Professor
Übermensch Post’s Aisthesis, image by Daniel Y. Harris
Carl Raschke and
Post-Philosophy
An Interview
The following
interview with internationally renowned author and academic, Professor Carl
Raschke, is conducted by X-Peri
Editor-in-Chief, Daniel Y. Harris, as part of the partnership between Esthesis and X-Peri. This partnership was launched with Carl Raschke’s interview of Daniel Y. Harris, aptly titled From
Shakespeare To Search Engines – Experimental Poetry Comes Of Age.
Carl Raschke is Professor of Religious
Studies, University of Denver, Senior Editor, Journal for Cultural
and Religious Theory, Co-Founder and Director, Global Arts & Ideas Network, Associate
and Managing Editor, Political
Theology Today and
General Editor, Esthesis
Daniel Y. Harris: From the concept of the alchemy of the word, to
quote from the title of your epochal first book, to infinitely capacious tropes
such as Derridean différance and
Deleuzian rhizome, through to the
disciplines of political and critical theology, in what ways would you describe
your current philosophical and theological thinking as post-philosophy?
Carl Raschke: I have coined the term “post-philosophy” (in contrast
with, for example, François Laruelle’s catchy term “non-philosophy”, which
he lifted from Deleuze decades ago) to convey the theme that philosophy is not
longer an autonomous strategy of discourse, but a way of “branding” certain
privileged strands of theoretical conversations while claiming a certain
pedigree for them that would effectively turn the heads of our cultural
peerage-mongers.
Philosophy historically,
especially in the modern period, has claimed to be a kind of “metalanguage”
grafted from the hard sciences that might somehow serve as a “grounding”
operation for all more specialized investigations of both the natural and the
human world. Certainly that was the aim of Descartes’ claim to have discovered
with his ego cogito the
“Archimedean point” of all knowledge, and it applies as well as to Kant’s
“Copernican revolution,” Hegel’s standpoint of absolute Wissenschaft, or Heidegger’s
“fundamental ontology.”
One may say it is also the thrust
of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. And it of course is exactly what Laruelle
is doing with his so-called “non-philosophy”, which is actually philosophy in
its purest sense (i.e., trying to acquire a kind of Olympian standpoint from
which one can enter directly into the gaze of the Real). But with what
Heidegger himself called the Destruktion of
metaphysics, from which Derrida derived his notion of “deconstruction”, we have
also the “destruction” of philosophy. Heidegger himself called it “the end
of philosophy.”
With Derrida we have the still
unappreciated insight which he took in a roundabout manner from Hegel, that we
cannot separate philosophy from the history of philosophy, except that for the
former philosophy always amounts to a kind of unique sentience about what
philosophy is actually doing that is attendant on the reading of philosophical
texts. With Deleuze, particularly during the period he collaborated with
Guattari, we see an effort to return to what might be considered the
"original being" of philosophy, which is the being of “bodies” and
their interpenetration and interaction with each other. Deleuze maintained
that the ancient Stoics had taken what we might call a “somatology” (from the
Greek soma (=“body”) as their
starting point. That was the platform from which Deleuze, following
Nietzsche, undertook his “reversal of Platonism”.
The Greek word for this kind of
“bodily knowing” was aisthesis which
is usually rendered in a misleading manner as “sense perception”, in opposition
to noesis (i.e., conceptual
knowledge). But philosophy, which is a distinctive Western idea shaped from the
outset by Plato himself, has always allied itself with the latter form of
knowing, while subjugating the former. “Esthetics”, therefore, has historically
been viewed as derivative, and subordinate, task for philosophers who seem to
concern themselves merely with the “beautiful” as opposed to the “true"
and the “good.” But what if philosophy indeed did begin with aisthesis, rather than noesis?
A “post-philosophy”, therefore,
simply comes down to starting over from scratch to go down the road philosophy
could have traversed in the first place?
DYH: How does your online publication Esthesis advance both the output and the visibility of such a
genre?
CR: Esthesis is not a journal
of theory. It is about “arts and ideas,” which unfortunately are two
strata of discourse which rarely link together these days. Esthesis is
largely an effort to give voice to those who seek to theorize - or reflect on -
the arts in compelling new ways as well as to bring what we used to call “avant-garde”
ways of thinking or philosophizing in close-quarter communication with the arts
as what the radical European culture collective Tiqqun dubs (perhaps extrapolating
from Wittgenstein) a “form of life”. A form of life is not a “discipline”. It
is a forceful, lived expression of human beings in their autogenetic habitats.
We want to do everything we can to change the conversation about the nature and
role of the arts and “humanities”, casting them not so much as academic
enterprises, but as paradigmatic praxes that put us in touch with the very genesis
of thought and experience. In that regard Esthesis consciously and
promotes the aims of any general project we would dub “post-philosophy”.
DYH: In what ways does post-philosophy challenge the academicization of
thought?
