Patrick Hayes
posted 18 May 2005

After reading his translated paper on 'Mad Derrida' in broken English, Jean-Luc Nancy took a handful of irrelevant questions from the floor, most notably one from a large guy who informed him in a patronising voice, 'In case you didn't know, there was an election here yesterday. What do you think of Tony Blair's relation to the Iraq war?'

Nancy, quite rightly, responded that he should make his own mind up, politely implying that he was in the wrong talk. A second question asking whether he felt a duty as a public intellectual to be lucid, prompted a retort along the lines of, 'being lucid is indeed very important, but it is first necessary to think through complexities before you make lucid statements as a public intellectual.'

Nancy's Big Idea is that individuals are in no way fundamentally separated from one another. We always-already exist in relations with one another. There is no singular self that pre-exists our relations with others. We always exist both in the singular and in the plural. Our existence as singular plural beings is something that Nancy repeats like a mantra throughout his work, both tacitly and explicitly. Nancy would respond to Sartre's 'hell is other people', that there is no escape from this hell. One's relation to others is as primordial to one's existence as one's relation with oneself.

This insight is nothing new. Heidegger's conception of Mitsein, formulated in his 1929 work Being and Time, is identical to Nancy's conception, although Heidegger gave the insight less importance within his system. Nancy's philosophical achievement is to remind us of our singular-plural existence in the light of recent 'postmodern' confusion about the fragmentation of the self. Here in his 'Mad Derrida' talk, our singular plural existence looms ever in the background. Nancy's talk focuses largely upon how certain human pursuits, such as the pursuit of identity and love, are in fact a kind of madness.

Whatever delusions Birkbeck's PR team (who sent out a release headed 'new drive to enhance the role of the public intellectual') were under must have been shattered by the talk delivered by Nancy. It seems these delusions weren't too strong, however, as all but one of these events are held when the non-academic 'public' are still finishing work - really bringing home just how little consideration was given to the public in general.

But what did Birkbeck expect, inviting over a notoriously complex French philosopher who has no mastery of English? What was increasingly clear was that they had little idea about how to organise a public discussion. We had to wait 2 hours and 20 minutes, after well over a third of the audience had left, before Nancy and Hillis Miller, an American Derrida scholar, had several interesting exchanges provoked by questions from the floor and we got a glimpse of what the evening could have been. Did no-one think to design a format that would encourage these two great minds to engage with one another?

As Frances Stonor Saunders points out in her Observer article, 'a centre for public intellectuals needs a public to address'. Locating a public in an increasingly individualistic age is wishful thinking that borders on idealism. If the Birkbeck series achieves one thing, it will be to conclusively falsify the idea that inviting over a few celebrity continental philosophers would suddenly magic a public into existence. With no social movement to engage with, it is no surprise that the Birkbeck sessions appear, as Saunders argues, as 'elitism on a platform'.

If public intellectuals can only exist when there exists a public to intellectually engage with, then bemoaning the lack of public intellectuals is reducible to bemoaning the lack of a public. A trend of much greater concern is the idea that intellectuals have to try to be relevant to what the needs of the public are seen to be. What is wrong with a 'platform of elitism'? When, and if, a new social movement does spontaneously emerge, the one thing that will not pop into being spontaneously is a group of intellectuals who are able to shape and direct such a movement. As a result, during times of political stagnation, it is vital that the intellectual flame (and with it a strong historical memory) be kept alight by all means necessary.

Philosophy is the discipline that demands that all our fundamental beliefs and attitudes are rigorously interrogated. This process of questioning does not result in a nihilism or vicious relativism, as cruder anti-relativists would have us believe. Socrates' maxim, 'the unexamined life is not worth living' is as pertinent today as ever before. This does not mean that one has to perpetually examine one's life to the point that it breeds a stultifying paranoia, rather that through the process of this examination, one attains a heightened awareness about one's relation to one's 'self', one's relation to the world and the nature of the projects in which one is engaged, than it is impossible to attain without. Indeed, without choosing such a path of critical examination, one is choosing to cling to their beliefs and projects (if one has any) with a desperate, religious fervour, being reduced to a pawn-like existence, freely manipulated both by forces of nature and by those who choose to reflect.

The fundamental difference between the philosopher and the intellectual is that a philosopher will abstract concepts from the world and is often all to happy to remain examining them in an abstract bubble that oft begins to float further and further away from the world. The intellectual, on the other hand, will engage with the world, abstracting trends he observes in order to obtain a clear understanding of them, yet he will remain firmly anchored to the world. The public intellectual will go one step further and attempt to articulate these findings in a manner that can be clearly understood by people in general.

What is most worrying about the 'public intellectual' discussion is that a group of esteemed philosophers coming over to lecture on philosophy is not deemed to be a sufficient end in itself. Philosophers and intellectuals alike should find a common enemy in those pragmatic instrumentalists who, like impatient children, demand immediate relevance to the point that they deny even the process of abstraction itself. It is during times when the critical reflection and abstract nature of philosophy is so disparaged that the discipline of philosophy is needed - and thus relevant - more than ever.