soundings, 65 (1982), 127–45 —— ‘Reconceiving the University as an Institution and the Lecture as a Genre’, in Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (London: Duckworth, 1990), 216–78 —— ‘Relativism, Power and Philosophy’, in After Philosophy, ed. by Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy, 385–411 Mallet, Marie-Louise, ed., Le Passage des frontiers: autour du travail de Jacques Derrida (Paris: Galilée, 1993) Marchal, Francis, ‘Nouveauté où permanence dans les débats à propos de l’enseignement philosophique’, in L’Enseignement de la philosophie à la croisée des chemins, ed. by Laurence Cornu, 44–57 Marin, Louis, ‘ “Le Neutre” and Philosophical Discourse’, in Neutrality and Impartiality, ed. by Alan Montefiore, 86–127 Marshall, James, ‘Pedagogy and Apedagogy: Lyotard and Foucault at Vincennes’, in Education and the Postmodern Condition, ed. by Michael Peters, 88–112 Marx-Scouras, Danielle, The Cultural Politics of Tel Quel: Literature and the Left in the Wake of Engagement (Philadelphia: Penn State Press, 1996) Matthews, Gareth, Philosophy and the Young Child (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980) Mayeur, Françoise, L’Enseignement secondaire des jeunes filles sous la Troisième République (Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1977) McCaffrey, Enda, ‘The Return of Faith and Reason to Laïcité: Régis Debray and “le fait religieux” ’, French Cultural Studies, 16.3 (2005), 273–90 McCarthy, Thomas, Ideals and Illusions: On Reconstruction and Deconstruction in Contemporary Critical Theory (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1992) —— ‘The Politics of the Ineffable: Derrida’s Deconstructionism’, The Philosophical Forum, 21.1–2 (1989–90), 146–68 McClelland, C. E., State, Society and University in Germany, 1700–1914 (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 1980) McQuillan, Martin, ed., Deconstruction Reading Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)

196

Bibliography

—— ed., The Politics of Deconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Other of Philosophy (London: Pluto, 2007) Mendras, Henri, and Alistair Cole, Social Change in Modern France: Towards a Cultural Anthropology of the Fifth Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) Merod, Jim, The Political Responsibility of the Critic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987) Messer-Davidow, Ellen, David R. Shumway, and David J. Sylvan, eds., Knowledges. Historical and Critical Studies in Disciplinarity (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993) Milner, Jean-Claude, De l’école (Paris: Seuil, 1984) Minot, Jacques, L’Éducation nationale (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1979) Mitchell, Sollace, ‘Post-Structuralism, Empiricism and Interpretation’, in The Need for Interpretation: Contemporary Conceptions of the Philosopher’s Task, ed. by Sollace Mitchell and Michael Rosen (London: Athlone, 1983), 54–89 Mitchell, W. J. T., and Arnold I. Davidson, eds., The Late Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007) Moi, Toril, Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994) Le Monde de l’éducation, 33 (September 1977), special issue: La Querelle des programmes Mongin, Olivier, ‘D’une vulgate à l’autre: à propos de la nouvelle philosophie’, Esprit, 12 (1977), 62–78 —— Face au scepticisme (1976–93): les mutations du paysage intellectuel ou l’invention de l’intellectuel démocratique (Paris: Découverte, 1994) —— ‘Les Média saisis par les intellectuels’, Esprit, 9–10 (1979), 9–16 Montefiore, Alan, ‘The Neutrality of Philosophy and its Teaching’, Teaching Philosophy, 2.3–4 (1977–78), 265–80 —— ed., Neutrality and Impartiality: The University and Political Commitment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975) —— ed., Philosophy in France Today (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) Moody, Joseph N., French Education since Napoleon (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1978) Moore, A. W., review of Marian Hobson, Jacques Derrida: Opening Lines, European Journal of Philosophy, 8.1 (2000), 122–26 Mortley, Raoul, French Philosophers in Conversation: Levinas, Schneider, Serres, Irigaray, Le Doeuff, Derrida (London: Routledge, 1991) Mouffe, Chantal, ed., Deconstruction and Pragmatism (London: Routledge, 1996) Mucchielli, Laurent, La Découverte du social: naissance de la sociologie en France (1870–1914) (Paris: Découverte, 1998) Müller, Detlef K., Fritz Ringer, and Brian Simon, The Rise of the Modern Educational System: Structural Change and Social Reproduction, 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press; Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1987) Muglioni, Jacques, ‘L’Enseignement philosophique et l’avenir de l’Europe’, in La Philo­ sophie en Europe, ed. by Raymond Klibansky and David Pears (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 652–81 —— ‘Quel enseignement est-il fondé à se dire philosophique?’, Études philosophiques, 3 (1979), 287–302 Mulhern, Francis, ‘Introduction: Preliminaries and Two Contrasts’, in Régis Debray, Teachers, Writers, Celebrities: The Intellectuals of Modern France, trans. by David Macey (London: New Left Books, 1981), 3–25 Murray, Kevin D. S., ed., The Judgement of Paris: Recent French Theory in a Local Context (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992) Naas, Michael B., Derrida From Now On (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008)