CR: The academicization of thought in the United States has been
responsible for both its compartmentalization and its trivialization. It
has also been a major factor in its commodification. Knowledge, learning, and
thinking has been cartelized by the American system of higher education as a
means to an end, as a functional pinion within the global economic and
financial machinery. To have any engagement with sophisticated ideas you
have to go through some kind of approved syllabus of the
corporate-financial-government elites who are the gatekeepers of what is socially,
politically, and civically “acceptable, and who serves as “factory bosses” of
the increasingly marginalized “knowledge workers” that live paycheck to
paycheck belong to the swelling classes of what radical social theorists have
come to call the “precariat.” Post-philosophy does not shackle us to the
protocols of academic thought, even though the resources for its evolution and
implementation can be assembled, like fragments of found art, from the oddments
and tailings of the academy. Post-philosophy (following Deleuze) constitutes a
new, theoretically generated kind of chaosmotic
discourse.
DYH: In what multifaceted ways does the ancient Greek concept of poiesis manifested through poetry, the
visual arts, film, theater, music and literature inform you scholarly oeuvre?
CR: The Greek word poieisis,
from which the term “poetry” of course derives, is multi-valent, or polysemic
(i.e., it has a wide range of often competing connotations). Both Plato and Aristotle gave it
philosophical currency, although they differed in how they employed the
concept. The original Greek context in
which the term transited from an ordinary to a specific, technical use is now
largely unintelligible to use, but a certain distinct way of negotiating the
various twists and turns of this evolution can be found in the writings of the
German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who has become our only remaining and
definitive authority for making sense of such a legacy. As it turns out, there is far more going on
than what we find simply in Heidegger’s own specific take on the matter. But that is a problem for scholars, not art
theorists. And Heidegger gets right a lot more of the early Greek nuances to the
problem than he gets wrong. So let us begin there.
Heidegger distinguishes between
the Greek concepts of poiesis and techne (the latter of which yields the
word “technology”). Poiesis is a kind
of “autoproduction” that belongs to realm of physis, or what we refer to as “nature.” Techne requires human agency and intermediation. That is why, for
Heidegger, “poetry” is the authentic voice of Being itself, whereas
“technology” is the upshot of what he calls Seinsvergessenheit
(German=”the forgetting of Being”). As you know, my more mature scholarly oeuvre begins with a book I published in
1979 entitled The Alchemy of the Word:
Language and the End of Theology (republished around the turn of the
millennium under the title The End of Theology). That book
introduces the later Heidegger for the first time in a serious way into
religious philosophy as well as the early Derrida. Derrida, of course, received
the inspiration for his famous notion of “deconstruction” from Heidegger’s
concept of the Destruktion of
metaphysics, a theme which I develop extensively in that work. But unlike the legions
of “deconstructionists” who have multiplied since the 1970s, in The End of Theology I describe how the
key to language is not the unravelling of sedimented textual meanings a la
Derrida but the generation of unprecedented significations – what Heidegger
dubs the “saying the unsaid” – through the poetic deployment of words.
DYH: In what multifaceted ways is post-philosophy performative and
dramaturgical?
As I emphasized in what was for
me personally a career-turning essay published in the Harvard Theological Review in 1975 (entitled “Meaning and Saying in
Religion: Beyond Language Games”), the “linguistic turn” in philosophy, which
happened as early as World War I and in many respects has dominated ever since
then (even after Derrida) can only be fulfilled through the realization that
only a small segment of the larger spectrum of meaning in language can be
considered inferential or “propositional.” Derrida himself offers a devastating
critique of this embedded Western philosophical conceit in his essay entitled
“White Mythology,” which unfortunately scholars who want to cut to the chase of
what “deconstruction” implies tend to ignore. Deleuze and Guattari in their Anti-Oedipus volumes
carry this distinctive “post-structuralist” critique of metaphysical, or
propositional, models of meaning to a certain excess in the very direction you
mention, especially with their valorization of the experience of the
schizo. They even end up saying that
philosophy has become “nonphilosophy.” However, since Francois Laruelle and the
speculative realists have appropriated the term for a completely contradictory
agenda, I think the term
“post-philosophy” is more appropriate, especially since we are talking about
what philosophy is becoming, not what it is “not.” One could of course argue
that philosophy is at its inceptions performative and dramaturgical. That is
why all Plato’s thoughts are coded as drama, and Aristotle’s writings were
originally lectures.
DYH: Please discuss your plans for a memoir.
CR: What you would call a “memoir” I would call more an “engaged
retrospective,” since I would be immersing myself in the flows of the history
of more than a half century. I would seek to “overcode”, as Deleuze might say,
those flows in a distinctive way, not only when it comes to philosophy and
theology, but my long-running engagement from the late 1970s to the late 1990s
with “esoteric” and strange undercurrents of our collective experience – i.e.,
my days as a “real life Indiana Jones,” as one of my book blurbers once called
me. My own personal life is not that interesting. But, like Ishmael in
Melville’s saga, I had many curious glimpses of the “great white whale,” and I
would want to find a literary way of bring the full “unsaid” ramifications of
what happened to me, before me, and through me to some enduring and
intelligible, as well as interesting, narrative synthesis. In my trajectory
there are a lot of long lost and expertly buried “scrolls of Qumran” waiting to
be discovered. But I would not call that trajectory “my” life. I would prefer
to invoke Deleuze’s phrase – a life.
