on Time Bombs

Here’s a slightly longer version of what I meant about my graduate school experience as it pertains to Merleau-Ponty.

There are always a few figures/works at any moment who seem like the consensus “time bombs” of the moment. The reaction to these figures/works is that although no one has fully understood them yet, once we do understand them, then everything will change and philosophy is going to be completely different.

Let’s call these figures/works the Time Bombs. This category is not meant sarcastically, because they are sometimes actual time bombs. Heidegger filled this role during the early 1920’s (his “rumors of the hidden king” period) and then he did in fact explode and change philosophy a few years later. But though the category is called Time Bombs, many of them are simply apparent time bombs that never explode with as much force as some expected.

During my graduate school years, I would say that there were two Time Bombs:

1. The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty. It was often implied that this was the very most avant garde piece of continental philosophy that we have, that if only Merleau-Ponty had lived a few years longer to complete the work, then everything would change, and so forth. Now don’t get me wrong: this book is an interesting read and contains some striking formulations. But it’s not the chilling avant garde landscape of unprecedented truths that it was often implied to be.

2. Blanchot. Plenty of people knew Derrida inside and out by the early 1990’s, and Blanchot was the darker, cooler, shadowy fellow traveler in that period who was supposedly always on the verge of transforming everything overnight if people could just understand him. But it never quite happened. Blanchot is still around, but as a special interest topic, not as one of the pillars of contemporary philosophy.

Who are today’s Time Bombs? I suppose it depends on where you work, but I would say Laruelle, and to some extent still Simondon (though that may have peaked a couple of years ago). And again, I’m not saying they won’t pan out, I’m just saying that there are always a couple of figures filling the Time Bomb role at any given moment, and some of them do explode but many don’t.

Badiou was a Time Bomb in the Anglophone world in around 2000, and he did in fact explode. There’s still the question of trying to figure out how big the explosion really was. But Badiou did succeed in moving from “promising fringe thinker whom only 15% of my American friends have heard about so far” (in 2000) to “one of the major global referents of contemporary continental thought” (in 2010).