Bibliography

197

—— ‘Introduction’, in Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas (Bloomington: Indiana Uni­ versity Press, 1992) Nancy, Jean-Luc, ‘La Détermination philosophique’, Esprit, 12 (February 1981), 66–83 —— ‘ “Fin de la métaphysique” ou fin de l’enseignement?’, Les Études philosophiques, 3 (1979), 303–05 Nehamas, Alexander, ‘Can We Ever Quite Change the Subject? Richard Rorty on Science, Literature, Culture and the Future of Philosophy’, Boundary 2, 10.3 (1982), 395–413 Nelson, Cary and Stephen Watt, Academic Keywords: A Devil’s Dictionary for Higher Education (London: Routledge, 1999) Nelson, Cary, ed., Theory in the Classroom (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986) —— and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, eds., Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1996) Nicolet, Claude, L’Idée républicaine en France, 1789–1924 (Paris: Gallimard, 1982) Nizan, Paul, Les Chiens de garde (Paris: Maspero, 1969) Norris, Christopher, The Contest of the Faculties: Philosophy and Theory after Deconstruction (London: Methuen, 1985) —— Deconstruction and the Interests of Theory (London: Pinter, 1989) —— Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (London: Methuen, 1982) —— ‘Home Thoughts from Abroad: Derrida, Austin, and the Oxford Connection’, Philo­ sophy and Literature, 10.1 (1986), 1–25 —— Jacques Derrida (London: Fontana, 1987) —— ‘Jacques Derrida in Conversation with Christopher Norris’, in Deconstruction, ed. by Andreas Papadakis, Catherine Cooke, and Andrew Benjamin, 71–75 —— ‘On Derrida’s “Apocalyptic Tone”: Textual Politics and the Principle of Reason’, Southern Humanities Review, 19.1 (1986), 3–30 —— New Idols of the Cave: On the Limits of Anti-Realism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997) —— ‘Philosophy as Not Just a “Kind of Writing”: Derrida and the Claim of Reason’, in Redrawing the Lines: Analytical Philosophy, Deconstruction, and Literary Theory, ed. by Reed Way Dasenbrock (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 189–226 O’Neill, John, ‘Lost in the Post: (Post)modernity Explained to Youth’, in The Politics of Jean-François Lyotard: Justice and Political Theory, ed. by Chris Rojek and Bryan S. Turner (London: Routledge, 1998) Ogilvie, Bertrand, ‘L’Enseignement de la philosophie à la croisée des chemins’, Les Temps Modernes, 536–37 (1991), 81–96 —— ‘Évaluation et finalité des systèmes éducatifs’, in L’Enseignement de la philosophie à la croisée des chemins, ed. by Laurence Cornu, 163–78 Oleson, Alexandra, and John Voss, eds., The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1860–1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979) Osborne, Peter, Philosophy in Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 2000) —— ed., A Critical Sense: Interviews with Intellectuals (London: Routledge, 1996) Ozouf, Mona, L’École, l’église et la République, 1871–1914 (Paris: Cana, 1982) Papadakis, Andreas, Catherine Cooke and Andrew Benjamin, eds., Deconstruction: Omnibus Volume (London: Academy, 1989) Parker, Noel, ‘Educational “Reform” in France’, Radical Philosophy, 14 (1976), 37–38 Paul, H. W., From Knowledge to Power: The Rise of the Science Empire in France, 1860–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) Pavel, Thomas, The Feud of Language: A History of Structuralist Thought (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989) Payne, Michael, and John Schad, eds., Life after Theory (London: Continuum, 2003)

198

Bibliography

Pena-Ruiz, Henri, Dieu et Marianne: philosophie de la laïcité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999) —— L’École (Paris: Flammarion, 1999) Pena-Ruiz, Henri, and Anne Baudart, eds., Les préaux de la République (Paris: Minerve, 1991) Peters, Michael, ‘Against Finkielkraut’s La Défaite de la pensée: Culture, Postmodernism and Education’, French Cultural Studies, 4 (1993), 91–106 —— ‘Professing with Derrida’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 3.1 (2004), 41–57 Peters, Michael, ed., Education and the Postmodern Condition (Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 1995) Petit, Dominique, ‘Mémoires de Kowalsky’, Le Doctrinal de Sapience, 5 (1978), 13 Phillips Griffiths, A., ed., Contemporary French Philosophy, Royal Institute of Philosophy Lecture Series, 21 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) Philosophie, école, mXunicodeX00EAXme combat. Colloque de Sèvres, 6–8 Mars 1984 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1984) Pinto, Louis, ‘L’École des philosophes: la dissertation de philosophie au baccalauréat’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 47–48 (1983), 21–36 —— ‘L’Inconscient scolaire des philosophes’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 135 (2000), 48–57 —— Les Philosophes entre le lycée et l’avant-garde (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1987) —— ‘Theory in Practice’, in Bourdieu: A Critical Reader, ed. by Richard Shusterman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 94–112 Plumb, J. H., ed., Crisis in the Humanities (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964) Poirier, Jean-Louis, ‘Quelle est la signification philosophique de l’enseignement philo­ sophique français?’, Revue de l’enseignement philosophique, 30.1 (1980), 97–111 Pol-Droit, Roger, Philosophie et démocratie dans le monde, une enquete de l’Unesco (Paris: Poche, 1995 Poucet, Bruno, Enseigner la philosophie: histoire d’une discipline scolaire, 1860–1990 (Paris: CNRS, 1999) Powell, Jason, Jacques Derrida: A Biography (London: Continuum, 2006) Prost, Antoine, Douze leçons sur l’histoire (Paris: Seuil, 1996) —— ‘Écoles, Collèges and Lycées in France since 1968’, in May ’68, ed. by David Hanley and Anne P. Kerr, 21–35 —— Éducation, société et politique: une histoire de l’enseignement en France de 1945 à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 1992) —— Éloge des pédagogues (Paris: Seuil, 1985) —— Histoire de l’enseignement en France, 1800–1967 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1968) Proust, Joelle, ‘Nouvelles frontières’, Philosophie, 35 (1992), 3–18 Quiniou, Yves, ‘La crise de l’enseignement de la philosophie’, Revue de l’enseignement philosophique, 26.6 (1976), 24–32 Rabaté, Jean-Michel, The Future of Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002) Radical Philosophy, 129 (2005), ‘Obituary Symposium: Jacques Derrida’ Radical Philosophy, 15 (1976), Editorial, 1 Raison Présente, 15 (1970), dossier: ‘François Châtelet, La Philosophie des professeurs’, 10–14 Rajan, Tilottama, ‘Derrida, Foucault and the University’, Mosaic, special issue: Following Derrida: Legacies, 40.2 (2007), 133–50 Rancière, Danièle, ‘L’État et la philosophie’, introduction to new edn of Défense de l’université et de la philosophie by Victor Cousin (Paris: Solin, 1977) Rancière, Jacques, La leçon d’Althusser (Paris: Gallimard, 1974) —— Le Maître ignorant: cinq leçons sur l’émancipation intellectuelle (Paris: Fayard, 1987) —— ‘Nous qui sommes si critiques’, in Groupe école et philosophie, La Grève des philosophes (Paris: Editions Osiris, 1984), 62-70

