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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
What kind of philosophy do we need for the 21st century? To answer to this question, Alain Badiou imagines a dialogue between Tocéras, an earnest and engaging professor, and various interlocutors from different countries and philosophical cultures – John After from Britain, Amantha from Greece, B’adj Akil from Senegal, Xi La Pong from China and several others. Their conversation takes readers on a playful journey through the history of philosophy framed by the five great questions that have preoccupied Alain Badiou: democracy, freedom, universality, language and being.
At the same time, philosophy is presented not as a system or doctrine but as movement and dialogue. The philosopher is not a solitary figure; he is inseparable from his pupils, his disciples and his adversaries. It is only at the end of the journey that he arrives at the written, stable forms of his work. So we are dealing more with a play than a treatise, more with dialogues than monologues, more with a course than a book. The obvious model is Plato's Socrates, who, in founding philosophy as a discipline, ensured that it could be established anywhere in the world. In praise, yes, of philosophy as the public creation of a thought that, inventing itself and transporting itself anywhere, speaking to anyone about anything, invents the theatricalization of being.
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Seitenzahl: 281
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Characters
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7
Day 8
Day 9
Supplement: Day 10
Eighteen exercises in contemporary philosophy
Exercise 1
Exercise 2
Exercise 3
Exercise 4
Exercise 5
Exercise 6
Exercise 7
Exercise 8
Exercise 9
Exercise 10
Exercise 11
Exercise 12
Exercise 13
Exercise 14
Exercise 15
Exercise 16
Exercise 17
Exercise 18
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Characters
Begin Reading
Eighteen exercises in contemporary philosophy
End User License Agreement
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In Praise of Philosophy
ALAIN BADIOU
Translated by Susan Spitzer and Kenneth Reinhard
polity
Originally published in French as Éloge de la philosophie. Roman – Théâtre – Leçons © Flammarion, 2023
This English translation © Polity Press, 2025
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6565-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024945771
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Preface
The following dialogue is based on papers contained in an abandoned trunk, which a few young friends of mine found lying alongside a wall when a small provincial railway station was shutting down, and which no one ever claimed. They offered me, not without a touch of affectionate irony, a photocopy of this document, pretending to believe, on the basis of certain clues, that it may have been “a failed attempt” of mine.
The original text was written in quite a strange language, a mix of English, Ancient Greek, Spanish proverbs, German phrases, and a fair amount of French, most of it rather approximate. Some scattered, fragmentary notations seem to suggest that this draft dates from the ’90s of the last century. It is yet another stab at a genre that has long been saturated: the fake Platonic dialogue. It seems obvious to me, moreover, that the master of ceremonies, a certain Professor Tocéras, who claims to be “a Spaniard of the routed army,”1 is merely an anagram of “Socrates,” except for the acute accent.
I felt that a kind of textual restoration of these delightful fragments, in French only, would ultimately be a fitting tribute to the efforts deployed by the routed Tocéras, to justify a vocation originally inscribed in his own name.
I’d like to point out something important here, namely that Isabelle Vodoz can truly be considered a co-author of this book. For one thing, she provided its initial material, translating the many passages written in German and English and joining me in my efforts to translate those in Ancient Greek. For another, she was constantly involved in organizing and editing the text, taking it from the dreadful disorder of the original fragments to a book that is readable, thanks to its narrative continuity. Last, but not least, she was ruthless in correcting any oversights or inaccuracies I had left in the final draft of the text.
ALAIN BADIOU
1.
This may be an allusion to “After the battle,” a famous poem by Victor Hugo, in which “A Spaniard of the routed army, broken, bleeding/dragged himself along the road/gasping for breath and pleading/‘Give us a drink! A drink, for pity’s sake, good sirs!’”
Characters
The speaker: Tocéras
The opponent: Clesacalli
The listeners who speak: After (John), Amantha, B’adj Akil, Glauque (Rémi), Isamuta (Delphine), Thijud (Diane), the Unknown Man, the Unknown Woman, Xi La Pong
The listeners who don’t speak: Any reader of this book.
