I had taken several of Haver's courses at Binghamton many years ago when he was a history professor. He had a layered personality with a very progressive -theatrical style of presenting himself and his material. Students were exposed to profanity and an expansive vocabulary of words not many have ever come across or used in daily life.
I had taken his F AIDS course which brought in extra students who peeked in to see gay pornograpic imagery presented right infrom of them on film. He also gave presentations sometimes all in leather with a bald head, that was very unusual for that time. Post a Comment. Rather, I come to my reading with certain questions in mind; what I look for in PT are indications that might inform my thinking about such questions. I am particularly interested in the turn of various disciplinary practices in this instance, philosophy to interrogate their own conditions of possibility in the present conjuncture as a response to the resistance presented by their various objects to the practice in question.
I read with the assumption that in the present situation the only possible excuse for reading philosophical texts is that they offer concepts that can provoke us to think beyond the presumptively common sense of the dystopia that is the present conjuncture; indeed, insofar as they might provoke another practice of philosophy. I therefore do not read PT as a position in what is called social and political philosophy, a position to be defended, and from which polemical attacks might be launched in the struggle for interpretative hegemony.
What is at issue in PT is not merely a difference in interpretation, but the very possibility of interpretation, the very possibility of making sense.
If there is, or if there can be, a political practice of philosophy, it certainly does not consist in the expression of opinions by those who call themselves philosophers regarding one or another political issue, event, state of affairs, affairs of state, or whatever. Of course, this does not mean philosophers should not express opinions, engage in debates, take positions, or simply discuss aspects of whatever is said to be political.