Bibliography

199

—— and Collectif, ‘Révoltes Logiques’, L’Empire du sociologue (Paris: Découverte, 1984) Rand, Richard, ed., Logomachia: The Conflict of the Faculties (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992) Rapaport, Herman, The Theory Mess: Deconstruction in Eclipse (New York: Columbia Uni­ versity Press, 2001) Raymond, Gino, ‘Education: from Confessionalism to Consumerism’, in Structures of Power in Modern France, ed. by Gino Raymond (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 115–38 —— ed., France during the Socialist Years (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1994) Raynaud, Philippe, and Paul Thibaud, La Fin de l’école Républicaine (Paris: CalmannLevy, 1990) Read, Malcolm K., Language, Text, Subject: A Critique of Hispanism (Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1992) Reader, Keith, Intellectuals and the Left in France since 1968 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987) —— Régis Debray: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto, 1995) —— and Khursheed Wadia, The May 1968 Events in France: Reproductions and Interpretations (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993) Readings, Bill, ‘The Deconstruction of Politics’, in Reading de Man Reading, ed. by Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 223–43 —— ‘From Emancipation to Obligation: Sketch for a Heteronomous Politics of Education’, in Michael Peters (ed), Education and the Postmodern Condition (Auckland and New York: Bergin and Garvey, 1994), 249-61 —— ‘For A Heteronomous Cultural Politics’, Oxford Literary Review 15.1-2 (1993), 163-199 —— ‘Dwelling in the Ruins’, Oxford Literary Review 17 (1995), 15-28 —— The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996) Rée, Jonathan, ‘Le Philosophe du peuple’, , in Les Sauvages dans la cité, ed. by Jean-Claude Beaune, et al., eds., 104–15 —— ‘Philosophy as an Academic Discipline: The Changing Place of Philosophy in an Arts Education’, Studies in Higher Education, 3.1 (1978), 5–23 —— ‘Professional Philosophers’, Radical Philosophy, 1 (1972), 34–39 —— review of Bruce Kuklick’s The Rise of American Philosophy, Modern Language Notes, 93 (1978), 972–81 —— Michael Ayers, and Adam Westoby, Philosophy and its Past (Hassocks: Harvester, 1978) Renan, E., Essais de morale et de critique (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères), 1959 Renaut, Alain, Les Révolutions de l’université: essai sur la modernisation de la culture (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1995) Revel, Jean-François, Pourquoi des philosophes? (Paris: Laffont, 1979) Revue de l’enseignement philosophique, 25.6 (1975) Richmond, Sarah, ‘Derrida and Analytical Philosophy: Speech Acts and their Force’, European Journal of Philosophy, 4.1 (1996), 38–62 Rifkin, Adrian, and Roger Thomas, eds., Voices of the People: The Social life of ‘La sociale’ at the End of the Second Empire (London: Routledge, 1988) Ringer, Fritz, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969) —— Fields of Knowledge: French Academic Culture in Comparative Perspective, 1890–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) Robbins, Bruce, ‘The Politics of Theory’, Social Text, 14.1 (1987), 3–18 Robert, André, Système éducatif et réformes (Paris: Nathan, 1993) Roman, Joel, ‘La Parole enseignante’, Autrement, 102 (1988), 166–69 Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg, ed., Philosophers on Education: New Historical Perspectives (London: Routledge, 1998) —— ‘The Ruling History of Education’, in Philosophers on Education, ed. by Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, 1–12

