AFFECTUS Intro

8/13/2019 AFFECTUS Intro

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In the first meeting o our seminar on Jacques Derrida,in winter 2013, the students in the course and I broachedthe question o what it might mean to study philosophyin the context o a university classroom that presupposescertain exclusions. We talked, or example, about the

many individuals who werent able to join us as enrolledstudents because o devastating provincial cuts to thehigher education budget. Several students described thestructural exclusions that result rom the universitys in-creasingly close relations to the marketplace. Along theselines, we discussed how the corporatization o universi-

ties leads to exclusionary dynamics, ranging rom thedisciplinary effects o the assessment o students (quanti-ying their work into the aggregate o a GPA) to the ideo-logical effects o the assessment o proessors (as sites likerate my proessor inculcate a culture o entertainmentrather than a culture o critique).

Why Undergraduate Philosophy?

Ada S. Jaarsma

An Introduction


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Te activities o reading and conversing about textsare caught up with market-driven imperatives, we mused,regardless o whether we willingly conront such dynam-ics or not. Derridas assessment o consumption explainswhy we cannot take or granted how we engage with texts:

Te mass productions that today inundatethe press and publishing houses do not ormtheir readers; they presuppose in a phantas-matic and rudimentary ashion a reader who

has already been programmed. Tey thus endup preormatting this very mediocre address-ee whom they had postulated in advance.1

Consumer-based reading practices exclude creative andcritical thinking, according to Derrida, which meansthat the terms o such overly programmed reading align

dangerously close with the existing order o values andmeanings.

On this account, philosophical study itsel risks a cer-tain unquestioning acquiescence to the exclusionary log-ics o the market. While we might want to affirm activi-ties like reading as resources or securing emancipation

and reedom, Derridas analysis disallows such naivet.O course, Derridas own method o philosophy promptsa much more hopeul line o thought: how might philos-ophy overcome these constitutive exclusions and equip uswith capacities or critique, as readers and interlocutors?And what kinds o practices should we be enacting, bothwithin our classroom and beyond, in order to contest ex-

clusionary orms o repression and create conditions inwhich critique and reedom flourish?

While this conversation marked the beginning o

1 Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally: Te Last Interview. rans.Pascal-Anne Brault & Michael Naas (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2011)


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our semester-long seminar, its concerns ultimately over-flowed the boundaries o our classroom. At the conclu-sion o our course, the students moved the seminar intothe city, meeting in parks and cas, shifing the ocuso seminar-discussion rom Derrida to Spinoza and De-leuze. Students rom universities across town joined thissummer seminar, which was entirely student-led, and outo this philosophical community came the decision tolaunch the journal,AFFECUS. In tracing the history o

the journal as caught up in some way with wide-rangingreflections on exclusion, I would like, on the one hand, tomake the case or its critical aspirations and, on the other,to reflect on its significance as a collaborative and stu-dent-led project. In contrast to the preormatted reader,constrained by mass marketing into reading solely alongpredetermined ways, Derrida suggests that there is hope

that critique might emerge out o close readingor textsthat orm the reader pedagogically.

I see this journal, AFFECUS, as an enterprise thatreflects such pedagogical hope. Above all, it was the la-bour o undergraduate students, exclusively, that broughtthis journal into being: students put out the call or pa-

pers, students rom across the continent submitted anarray o excellent work, and students gathered togetheror the difficult work o adjudicating submissions andascertaining the contents o this first issue. Rather thanthe constraints that tend to govern the assessment ostudent work, constraints that can impede rather thaninspire creativity, this peer-reviewed assessment reflects

the criteria that the editorial board o students developedtogether. It seems worth emphasizing that these valuesand ideals emerged out o student-led discussion. In hisanalysis o the obstacles that ofen block critical resis-tance in universities, Jeff Schmidt points out that proes-sors were ofen themselves the best students, those who


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excelled by playing by the rules. Conorming to institu-tional norms, he explains, reflects the long-rewardedbehavior that got them [proessors] into graduate schoolin the first place.2In other words, there are certain pre-ormed habits and dispositions in proessors that can re-inorce, rather than call out, the exclusionary tendencieso the classroom. Schmidts gentle rejoinder to proessorssuggests that resistance is more likely to be ound withinstudent communities.

And, as we peruse the contents o this first issue oAFFECUS, we come across examples o the creative,boundary-questioning work that demonstrate the pos-sibility o critical resistance. In their inventive recastingo Jean-Paul Sartres No Exit, Exit ime, Britanny Burrand Syd Peacock move the drama o Sartres play romthe hellish aferlie into a modern-day university hallway.

