Discomfort

There's lots of Turkish women fighting outside my window. They are very shrill... I'm not sure what they're fighting about but it has been very entertaining.

I was glad to see Mark's response to the 'Fluffy Deleuze' post (too lazy to add hyperlinks). It also got me thinking about fluffy philosophy in general. When I read Deleuze in particular I always find something joyful about his work, it makes me smile, I like it when philosophy makes me smile...... but then that isn't the point of philosophy, the smiling is only secondary to what is so important about it. If philosophy were all about warm hearted hugs and hearts then what would be the point in it? Do we really want to make a (very off the mark) reading of Deleuze, Foucault et al that simply upholds our (very much) Western position of comfort and commodities?

For me, Philosophy is not about warmth and kindness, it is about opening a space for thought that is often extremely uncomfortable. What brings one into a mind of questioning is not happy happy joy joy love but a feeling of anxiety, pain, suffering. Happiness is great for people who want to live a lifestyle in which they want to be comfortable in whatever manner they like best (I am not condemning such a lifestyle, I often think that it would be a lush way to live) but for those who wish to think, or to set themselves to the task of thinking, one must look behind happiness to those things that lie at the very core of the human condition. This is not to say, a la Alyosha Karamazov, that we should desire to suffer; but that we have an understanding that more people suffer than are encased in happiness and that this is something that philosophy must attest to.

We are discontinuous beings, very much aware of our own mortality though we in the west are able to expertly shy away from that fact. Despite being the only certainty we have, death is rarely discussed, it becomes clinical and sanitized. Deprived of the certainty that Christ died for our sins so that we might go to heaven we become silent about that which is certain. We prefer to remain silent also while we exist in our comfort zone about the blatant fact there are people who suffer. Philosophy is not meant to be about hiding but about uncovering, unconcealing. For us to champion philosophy as the discourse of comfort and happiness is to strip it of all real meaning and hide what should not remain hid.

So, although Deleuze might make me chuckle occasionally, or I might go into ecstasy over a line written by Bataille, I find little that is warm or comfortable about philosophy. There may be times when words are written in joyful cadences or enraptured tones but I will always approach it with sobriety for when I look at the world and try to uncover what lies hidden I find little that is 'fluffy.'

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