a young French reader comments on the philosophy scene in America

He writes about his experience in America:

“One of the interesting things I realized is that in such a climate, being a ‘continental philosopher’ is much more of a commitment for someone, since the overwhelming majority is concerned with analytic issues; whereas in France (and maybe Germany, it seems), continental is the default position, and analytic philosophers view themselves as a marginalized minority.

Maybe this explains the surgency of SR in the Anglophone world: the opposition to correlationism was the first occasion that provided metaphysically-oriented continental thinkers with a common project, but could only arise in a context where philosophers viewed themselves as continental, as opposed to ‘just doing philosophy,’ which is still the case in Paris. Maybe this partly explains the differing fortunes of Meillassoux’s After Finitude in the french and anglophone worlds…”

I like this take on it, especially given the true philosophical neutrality of the enthusiastic young Frenchman who sent me this email.

Most of what gets said about the analytic-continental divide is, in my opinion, completely wrong. Two major mistakes are as follows:

(a) To deny that the difference exists, and end up replacing it with a difference between high-quality and low-quality philosophers, with all the supposed high-quality people found in what we could call the analytic camp. This is roughly the tactic of Brian Leiter, who first tells us that all the best continental philosophy is being done in high-ranked departments (basically, analytically trained people writing about Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger) and then denies that such a thing as analytic philosophy even exists. “You cannot attack the Empire. The Empire does not exist.”

(B) Premature declarations of the end of the gap. Certainly, more communication would be desirable, but I don’t think it should take the form of pretending that we’re all one big happy family of philosophers. We’re not. In order to be fruitful, the communication should be highly targeted and based on limited areas of overlapping concerns and methods.

The practical situation of the divide isn’t all that different from what it was 20 years ago. There are still at least two radically different ideas of what good philosophy ought to look like, and those two groups simply don’t read each other. The two most popular continental philosophers from the mid-1990’s onward have probably been Deleuze and Badiou, and you’re going to have a hard time finding people in Leiter’s ranked departments who have even read Deleuze and Badiou, let alone appreciate them. Likewise, few Deleuzians and Badiouians are even loosely familiar with the major analytic thinkers of today. They may not even have heard their names.

So let’s not overlook the obvious: the divide is very real, and it’s much too early to say that it has vanished or that it is “meaningless.” Nor is it even a bad thing; premature unification always benefits the dominant party of the moment and stifles the deviant trends from which more interesting currents are quite often born.

A number of people are building interesting bridges between specific figures, that’s certainly true. But you don’t build bridges unless there are chasms, gorges, or at least rivers separating two distinct places.

But back to the reader’s comment above. I think his analysis of SR is on target, as is his analysis of Meillassoux’s strikingly larger readership in the Anglophone than in the Francophone world. In France there’s no such thing as a self-consciously “continental” camp. In the Anglophone world this camp has been around for quite awhile, and has generally done its work in the form of commentary on major French and German figures. Not that commentary and systematic work are mutually exclusive (far from it). But there’s a difference between books that try primarily to clarify what a specific author said, and books that try primarily to advance philosophical argument. In the Anglophone world it was usually the case that continentals mostly did the first and analytics mostly did the second. And this is certainly changing, on both sides.

There were always philosophical movements available in Anglophone continental circles– phenomenology, structuralism, poststructuralism… But all were imported from abroad, which means that all were born under institutional and cultural circumstances basically different from those we all grew up with ourselves. As for SR, despite the pivotal role played by Meillassoux’s term “correlationism” and the general power and elegance of his thought, SR was hatched in London, and in the form of OOO was raised in North America. Inevitably, then, these movements have a certain tone and style and specific sense of humor that is more familiar and comfortable and domestic for Anglophone continentals. But even this wouldn’t matter, if not that SR addresses a vague hunger we all had for systematic work in the continental style that would also be home-brewed rather than mostly borrowed.