Day 1
As he was walking beside a gentle little stream, “Professor” Tocéras, who, before being hired by the Institution Instituted as Instituting—the famous I. I. I.—had never “professed” anything, wondered wistfully why, in our world, English is spoken everywhere, or at any rate approximations of that beautiful language, which he, despite being a professional speaker (at the I. I. I. they said “speaker,” never “professor”), had never been able to speak. Tocéras was thinking/speaking aloud, amid the gentle babbling of the water: “Of course, you could say that in a certain sense there’s only one world, that of global commerce and its capitalist substructure. And, if there really is only one world, it’s no wonder that there’s only one language of that world. And for reasons of history and imperial power, that language is English or a dialect derived from it, like American English …”
Tocéras had a habit of contradicting himself, especially when he was alone by the stream, all the more so because he was a fanatical admirer of Socrates’ dictum “The only thing I know is that I know nothing.” In “his deep-down insides,” as Sapeur Camember1used to say, he continued his linguistic meditation, all the while stepping over stinging nettles. “It’s a problem, a real problem! Because philosophy is supposed to take all differences into consideration and especially to ponder the multiplicity of peoples and cultures. So, are we going to speak only this one language, simply because we’re part of contemporary capitalist globalization? Wouldn’t that be a capitulation?”
Tocéras then did a little jump for joy. “We’re back to our same old problem: we have to speak English, but why? That’s it! Philosophy means always asking ‘why?’ Well, first and foremost because today we need to address philosophy to other people, to everyone, and because, basically, ‘everyone’ speaks English today. Of course, this doesn’t apply to everyday life, where we speak French, German, Spanish, Bambara, Persian, or Japanese, or any other of the hundreds of existing languages, all of which can be said, in this respect, to have the same intrinsic relevance to the course of existence as English. But to address philosophy to people who don’t speak your language, you have to speak English nowadays, you have to be translated into English.”
He was approaching the old mill. A little waterfall was endlessly turning the remnants of a waterwheel that was once responsible for providing the village of Foos-en-Sus with a fitful supply of electricity. It was in this mill that the speaker’s listeners met (at the I. I. I. they never said “pupil” or even “student” but always “listener”). And, when it came to speaking, Speaker Tocéras was ready to roll: he would continue with his meditation on English for his little group of listeners. As a speaker, he’d already mulled over, while walking beside the stream, the main consideration of his little speech as he intended to speak it in the speaking-mill.
And he launched into it in this way:
— The problem of the contemporary hegemony of the English language is very specific but also very far-reaching because it concerns the relationship—today, in “our” world—between philosophy and universality. Why is this so? Well, because we must first ask ourselves whether philosophy’s universality can be explained by its inclusion in the world as it is or whether it is universal precisely because it does not lie completely within the world as it is, because it lies in a world that, in a way, doesn’t exist, a world—according to conflicting opinions—that is either imaginary and illusory or more real than all the worlds that can be found within reality.
An Italian listener named Clesacalli, who was already known for his insolence, responded to this opening attack with a short but forceful counterattack, directly connected to the question of existence:
— There’s lotsa people who say that philosophy isn’t worth squat anyhow, since, as you yourself say, the world of philosophy’s an abstraction that doesn’t exist.
But Tocéras, unruffled, applied the electric current of his thought to the objection itself:
— Good point, Mr. Clesacalli. You’re giving me another argument! We could in fact respond by saying that, on the contrary, philosophy is useful precisely because the world of philosophy is not exactly the world as it is: the philosophical will and the language in which that will is expressed actually lie between the world as it is and the world as we would like it to be. As I see it, philosophy moves between two approaches. The first considers the world as it is, a world that we need to know and of which we need to provide a clear vision. The second, which considers the world from the standpoint of what could be called philosophical desire, speaks to us about what the world could be.
At that point, one of the listeners, the most faithful among the faithful, a young Greek woman named Amantha, felt that she could not only support the speaker but at the same time steer his argument back to its starting point, namely the question of English.
— On that basis, we can return to the truly crucial question posed at the outset by Mr. Tocéras: in what language should philosophy be spoken and written? This is not just a question of grammar and logic, concerning the structure of languages; it’s a question that more precisely concerns the problem of knowing in what language philosophy exists, so to speak, most effectively. The answer is that philosophy exists today in the dominant language of capitalist globalization and that if it accepts to be within the world as it is, then it has to speak this contemporary universal language, that is, a kind of bastardized English, an international and commercial language derived from the English language.
