What place can philosophy occupy within an institution that has deteriorated so badly? It is clear that it is no longer any more than a figuration, a figleaf, making one believe that nothing has changed and that, in the universities as they are currently, one continues to study, in the proper sense of the word, when in fact this sense has been eroded. I don’t mean that no-one works at all anymore in the university context: but, if one does so, thanks to one’s own personal initiative, it is against the grain, in the margins of a system that no longer functions, or which functions badly, and which no longer survives except through the dedication of its staff, who do what they can to keep the machine running in spite of everything. I am very pessimistic in this regard—maybe too pessimistic, I certainly hope so. I entered academia firstly as a student, then as a teacher, imagining that there one could devote oneself to intellectually useful, formative activities, and in particular that one could do philosophy there, giving the word “do” its full dimensions: subsequently I was forced to realize that this was more and more difficult, in that this no longer responded to a clearly defined collective demand. When, after forty years of teaching, I left the system, I can tell you that, since I had come to feel out of place in it, I was quite relieved. –Pierre Macherey
Posted on: Mon, 10 Mar 2014 12:50:33 +0000
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