200

Bibliography

Rorty, Richard, Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972–1980 (Brighton: Harvester, 1982) —— Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) —— ‘Derrida and the Philosophical Tradition’, in Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 327–50 —— ‘Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism’, in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, ed. by Chantal Mouffe, 13–18 —— J. B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner, eds., Philosophy in History: Essays on the Historiography of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) Rosat, Jean-Jacques, ‘Roland Brunet et l’enseignement philosophique français’, in Patrick Dupouey and Jacqueline Brunet, Roland Brunet, 17–21 Ross, Dorothy, ed., Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences, 1870–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994) Ross, Kristin, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1995) —— ‘Introduction’ to Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 2–28 —— May ’68 and its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002) Roth, Michael S., Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988) Rothblatt, Sheldon, The Modern University and its Discontents: The Fate of Newman’s Legacies in Britain and America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) —— Tradition and Change in English Liberal Education: An Essay in History and Culture (London: Faber, 1976) —— and Björn Wittrock, eds., The European and American University since 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) Roy, Olivier, ‘Les États-Généraux ou l’apologie de nous-mêmes par nous-mêmes’, Le Doctrinal de Sapience, 6 (1979), 5–11 —— ‘Le Fantôme de l’inculture ou l’inculture des professeurs’, Esprit, 5 (1981), 99–110 —— ‘Sophie va au lycée’, Le Doctrinal de Sapience, 5 (1978), 7–13 Royle, Nicholas, After Derrida (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995) Rubenstein, Diane, What’s Left? The École Normale Supérieure and the Right (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990) Ryan, Michael, Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982) Safran, William, The French Polity (New York: MacKay, 1998) Saïd, Edward, ‘The Problem of Textuality: Two Exemplary Positions’, Critical Inquiry, 4 (1978), 673–714 —— The World, the Text and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983) Schmitt, Gerhard, ‘Philosophy in German Secondary Schools’, Teaching Philosophy, 2.3/4 (1977–78), 257–64 Schnapp, Alain, and Pierre Vidal-Nacquet, eds., Journal de la commune étudiante: textes et documents, novembre 1967-juin 1968, 2nd edn (Paris: Seuil, 1988) Schneider, Ulrich Johannes, ‘The Teaching of Philosophy at German Universities in the Nineteenth Century’, History of Universities, 106.2 (1993), 197–289 Schrift, Alan D., ‘Is There Such a Thing as “French Philosophy”? Or Why Do We Read the French so Badly?’, in After the Deluge, ed. by Julian Bourg, 21–47 —— Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: Key Themes and Thinkers (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006) Schultz, William R., and Lewis L. B. Fried, eds., Jacques Derrida: An Annotated Primary and Secondary Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1992) Séguin, Louis, ‘Une certaine idée de la philosophie’, a review of Jacques Derrida’s Du droit à la philosophie, La Quinzaine Littéraire, 564 (16 October 1990), 20–21

Bibliography

201

Sernin, André, Alain: un sage dans la cité (Paris: Laffont, 1985) Shaffer, Elinor S., ‘Romantic Philosophy and the Organisation of the Disciplines: The Founding of the Humboldt University of Berlin’, in Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. by Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 38–54 Sheridan, Alan, Michel Foucault. The Will to Truth (London and New York: Routledge, 1980) Shumway, David R., and Ellen Messer-Davidow, ‘Disciplinarity: An Introduction’, Poetics Today, 12.2 (1991), 201–25 Silverman, Hugh J., Textualities: Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction (London: Rout­ ledge, 1994) —— ed., Writing the Politics of Difference (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991) Simon, W. M., ‘The “Two Cultures” in Nineteenth-Century France: Victor Cousin and Auguste Comte’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 26.1 (1965), 45–58 Sirinelli, Jean-François, ‘La Khâgne’, in Les Lieux de mémoire, ed. by Pierre Nora, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), III, 589–624 Smith, Anthony, and Frank Webster, eds., The Postmodern University? Contested Visions of Higher Education in Society (Buckingham: Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University, 1997) Smith, Robert J., The École Normale Supérieure and the Third Republic (Albany: State Uni­ versity of New York Press, 1982) Smith, Roger, The Fontana History of the Human Sciences (London: Fontana, 1997) Social Epistemology, 1–3 (1998), special issue: Sites of Knowledge Production: The University Société française de Philosophie, ‘La Place et le caractère de la philosophie dans l’enseignement secondaire’ (1902), in La Philosophie saisie par l’État: les petits écrits sur l’enseignement philosophique en France, ed. by Stéphane Douailler, et al. (Paris: Aubier, 1989), 98–122 Sojcher, Jacques, Le Professeur de philosophie (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1976) Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorti, ‘Limits and Openings of Marx in Derrida’, in Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (London: Routledge, 1994), 97–119 Starr, Peter, Logics of Failed Revolt: French Theory after May ’68 (Stanford: Stanford Uni­ versity Press, 1995) Stewart, Jon, ‘Schopenhauer’s Charge and Modern Academic Philosophy: Some Problems Facing Philosophical Pedagogy’, Metaphilosophy, 26.3 (1995), 270–78 Stock-Morton, Phyllis, Moral Education for a Secular Society: The Development of Morale Laïque in Nineteenth-Century France (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988) Stray, Christopher, Classics Transformed: Schools, Universities and Society in England, 1830– 1960, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998) SubStance, 34.1 (2005), special issue: Jacques Derrida, 1930–2004. A Counter-Obituary. ‘Table Ronde’, Esprit, 1–4 (1980), 60–75 Taine, Hippolyte, Les Philosophes français du XIXe siècle (Paris: Pauvert, 1966) Tavoillot, Pierre-Henri, ‘L’Invention de la classe de philosophie’, in Philosopher à 18 ans, ed. by Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, 110–67 Thibaudet, Albert, La République des professeurs (Paris: Grasset, 1927) Thomas, Michael, The Reception of Derrida: Translation and Transformation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) Thompson Klein, Julie, Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990) Thuillier, Guy, Socrate fonctionnaire (Paris: Éditions Complexe, 1969; repr. 1982) Too, Yun Lee, and Niall Livingstone, eds., Pedagogy and Power: Rhetorics of Classical Learning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)