Tocéras was always delighted when the astute, beautiful Amantha came to his assistance, and he wouldn’t have minded if she’d gone even farther in that direction, if, for example, she’d transformed “assistance” into the ambiguous concept of “active sympathy.” But he was also adept at showing nothing of his feelings, except on rare occasions, through the slightest nuances in the inflections of his voice. This time, though, he began his reply with a somewhat suspicious degree of enthusiasm:
— You’re remarkable, Amantha. You’re like a shepherdess who always knows how to bring her lost sheep back to the fold. The common expression “Let’s get back to our sheep”2 implies a genuine discipline of thought where you’re concerned. Yet I don’t think we can be satisfied with that obligation, however realistic it may seem. It’s actually not a truly creative possibility. The true creative logic to which philosophy should be subjected would consist, on the contrary, in inscribing the real of philosophy not in the dominant language but in the total multiplicity of languages. What does this mean? First and foremost, that philosophy can’t be reduced to a single language, because if it could, if it were expressed in only one particular language, it could certainly not be universal …
Just then, Clesacalli saw a chance to jam the machine and shut the speaker up:
— Everyone speaks in their own language, that’s all there is to it, and the philosopher does the same. Later, you translate if you like …
— Oh, come on, Clesacalli! Don’t play dumb! Tocéras shot back. I assume you’re familiar with the example of Heidegger. He didn’t just write in German! He had the audacity to say that, today, German was, after Ancient Greek, the true language of philosophy and that it was possible to say something along the lines of “Being speaks German.” That’s a purely nationalistic position, in the fascistic sense of the term. I think Heidegger is a great philosopher, but this specific position regarding the language of philosophy is in total contradiction with the universality of philosophy, with the recognition that there is a Subject to which philosophy is addressed, a Subject that is humanity as such, not humanity in one language, in one specific culture, in the frenzy of intellectual nationalism. Philosophy, as I understand it—and, for me, this is a condition of its existence—is impossible if we don’t accept that there is something like humanity as such. Naturally, there are all sorts of cultures and differences, because humanity is a complex multiplicity, but this multiplicity must first be recognized in its fundamental unity, otherwise sub-humans, or sub-nations, or a “weaker sex,” or accursed “races” would be singled out, which would immediately bring disgrace upon philosophy. To use a more technical term, there’s something like a generic humanity, a humanity that’s not reducible, at least not right away, to its immanent differences, nor to any of its particularities. And so, whatever the idiom in which it’s expressed, philosophy, speaking about humanity to humanity, cuts across all existing languages, even those that don’t yet exist or have died out.
Rémi Glauque, one of those fervent disciples who are sometimes at risk of thinking they’re more in tune with the Master’s thinking than the Master himself could ever be, stood up to introduce, in his style that aimed for grandiosity, a fatal nuance:
— It’s obvious, he said, that, according to your own view, we have to concede that the extremely suspect statement “Philosophy speaks only one language, which today is English” can clearly be understood in two ways. First, it can be said that we have to speak English, not because being speaks English (poor being!)—as it was once said that it spoke German or Ancient Greek or no doubt Chinese, too—not for that reason supposedly derived, in a way, from the true-being of being, but because, in the world as it is, we’re forced to. It’s a current imperative, an empirical constraint, which has no philosophical value whatsoever. Then you’ve got the other position, Heidegger’s, which is also Leibniz’s—so it’s very important in German history—namely that we have to speak English today for ontological reasons, because there’s something fundamental about the historial relationship between being qua being and a given epoch, a relationship reflected in the discourse of thought.
