Reading a recent collection of Conversations with Zizek, Z. suggests that one of the definitive facts about philosophy seems to be that it is never 'in its place'. Somehow its existence is nearly always unofficial, or conducted under some subterfuge. It must ceaselessly find itself anew, but finds itself always 'somewhere else'. By the time it has been codified and academically enshrined, it has already slipped out the back door, for such codification is eccentric to its very substance... It reappears only to to be dismissed as non-philosophy, and the philosopher ridiculed as a mountebank and corrupter of youth.
Often, other disciplines take over (at least part of) the ‘normal’ role of philosophy: in some of the nineteenth century nations like Hungary or Poland, it was literature which played the role of philosophy (that of articulating the ultimate horizon of meaning of the nation in the process of its full constitution); in the USA today, I.e., in the conditions of the predominance of cognitivism and brain studies in philosophy departments, most of ‘Continental philosophy’ takes place in departments of comparative literature, cultural studies, English, French and German [..] In Slovenia in the 1970’s, ‘dissident’ philosophy took place in sociology departments and institutes. [..] So where did philosophy play its ‘normal’ role? One usually evokes Germany – however, is it not already a commonplace that the extraordinary role of philosophy there was grounded in the belatedness of the realization of the German national political project? [..] Is there then a ‘norm’ at all? The closest one can come to it is if one looks upon the anaemic established academic philosophy, such as neo-Kantianism a hundred years ago in Germany or French Cartesian epistemology of the first half of the twentieth century – which was precisely philosophy at its most stale, academic, dead and irrelevant. What if, then, there is no ‘normal’ role? What if it is only the exceptions themselves that retroactively create the illusion of the ‘norm’ they allegedly violate? What if not only, in philosophy, is exception the rule, but also philosophy – the need for authentic philosophical thought – arises precisely in those moments when (other) parts-constituents of the social edifice cannot play their ‘proper’ role? What if the proper space for philosophy consists of these very gaps and interstices opened up by the ‘pathological’ displacements in the social edifice?