202

Bibliography

Touraine, Alain, Le Mouvement de mai ou le Communisme utopique (Paris: Seuil, 1968) Trifonas, Peter Pericles, ‘Auditing Education: Deconstruction and the Archiving of Knowledge as Curriculum’, Parallax, 10.2 (2004), 37–49 —— The Ethics of Writing: Derrida, Deconstruction, and Pedagogy (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000) —— ed., Revolutionary Pedagogies: Cultural Politics, Instituting Education, and the Discourse of Theory (London: Routledge, 2000) —— and Michael A. Peters, eds., Derrida, Deconstruction and Education: Ethics of Pedagogy and Research (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004) Tully, James, ed., Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics (Cambridge: Polity, 1988) Turner, Stephen, The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge and Presuppositions (Cambridge: Polity, 1994) Ulmer, Gregory L., Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985) Ungar, Steven, ‘Philosophy after Philosophy: Debate and Reform in France since 1968’, Enclitic, 8.1–2 (1984), 13–26 —— Roland Barthes: The Professor of Desire (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983) Vaughan, Michalina, and Margaret S. Archer, Social Conflict and Educational Change in England and France, 1789–1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971) Venuti, Lawrence, The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (London: Routledge, 1998) —— ‘Translation, philosophy, materialism’, Radical Philosophy (Sept-Oct 1996), 22-25 Verger, Jacques, ed., Histoire des universités en France (Toulouse: Privat, 1986) Vermeren, Patrice, Victor Cousin: le jeu de la philosophie et de l’état (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995) Vidal-Nacquet, Pierre, with C. Pietri, C. Nicolet, and E. Will, ‘Vercingétorix né sous Louis-Philippe’, Le Monde, 29 June 1977, 7 Wacquant, Loïc, ‘Bourdieu in America: Notes on the Transatlantic Importation of Social Theory’, in Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives, ed. by Craig Calhoun, Edward Lipuma, and Moishe Postone (Cambridge: Polity, 1993), 224–90 Watson, Richard A., ‘Notes and Discussions: Shadow History in Philosophy’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 31.1 (1993), 95–109 Weber, Eugene, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1977) Weber, Florence, ‘L’Autonomisation de la sociologie par rapport à la philosophie’, in Encyclopédie philosophique universelle, ed. by André Jacob, I (1989), 886–92 Weber, Samuel, ‘The Future of the University: The Cutting Edge’, in Ideas of the University, ed. by Terry Smith (Sydney: Research Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Sydney, and Power Publications, 1996), 17–39 —— Institution and Interpretation, with afterword by Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) —— ‘The Limits of Professionalism’, Oxford Literary Review, 5.1–2 (1982), 59–79 —— ‘Reading over a Globalised World’, in Encountering Derrida, ed. by Allison Weiner and Simon Morgan Wortham, 58–67 Close Preview —— ‘The Vaulted Eye: Remarks on Knowledge and Professionalism’, Yale French Studies, 77 (1990), 44–60 Weiner, Allison, and Simon Morgan Wortham, eds., Encountering Derrida: Legacies and Futures of Deconstruction (London: Continuum, 2007) Weisz, George, The Emergence of Modern Universities in France, 1863–1914 (Princeton: Prince­ ton University Press, 1983)

Bibliography

203

White, John, ‘The Roots of Philosophy’, in The Impulse to Philosophise, ed. by A. Phillips Griffiths, The Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 33 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 73–88 Wiggins, Grant, ‘The Place of Philosophy in the High School Curriculum’, Teaching Philo­ sophy, 4.1 (1989), 13–21 Wigley, Mark, The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1993) Wittrock, Björn, ‘The Modern University: The Three Transformations’, in The European and American University since 1800, ed. by Sheldon Rothblatt and Björn Wittrock, 303–42 Wood, David, ‘An Introduction to Derrida’, Radical Philosophy, 21 (1979), 18–28 —— ‘Translating the Differences: The Futures of Continental Philosophy’, in Writing the Politics of Difference, ed. by Hugh J. Silverman, 178–213 Wortham, Simon Morgan, ‘Bringing Criticism to Account: Economy, Exchange and Cultural Theory’, Economy and Society, 26.3 (1997), 400–18 —— Counter-Institutions: Jacques Derrida and the Question of the University (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006) —— Rethinking the University: Leverage and Deconstruction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999) Young, Robert J. C., ‘Post-Structuralism: The End of Theory’, Oxford Literary Review, 5.1–2 (1982), 3–15 —— Torn Halves: Political Conflict in Literary and Cultural Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996) Zeldin, Theodore, France, 1848–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), II: Intellect, Taste and Anxiety —— ed., Conflicts in French Society: Anticlericalism, Education and Morals in the Nineteenth Century (London: Allen and Unwin, 1970)

