What’s worst is that it doesn’t die – that it goes on, European philosophy. That there’s more of it European philosophy. Always some new book series. With new introductions to the usual suspects.
The thirty-first introduction to Being and Time. The two hundred and sixth idiot’s guide to the Phenomenology of Spirit. A handbook of … A companion to … The Cambridge introduction to … The Oxford introduction … The Edinburgh introduction to … Philosophers in sixty minutes … Guides for the Perplexed … A Bloomsbury Critical Introduction to …
How many, how many! Do people really write these things. Textbooks, textbooks. It goes on.
There are still conferences. Still publishers’ stands at conferences. Still symposia. The whole thing continues. It rolls on, through the years. Institutionalized. Still things to be said about Hegel and Husserl and Heidegger. Still readings of readings of readings. Still new waves of interpretation.
What’s worse than being an introducer? A Contextualiser? An explainer of European philosophy in a way the Anglophone world might understand. In plain, serviceable prose. No flourishes!
Don’t, whatever you do, try to imitate the great stylists! Nothing worse than an Anglophone imitator of high French style. Grotesque! Forced!
Reconcile yourself to explanation. To bullet points. To numbered lists. To taking the quick and rendering it slow.
There should be a rewilding of continental philosophy. Where people like us aren’t allowed to write introductory books about this European thinker or that one.
Where thinkers can think in peace. Without opportunist secondary commentary writers looking for the Next Big Thing. Thought-prospectors. Thought-opportunists. The introductory philosophical book industry.
Americans, on a Parisian safari. Helping to see the big beasts of philosophy in the Parisian wild. In their natural habitat. In their environmental niches.
Americans, hanging around the Sorbonne, or whatever. All but asking for signatures. Getting all fan-boy and girl. Getting all groupie. Ask Badiou for a selfie. Jacques Rancière …
Work in Progress 