Even when I am alone, I am existing with others, onespeaker admits, an insight that Sartres characters are un-able to glimpse, let alone express, because o the troublethat this admission would cause or the stubborn indi-

viduality o bad aith. It is no neutral declaration, thisacknowledgement that I, regardless o circumstance or

choice, exist undamentally with others. As Lisa Guen-ther explains in the interview with Michael Giesbrecht,the study o philosophy ought to create time and spaceor exploring existence, experience, and praxis, puttingus more on the hook or the world that we create together.Tis kind o pedagogy intensifies our responsibility orthe shared nature o existence, especially in relation to

structural orms o oppression that affect all o us butin grossly disproportionate ways. Since it is the hope orsolidaritya hope that is existential but also pragmat-

2 Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Profes-sionals and the Soul-Battering System that Shapes Teir Lives. (NewYork: Rowman & Litt lefield Publishers, 2000).


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icthat emerges rom this line o critique, we conrontan insistent challenge: namely, to find ways to cultivatesolidarity with others, through our actions, choices, andrelations.

What is the significance, then, o choosing some phil-osophical rameworks over others as we make decisionsabout such actions and choices? In Democracy Promo-tion as a Political Project, Jeta Mulajs careul parsing othe implications o democracy-projects oregrounds the

political stakes o how philosophical arguments aboutdemocracy are elaborated and then carried out as pro-grammatic visions. Identiying prevailing paradigms aspolitical projects o the powerul, Mulajs analysis in-

vites us to grapple with the dissonance that arises romreading Plato and Aristotle alongside a contemporarythinker like Jacques Rancire. It also prompts uncom-

ortable and deeply pressing questions about what ournormative ideals should be or how philosophy and poli-tics come together and how they might inorm the natureo our shared world.

In Rhythm as Logos in Native-World-Ordering, Si-erra Mills Druley shows us that our reflections on philos-

ophy and politics are limited i we are not also equippedwith resources or conronting our cosmological assump-tions. Drawing out a nuanced account o indigenous phi-losophy, Druley proffers an important intervention inhow we think about relationality, especially in terms othe spatial and temporal dynamics o rhythm. Rhythm,Druley suggests, can be seen as revelatory, prompting

a kind o learning that is not literate or visual but vis-ceral and real. Druleys conclusion points to a vision ohumanity in communion with the whole o the pulsingworld, a vision that is inspiring and that provokes re-flection on the methods by which we might participate insuch communion.


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Jason Walsh, in his Te Nature o Oz: Te CulturalLogic o Nature Documentaries and Prison Films, drawsour attention to the ways in which ideological construc-tions mediate our cultural conceptions o lie, nature andreedom. While shows like Oz represent the panopticonin ways that align with Foucaults descriptions, Walsh ex-poses how such simulations o reality work to undercutcritical resistance on the part o consumers. And whilenature documentaries dramatize the plight o global

warming, they paciy us with the domesticating logic ocapitalism (enterpreneurs will save us) and o natural-ized survivalism (there has always been conflict). Walshconcludes his essay by citing a rhetorical question romFoucault: Is it surprising that prisons resemble actories,schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?Tis indictment by Foucault o the allegiance o modern

institutions with capitalism reminds all o us who workand study in universities o the importance o resistance.

We will be celebrating the launch o this inaugural is-sue oAFFECUSwith an event at Mount Royal Univer-sity that has been organized around the question, WhyUndergraduate Philosophy? While this query is ulti-

mately an open one, with no delimited set o answers, I dothink that we can read this first journal issue as supplyingsome initial responses. Why undergraduate philosophy?One answer has to do with the insights, challenges andcommitments demonstrated by every writer in this is-sue. Rather than closing down debates by appealing toauthorized interpretations, each essay advances innova-

tive lines o thought. We can see the thematic coherenceo the issue in the very investment by each contributor inthe tasks o close reading, analysis, and dialogue. Anoth-er answer has to do with the community o students whoinitiated this project in the summer o 2013. Not contentwith an approach to philosophy that keeps it constrained


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to the classroom, these students bring philosophy outsideo the universityto the parks and cas where conversa-tion thrive, and also to this new undergraduate journal.Te hope, then, is that these essays will incite urther de-bate and will oster ongoing community, community inwhich solidarity is an ever-present ideal and in which theboundaries o the classroom remain contested.

Bibliography

Derrida, Jacques. Learning to Live Finally: Te Last Interview.ranslated by Pascal-Anne Brault & Michael Naas. MelvilleHouse, 2011.

Schmidt, Jeff. Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at SalariedProfessionals and the Soul-Battering System that Shapes TeirLives. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000.

Dr. Ada S. Jaarsma is an Associate Professor of Philoso-phy in the Department of Humanities at Mount RoyalUniversity, where she teaches continental philosophy and

feminist philosophy. Her current research examines theintersections of existentialism with evolutionary theory.

AFFECTUS Intro

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