Index ❖

ACIREPH 44 Alain 66, 75, 119, 136, 161 Althusser, Louis 50, 72 nn. 18 & 21, 77 n. 89, 94, 106 n. 87 APPEP 54–55, 57–59, 74 n. 51, 76 n. 70, 77 nn. 87 & 89, 83, 115, 137 n. 55, 1412, 165, 170 n. 4 Austin, J. L. 39 n. 62, 103 n. 27, 157, 174 n. 66 Ayer, Alfred J. 23–24, 40 n. 80 Balibar, Renée 40 n. 75, 51 Barrès, Maurice 72 n. 13, 121, 137 n. 48 Barthes, Roland 15, 106 nn. 82 & 85 Bataille de la presse 56–57, 67, 80, 84, 108, 174 n. 68 Benda, Julien 28, 43 n. 103, 77 n. 97 Bennington, Geoffrey 10, 37 nn. 3 & 5, 39 n. 62, 69, 71, 79, 81, 92, 102 Beullac, Christian 52, 63, 72 n. 91, 108, 127, 141 Bloom, Allan 56, 74 n. 43, 128 Bourdieu, Pierre: ‘Aspirant philosophe: un point de vue sur le champ universitaire dans les années 50’ 21 ‘Les Conditions sociales de la circulation internationale des idées’ 104 n. 28, 176 n. 119 La Distinction: critique sociale du jugement 103 n. 24, 104 n. 36 ‘Fieldwork in Philosophy’ 21, 86, 103 nn. 21 & 27 Homo Academicus 104 n. 37 ‘L’Inconscient d’école’ 104 n. 28 L’Ontologie politique de Martin Heidegger 103 n. 27 ‘Passport to Duke’ 104 n. 38 ‘The Philosophical Institution’ 105 n. 65, 106 n. 69 ‘Les Sciences sociales et la philosophie’ 85, 103 nn. 24 & 26, 104 n. 36, 137 n. 53 Les Héritiers: les étudiants et la culture 72 n. 20 La Reproduction 72 n. 20 ‘Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945: Death and Resurrection of a Philosophy without a Subject’ 84 Bouveresse, Jacques 76 n. 79, 170 n. 10, 176 n. 108 Brunet, Roland 79, 109–11, 114–18, 122–25, 129, 130, 134, 135 nn. 3, 12 & 17, 137 n. 55, 138 n. 60, 149, 163, 170 n. 1 Canivez, André 29, 41–42 n. 96, 43 n. 102, 44 n. 138, 96–97, 99–100, 106 n. 72, 120–21, 126 n. 34, 136 n. 42, 137 n. 46 Chatelet, François 45 n. 140, 66, 68, 71, 77–78 nn. 96 & 97, 88, 93–94, 98, 110–11, 144, 171 n. 23, 175 n. 83

Collège International de Philosophie 3, 14, 43 n. 102, 104 n. 36, 105 n. 43, 110, 130, 141–47, 161–68, 176 n. 108 Cousin, Victor 24, 27–36, 38 n. 38, 39 n. 61, 42 nn. 96, 99 & 100, 43 nn. 102, 105, 107, 109, 110, 111, 112 & 120, 45 n. 138, 50, 51, 56, 58, 60, 62, 67, 70, 71, 76 n. 73, 77 n. 97, 80 & 91, 105 n. 57, 108, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117 & 126, 137 n. 51, 166 Critchley, Simon 20, 39 nn. 65 & 66, 105 n. 44, 177 n. 125 Culler, Jonathan 6, 11, 15, 17–19, 39 nn. 41 & 42, 65, 82, 95, 106 nn. 70 & 78 Canguilhem, Georges 90, 105 n. 53, 122 Chevènement, Jean-Pierre 144, 151 Clark, Timothy 167, 172 n. 30, 176 n. 117, 177 n. 121 conflict of the faculties 86, 114, 130, 147–51, 157, 175 n. 80 Cooper, David: ‘Intimacy Thesis’ 83, 103 n. 15, 105 n. 58 Debray, Régis 25, 32, 41 nn. 91 & 92, 106 n. 87, 125–28, 138 n. 63, 64, 138 n. 71, 75 deconstruction: in America 1, 6, 17, 37 n. 16 and paleonymic logic 164, 167, 170 politics of 5–6, 10–12, 17–18, 148 Derrida, Jacques: L’Âge de Hegel’ 80, 117, 132 ‘L’Autre nom du Collège’ 170 n. 7 ‘Avant-projet pour la constitution d’un groupe de recherches sur l’enseignement philosophique’ 47, 50, 76 n. 83, 79, 82, 87, 90–92, 101, 109–12, 117, 143, 146 ‘Between Brackets I’ 13, 39 n. 44, 78 n. 110, 80–82, 92, 102 n. 3, 105 n. 62, 129 ‘Coups d’envoi’ 37 n. 8, 152, 171 n. 13, 175 n. 94 Du droit à la philosophie 2, 3, 90, 105 n. 54, 157, 169 ‘Le Facteur de la vérité’ 80 ‘Fifty-Two Aphorisms for a Foreword’ 175 n. 96, 176 n. 101 Glas 80, 102 n. 4 ‘La Langue et le discours de la méthode’ 20, 40 n. 69, 177 n. 24 ‘Lettre préface: les antinomies de la discipline philosophique’ 142 ‘Mochlos; or, The Conflict of the Faculties’ 147–50, 157 Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001 37 n. 10