Just from the low murmur of agreement that seemed to rise, like a wisp of silence, from the little group of listeners, Tocéras instantly realized that he needed to be very strict. He took a deep breath, ready to run a marathon of arguments, and said:
— Actually, we’d argue, dear Glauque, that neither of the two approaches—which you fail to make clear by hastily choosing the second one—is good for philosophy. The first because there is indeed something abstract about saying that philosophy has to speak English since the contemporary world forces it to do so. I understand, of course, that speaking English is a necessity in the business world, but the law of philosophy can’t be the law of business: after all, philosophy is not just another kind of business. The real problem, you see, is whether philosophy is capable of being an exception. Furthermore, the idea that we should only speak our own language, which is sometimes contrasted with the abstract idea that everyone should speak English, today takes the form of a nationalistic reaction to globalization. This conflict between abstract universality, which is ultimately the universality of imperialism, the universality of business, capitalism, and so forth, whose language is formally English, and the reaction of different cultures to this universality in the form of the mere affirmation of their particularity, is without doubt the greatest conflict in the contemporary world. Fidelity to the history of philosophy has always consisted in overcoming this kind of confinement, this conflict between purely abstract, oppressive universality, which works against the life of the different peoples, and purely reactive particularity, which asserts itself as such in a struggle against that abstract universality. We can understand this struggle, but it’s impossible for philosophy to be involved in a conflict of this kind. It can adopt neither the abstract vision of the world, globalization, the so-called “peaceful” world of business, nor the position, which I would call obscurantist, of a Heidegger, for whom being speaks German, but which would be no better if we said that philosophy should speak Italian, Breton, or Peul. In short, we have to reject both the “We have to speak English because the business world speaks English” and the “I’m a German philosopher, so I have to speak German.”
In one of the brief pauses of the Master, who was catching his breath, Clesacalli saw a breach through which he could enter the citadel of arguments:
— Your argument may be true all right, in Philosophy with a capital P (if it even exists), but it’s totally false when it comes to politics. There, you gotta speak the language of the people you’re talking to, or else you’re screwed.
But the Master had foreseen this attack and prepared his counterattack:
— Thank you, dear Clesacalli, for allowing me to continue by contradicting you mercilessly! The linguistic conflict we’re speaking about, far from being only philosophical or cultural, is also a conflict between two political positions. For one of them, globalization, the business of capital, and the English language are the only possible destiny for humanity today. Abstract universality, the paradigm of the history of humanity as a whole is, in fact, in this vision, that of the Western world, for which the only feasible option is the universal expansion of the existing world market. We thus live within a world that accepts as its only option the continuation of the world as it is, subject, of course, to a few small improvements, a little more respect for the environment—for example, better life expectancy for toads and grasshoppers—and a healthy dose of apparent equality between men and women. That political position is in fact the true conservative one, whereas we usually call “conservative” the obscurantist position, which holds that we need to return to the world of the past, that of the “family,” of the old laws (for example, those that have to do with sexual freedom), return to the law of God and the old world with its habits and customs. This reactionary gloom is, of course, an ominous and dangerous position, which we must fight. But I would say that our main enemy is not that second position, which I call “obscurantist,” because it’s not the dominant one. Rather, our main enemy is the position, now dominant, that holds that we must simply carry on as we “democratic” Westerners are doing, that there’s no other option, because the world, as it is, ensures, under our leadership, the peace of business, which is the first duty of civilizations.
Amantha was perplexed:
— Still, she said, better a new kind of universality, even a business-oriented or imperfect one, a minimal defense of common principles, a kind of symphonic arrangement of singularities, than the return to fractious nationalisms, local religions, and family obligations!
— Think about it, dear Amantha, Tocéras continued. This position, which can actually be called the universality of the business world, is that of practically all the governments of the major European countries and the United States, but of China and Korea as well … As always, there are conflicts and differences between these nations, but, fundamentally, what they have in common is that they all claim that it’s all over for those who’d like to propose completely different visions of our world as real possibilities, when they’re only pipe dreams or utopias. Today the prevailing, dominant trend is to assert that the world as it is contains no other real alternative than to continue along the path of the democratic peace of business. The fact that this continuity sometimes has to be enforced by fierce local wars is just the price we have to pay. All in all, this is the philosophical definition that can be given of the contemporary conservative position, whose official name is “democracy.”