Index ‘On Colleges and Philosophy’ 171 n. 23, 176 n. 103 ‘Onto-Theology of National-Humanism (Prolegomena to a Hypothesis)’ 37 n. 8 ‘Où commence et comment finit un corps enseignant’ 78 n. 99, 79, 81, 91–99, 101, 149, 169 ‘La philosophie et ses classes’ 63, 118 ‘The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils’ 148–53 ‘Sendoffs’ 171 n. 13 ‘Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and Other Small Seisms’ 135 n. 15, 177 n. 26 Rapport de la Commission de Philosophie et d’Epistémologie 170 n. 10 Spectres de Marx: l’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle internationale 37 n. 3, 38 n. 33 ‘The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations’4, 37 n. 8, 102 n. 6 L’Université sans condition 173 n. 47 La Vérité en peinture 81, 93, 102 n. 8, 103 n. 64 ‘The Villanova Roundtable: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida’ 170 n. 4, 172 n. 32, 176 n. 104 Descombes, Vincent 16, 21–23, 26, 32, 39 n. 57, 40 nn. 70 & 76, 138 n. 69 Doctrinal de Sapience 42 n. 96, 43 n. 114, 49, 67, 71 n. 3, 72 n. 13, 89, 109, 123, 135 n. 10, 137 n. 51, 166 Dosse, François 56, 74 n. 42, 77 n. 89, 104 n. 33, 175 n. 85 Durkheim, Emile 36, 59, 75 nn. 54 & 59, 85, 103 n. 19, 120 Duruy, Victor 33, 44 nn. 125 & 129, 67, 75 n. 68 Eagleton, Terry 6, 7, 10, 38 n. 20, 37, 39 n. 39 Etats-Généraux de la Philosophie 2, 68–69, 71–74, 73 n. 33, 79, 102 n. 1, 108 n. 11, 127 n. 8, 130, 135 n. 13, 138 n. 75, 139 n. 77, 141, 170 nn. 6 & 7 Fabiani, Jean-Louis 28, 42 n. 96, 43 n. 104, 75 n. 54, 87–88, 92, 99, 104 nn. 39 & 40, 105 nn. 41 & 58, 116, 120, 135 n. 24, 136 nn. 37, 38 & 39 Falloux law 31, 33, 43 n. 118 Faye, Jean-Pierre 144, 162, 171 nn. 14, 16 & 19, 175 n. 90 Ferrari, Joseph 28, 43 n. 102, 72 n. 17, 105 n. 57 Ferry, Jules 34, 50, 106 n. 87 Ferry, Luc 24, 41 n. 86, 42 n. 96, 44 n. 123, 46, 56, 62, 71 n. 2, 74 nn. 40 & 41, 76 nn. 77 & 78, 76 n. 79, 92, 139 n. 77, 172 n. 37, 174 nn. 73 & 75 Finkielkraut, Alain 128 Fortoul, Hippolyte 32, 35–36, 53, 128 Foucault, Michel 10, 15–16, 28, 58 nn. 37 & 38, 39 n. 58, 76 n. 73, 95, 137 n. 52 Fouchet, Christian 54, 55, 61, 65, 69, 73 n. 36, 75 n. 51, 105 n. 56

205

Fouillée, Alfred 36, 45 n. 143, 58, 67, 75 n. 54, 106 n. 76, 115–16 Fynsk, Christopher 9, 16–18, 37 n. 6, 38 nn. 18, 31 & 32, 39, nn. 42 & 59, 72 n. 14, 135 n. 19, 163, 172 n. 30, 175 n. 93, 176 n. 100 Gaussen, Frédéric 52–53, 60, 68, 73 n. 26, 74 n. 51, 75 n. 62, 78 n. 105 Genette, Gérard 44 n. 136, 99–101, 106 n. 84, 115, 169 Ghosh, Peter 10, 38 n. 38 Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry 51–52, 60, 143, 179 Glendinning, Simon 37 nn. 3 & 5, 39 n. 62, 40 n. 74 GREPH, Qui a peur de la philosophie? 1, 3, 5, 17, 42 n. 99, 76 n. 79, 90, 109, 113, 128 Habermas, Jurgen 8, 155, 173 nn. 55 & 56, 174 nn. & 75, 76 & 77, 175 n. 89 Haby reform 31, 47–48, 50–58, 60–63, 65, 67, 70, 72 n. 21, 73 nn. 23, 26, 31, 33 & 38, 75 n. 51, 77 n. 87, 78 n. 101, 81, 84–85, 90, 108–09, 111–12, 117, 122, 126–27, 137 n. 54, 138 n. 62, 141, 143, 146, 151, 158 Heath, Stephen 6, 17–18, 37 n. 15, 39 n. 60 Hobson, Marian 37 nn. 3 & 5 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 150–51, 155, 157, 159, 167, 172 nn. 37, 38 & 39, 174 n. 72, 73 & 75 Hunter, Ian 150, 172 n. 41, 173 n. 55 Interdisciplinarity 2, 14, 65, 130, 141, 145–46, 161–64, 166–68, 170, 175 nn. 85 & 97 Johnson, Barbara 8, 38 n. 26, 97, 106 n. 75 Kamuf, Peggy 148, 153, 172 n. 28 Klein, Julie Thompson 162, 175 nn. 87, 88 & 97 Lacroix, Jean 60, 73 n. 32, 75 n. 66 Laïcité 34, 44 n. 134 Lecourt, Dominique 144, 171 nn. 14 & 17 Lyotard, Jean-François 54, 65, 69, 73 n. 36, 77 nn. 91, 93 & 94, 78 n. 107, 105 n. 58, 110, 125, 138 n. 61, 139 n. 82, 145, 159, 174 nn. 72 & 73, 175 n. 97, 187 La Condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir 65, 77 n. 91, 157, 174 n. 72, 175 nn. 85 & 97 Jankélévitch, Vladimir 37 n. 4, 62–63, 76 n. 76, 110, 113, 135 nn. 13 & 20 Kant, Immanuel 22, 87, 103 n. 24, 104 n. 37, 106 n. 74, 114–15, 125, 129, 135 n. 23, 148–51, 154–60, 166–67, 172 n. 41, 174 nn. 64, 65, 66 & 67, 176 n. 121 Kofman, Sarah 109, 118, 123, 135 n. 4 Le Doeuff, Michèle 2, 64–65, 69, 72 n. 10, 76 nn.