— But it’s our direct enemies who have that ideology! Rémi Glauque interjected. The most important conflict is between us, let’s say “socialists” in general, and that world of individualism whose only rule is to extract the most profit from the workers! Alongside that conservative position, there’s now only the obscurantist position. And this is where one of the greatest dangers of our situation lies. The obscurantist position advocates less the continuation of the world of modern “democracy” than the return to a good old-fashioned reactionary world, a world of the past, which is tantamount to returning to a mix of religious reaction and aggressive nationalism. It’s the position of a certain Islamism, or that of President Trump in the United States, or in some respects that of our own Sarkozy, and definitely that of the Le Pen daughter, as well as the Northern League in Italy, or again, and certainly, that of Bolsonaro in Brazil, as well as that of the cliques currently in power in India and the Philippines, not to mention the clown Zemmour.3 Which is a lot of people! What can you do about all this? What place do you reserve for anti-fascism, then?
— In my vision of the contemporary political world, replied Tocéras with a smile, the obscurantist passion does in fact seem like the opposite of the conservative liberal position, but it’s on the exact same ground, namely that of hatred for any other strategic hypothesis and especially the communist hypothesis. The dominant conservative position asserts the need to continue with the world as it is, whereas the obscurantist position asserts that we must desire a return to the world of the past. As you can see, in both cases there is no future that can assert itself as a radical change in the dominant parameters, i.e., the guarantee of business. Anything along those lines is immediately identified as a criminal utopia. To a certain extent, today’s time consists in reducing time to a pure present, to continuation, to the immanent transformation of the present, or even to the resurrection of the past of this present. This is where the fashionable philosophical statement, the statement pronouncing “the end of History,” comes from. It’s an idea that, in a sense, is an old Hegelian one: the historical world has reached its highest form, particularly with the coupling of capitalism and democracy. Philosophy is thus reduced to the recognition and justification of this end. In other words, we can do without it, given that it’s now no more than a useless version of the dominant ideology. As some clever contemporary ideologists put it: “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism/democracy.” Given this situation, philosophizing is just chit-chatting.
Delighted with the opportunity that had fallen into his lap, Clesacalli exclaimed:
— Good point! What’s philosophy that ain’t chit-chat? Politics is all about anger and action but philosophy’s what? A quiet chat?
Tocéras, acting as if he hadn’t heard, said:
— In a nutshell, if philosophy can be really useful today it’s through the attempt to escape the false dichotomy between the obscurantist position and the “modern” conservative position. False since the two terms have something in common, namely the absence of a future, leaving us only with the continuation of the present, which requires only skill without a concept. Indeed, if the world has no alternative other than itself, then there’s no future. And if the world has no desire other than going back to the past, then there’s no future either. We can therefore define one of the key stakes of philosophy, an axiom of its survival, by saying that if philosophy is to be something other than an academic exercise, it must propose the possibility of a real future or, at the very least, examine the conditions for the existence of a real future. This must be our strategic duty.
This rather military conclusion was followed by a silence modulated, from outside, by the sound of the water running over the remnants of the waterwheel. Clesacalli attempted a breakthrough:
— What about our tactical duty, then? he asked. Here, in this room? What’s a philosophy professor’s duty when it comes to these questions—like how we’re s’posed to speak, how we’re s’posed to live?
Tocéras wasn’t caught off-guard:
— My immediate duty as a professor, he said, is formally very simple: to be with you for three hours a day for six days in a row. That is, after all, a professional duty.
— So, what about the students? It’s not a profession, being a student! What d’you have to say about our duty as students, huh?
— Well actually, Tocéras replied, it’s also to be here with me, three hours a day for six days in a row.
This time, Amantha became annoyed and said:
— Mr. Tocéras, now you’re being sly, you’re deflecting, I must say. The duty of a student …
— Of a listener, Tocéras interrupted her, smiling.
— Right, Amantha continued, the duty of a listener isn’t the same as the duty of a profess … I mean, of a speaker. And furthermore, this business about “duties” isn’t clear. This is a summer session that we’re attending. We didn’t come to this mill to take competitive exams and become someone who’s well established and well paid in business, in the world as it is. We came of our own free will to listen to you. Therefore, our duty as listeners is not exactly a professional one. That’s the difference between us and you, Mr. Tocéras: in our choosing to be here there is something like freedom. In your course, whether you’re paid or not (which is incidentally an unclear issue), there necessarily lurks the idea of the transmission of a duty, of a kind of obligation imposed by pure Reason on our freedom.