206

Index

84 & 95, 78 n. 106, 79, 81, 102 nn. 2 & 12, 109–10, 116–17, 124, 126, 129, 135 nn. 4, 9 & 11, 136 n. 29137 n. 58, 138 nn. 59, 60 & 66, 139 nn. 78 & 80 Lefranc, Jean 74 n. 51, 76 n. 81, 83, 94, 103 n. 13, 105 n. 60, 106 n. 68 Leitch, Vincent 14, 39 nn. 52, 54 & 55, 98, 106 n. 78, 176 n. 107, 164–66 Macherey, Pierre 21–23, 25, 40 nn. 72, 73 & 75 Marin, Louis 106 n. 81 May ’68: 46, 50, 65, 71 n. 1, 72 n. 15, 111 Milner, Jean-Claude 100, 106 n. 87, 110, 125, 128, 138 n. 62, 176 n. 111 Montefiore, Alan 21–22, 84, 86, 91, 102, 103 n. 18, 106 n. 81 Monzie, Anatole de 35, 45 n. 140, 58, 122, 136 n. 31, 137 n. 51 Muglioni, Jacques 91, 105 n. 56, 126, 137 n. 54, 138 n. 62, 138 nn. 63 & 67 Nancy, Jean-Luc 2, 68, 76 n. 7279, 88, 105 n.61, 109–10, 114, 130–35, 136 n. 30, 139 nn. 83 & 85, 140, 170 Nietzsche, Friedrich 44, 62, 76 n. 79, 92, 105 n. 58 Nizan, Paul 77 n. 97, 94 Norris, Christopher 5–6, 9–10, 19, 37, 14 & 16, 37 n. 14, 38 nn. 27 & 29, 148, 172 n. 31 Nouveaux philosophes 128, 138 n. 75 Philosophe-fonctionnaire 28, 32 La Philo selon Philippe 23 Pinto, Louis 46, 71 nn. 2 & 8, 88, 92, 104 n. 39, 105 nn. 42 & 58, 109, 166, 176 n. 109 Pompidou, Georges 51 Professeur de philosophie 72 n. 13, 89, 108, 117–19 Radical Philosophy 79, 89, 105 Rancière, Danièle 31, 43 n. 114, 62, 75 n. 52, 76 n. 75 Rancière, Jacques 49–50, 72 n. 15, 86, 104 n.30, 106 n. 87, 110, 126, 128, 137 n. 51, 138 n. 68, 139 n. 76, 149, 151, 172 n. 36, 172 n. 45 Ravaisson, Félix 33 Readings, Bill 38 n. 28, 77 nn. 92 & 93, 156, 164, 167, 172 nn. 30 & 41, 173 n. 54, 174 n. 61, 176 nn. 102 & 116

Rée, Jonathan 30, 43 n. 113, 74 n. 50, 89, 105 nn. 48 & 52, 121, 124, 136 n. 43 Renan, Ernest 27, 29, 42 n. 99, 49 Renaut, Alain 24, 32, 41 n. 86, 42 n. 96, 44 n. 123, 46, 56, 62, 71 n. 2, 74 nn. 40 & 41, 76 nn. 77, 78 & 79, 92, 139 n. 77, 172 n. 37, 173 n. 44,174 nn. 70, 73 & 75, 176 n. 115 Renouvier, Charles Bernard 27, 33, 42 n. 99 Ricoeur, Paul 75 n. 51, 102 n. 6, 110, 122 Ringer, Fritz K. 41 n. 93, 58, 75 n. 54, 106 n. 76, 137 n. 48, 173 n. 59, 174 nn. 73 & 74 Rorty, Richard 5, 20, 37 n. 14, 38 n. 34, 170, 171 n. 23 Rothblatt, Sheldon 119, 121, 136 n. 35, 155, 173 n. 44, 173 nn. 57 & 58, 174 nn. 60, 63 & 74 Ryan, Michael 6, 10–11, 17, 47, 76 n. 79, 110, 125, 127, 138 n. 58, 176 n. 117 Said, Edward 6, 38 nn. 17 & 38, 95, 106 n. 70 Schopenhauer, Arthur 92, 105 n. 58 Schrift, Alan D.39 n. 65, 40 nn. 75 & 80 Sirinelli, Jean-François 24 Société française de philosophie 116, 121 Thibaudet, Alfred 44 n. 131, 119–20, 136 n. 41 Thuillier, Pierre 28, 43 n. 102, 78 n. 97, 88 Ulmer, Gregory 14, 98 Ungar, Steven 15–18, 22, 23, 39 nn. 56 & 57, 46 University of Berlin 29, 43 n. 109, 144, 147, 149–50, 153, 155, 159–63, 172 n. 37, 173 n. 55, 175 nn. 80 & 89 Vermeren, Patrice 32, 41 n. 96, 42 nn. 97 & 100, 43 nn. 109, 111 & 118, 44 n. 130, 49–51, 71 n. 3, 72 nn. 14 & 16, 81, 86, 104 n. 29, 109–10, 116, 138 n. 61, 142–43, 166, 176 n. 114 Wigley, Mark 37, n. 10 Yale critics 6–7, 37 n. 16 Young, Robert 10, 38 n. 35, 69–70, 78 n. 109 Zeldin, Theodore 23–24, 34, 40 n. 81, 43 n. 106, 44 nn. 130 & 133, 59, 121, 137 n. 45