— Well done, dear Amantha! Yes, we can and we must speak of something like a philosophical duty, a duty that’s not reducible to the interests of the human animal—to be in business, have money, consume, have a nice life—or, as Kant would say, “a duty that is a disinterested duty.” It is insofar as that duty has a disinterested nature that my task as speaker has, over and above any possible professional value, a truly philosophical value.
— So, said Glauque, with a happy look on his face, we’re cooped up in a mill to create a community around a disinterested obligation.
— Well said, a delighted Tocéras replied. Note that it wouldn’t be the same if you were here, for example, to study mathematics. I know because I love mathematics so much and sometimes I change from being a speaker of philosophy to being a professor of mathematics. But when that happens to me, I immediately sense that the community is no longer the same, because there’s a lack of symmetry in terms of knowledge. The question then becomes: why, in general, is a course, a lecture, a …
— A dialogue? Glauque asked. Like in Plato?
— A dialogue, sure, Tocéras agreed, a philosophical dialogue. Why is such a dialogue different from a course in geography, or mathematics, or what have you? I think it has to do with the dialectical nature of philosophy, which has remained so from Plato to the present day.
— Now you’re jus’ going round in the roundest of circles! Clesacalli thundered. Because “dialectical” is philosophical jargon, and ultimately, like almost all … oh all right, speakers, you end up saying that philosophy is philosophy.
— And I’m telling you, Tocéras replied with unexpected severity, that philosophy is the creation of a desire. And, in fact, you can hardly say anything about a desire other than: It’s a desire!
His words hit home, and a kind of commotion broke out in the mill, briefly drowning out the gurgling of the water. The speaker nevertheless reclaimed his putative possession, namely speech:
— The task of philosophy, he said, is dialectical, because it’s not just a matter of providing right answers to various questions. As such, the aim of philosophy isn’t the same as that of mathematics, which is to set out a problem and its solution. Nor is it to answer empirical questions, to learn something new about the geography or history of a particular country, or to understand the laws of the social world, as economics, for example, claims to do. Its aim is truly to arouse in each and every one of us a new desire, which Plato called the desire for the Idea. The creation of this kind of desire is dialectical in nature for the following reason. Granted, you and I are not in the same position at the outset—there’s a main speaker and subordinate listeners—but the aim of the philosophical process is to overcome this difference in position, this asymmetry in knowledge. Granted, I speak and you listen, I speak and you learn, I speak and you may even take notes. But the properly philosophical interest is not to continue indefinitely within this difference. The real aim is to produce something shared, something egalitarian, which is precisely a new desire. To produce this shared desire as the dialectical outcome, and ultimately the elimination, of the initial difference in position.
Amantha stood up slowly, like a weary ghost, and, as she remained silent, the sound of the mill seemed to take over as the only reality of the moment. When she finally began to speak, with great, languid sweetness, it was as if a singer were singing a recitative against the imaginary background of aquatic cellos:
— You’re reminding us, dear speaker, that the question of philosophy is not that of acquiring new knowledge but rather that of a new desire. This has been true ever since Plato, and I’m certainly not saying that to make fun of you! It’s precisely the collective victory of our meeting here, the victory that concerns you and me and all of us in the old mill constantly: the emergence of something like a new possibility in thought, a new vision.
— Absolutely! Glauque chimed in. But never forget, Amantha, that a new possibility necessarily begins with a new subjective position. Indeed, if, subjectively, we remain prisoners of the world as it is, it’s obvious that we won’t be able to defend any truly new objective possibility. That’s why the measure of success of a philosophy course—but also of one’s own reading of a book of philosophy, if that reading is itself philosophical—is, I believe, something like a subjective transformation, which acts as a small part of the opening up of new possibilities in the world, rising up, even if sometimes tiny, timid, though very real, against capitalo-democratic conservatism and its obscurantist twin.
As for Tocéras, he was on cloud nine:
— Congratulations, both of you! Indeed, the mystery of philosophy is that it is both purely individual and completely universal. Purely individual because it’s not politics—we’re not creating a philosophical organization or party. On its own level, philosophy is first and foremost an individual matter. After all, this new desire that we’re going to create here, I hope, is first and foremost the desire of each and every one of you. When I speak to you, I’m speaking to each and every one of you personally. At this level, there are differences, asymmetries, advances, and delays. But, if the aim of philosophy is a new
