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Curiosity: Philosophy and the Politics of Difference

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Curiosity: Philosophy and the Politics of Difference DePaul University Via Sapientiae College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences 7-2015 Curiosity: philosophy and the politics of difference Perry Zurn DePaul University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://via.library.depaul.edu/etd Recommended Citation Zurn, Perry, "Curiosity: philosophy and the politics of difference" (2015). College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations. 183. https://via.library.depaul.edu/etd/183 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at Via Sapientiae. It has been accepted for inclusion in College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Via Sapientiae. For more information, please contact [email protected]. CURIOSITY: PHILOSOPHY AND THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE A Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy June, 2015 BY Perry Zurn Department of Philosophy College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences DePaul University Chicago, Illinois Copyright © 2015 by Perry Zurn All rights reserved ii To Holly Zurn for teaching me to read the world And to Sara Atlee for inspiring me to live in it iii Philosophy leaps ahead on tiny toeholds; hope and intuition lend wings to its feet. Calculating reason lumbers heavily behind, looking for better footholds, for reason too wants to reach that alluring goal which its divine comrade has long since reached. It is like seeing two mountain climbers standing before a wild mountain stream that is tossing boulders along its course: one of them light-footedly leaps over it, using the rocks to cross, even though behind and beneath him they hurtle into the depths. The other stands helpless; he must first build himself a fundament which will carry his heavy cautious steps. Occasionally this is not possible, and then there exists no one who can help him across. What then is it that brings philosophical thinking so quickly to its goal? Is it different from the thinking that calculates and measures, only by virtue of the greater rapidity with which it transcends all spaces? No, its feet are propelled by an alien, illogical power—the power of creative imagination. Lifted by it, it leaps from possibility to possibility, using each one as a temporary resting place. —Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks iv CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vi INTRODUCTION 1 I. Curiosity and Philosophy 4 II. A Short History of Curiosity 7 III. Nietzsche‟s Account 17 IV. Heidegger and Curiosity 22 V. Turning to Foucault and Derrida 28 CHAPTER ONE: FOUCAULT: HISTORIES OF CURIOSITY 32 I. Foucault‟s Histories of Curiosity 34 II. The Archeological Writings 36 III. The Genealogical Writings 46 IV. A Nascent Account of Curiosity 60 CHAPTER TWO: FOUCAULT: AN ETHICS OF CURIOSITY 65 I. Curiosity and the Moral Life 67 II. Curiosity and the Public Intellectual Life 76 III. Curiosity and the Writing Life 85 CHAPTER THREE: A CASE STUDY OF PUBLICITY 97 I. Foucault and the GIP 100 II. The GIP and Publicity 106 III. Foucault and Kierkegaard on Publicity 110 IV. Foucault on Leveling 119 CHAPTER FOUR: DERRIDA: DECONSTRUCTING CURIOSITY 131 I. “The Most Curious of Men” 133 II. Sovereign Curiosity 140 III. Animal Curiosity 148 IV. Limit Cases: God and the Herb of the Field 155 V. Philosophical Curiosity 163 CHAPTER FIVE: A CASE STUDY OF INQUIRY 169 I. Technologies of Theological-Political Sovereignty 170 II. The Death Penalty and Philosophy 174 III. The Guillotine 179 IV. The Question 182 V. The Abolition of Inquiry 196 CONCLUSION 201 BIBLIOGRAPHY 214 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work springs from a series of debts, debts which are as impossible to calculate as they are to forget. I am grateful to my committee for their support in general and their comments on the project in particular. Thanks to Tina Chanter and Elizabeth Rottenberg for their graduate seminar, in fall 2008, where this project really began to take shape. It was here that I started to grapple with curiosity‟s ambiguous role in a politics of difference. Thanks to Tina for seeing me through the early stages and believing in what did not yet exist. Thanks to Michael Naas and Elizabeth Rottenberg for their invitation to join the Derrida Seminars Translation Project 2010- 2012, where I began to analyze a certain kind of curiosity as the deconstruction of philosophy. To David Wills and Geoffrey Bennington for encouragement in the project, and to Peggy Kamuf and Elissa Marder for important references along the way. And thanks to Kevin Thompson for the invitation to translate material from the Prisons Information Group. It was this archival work that pushed me to investigate the relationship between curiosity, language, and punishment. Thanks to the many conference audiences who offered important questions and clarifications in the process. To the anonymous readers at Radical Philosophy Review for their helpful comments on early drafts of Chapters Two and Three and to the special issue editors, Andrew Dilts and Natalie Cisneros, for seeing a shorter version of Chapter Three through to publication. To Jeremy Bell, Andrew Dilts, Dilek Huseyinzadegan, Anna Johnson, Sina Kramer, Jana McAuliffe, and Jeff Pardikes for their community of inquiry and care. A special thanks to Andrew for his friendship, his mentorship, and what has become a rich experience of collaboration. Thanks to DePaul‟s McNair Scholars Program: Lindsey Back, Luciano Berardi, Paulina Nava, Gina Nuñez, Lee Westrick, Ife Williams, and Shannon Williams for their interest in the project from the start and their understanding in its final hours. Working with them has given me a renewed, concrete appreciation for the importance of diversifying the methods and practitioners of curiosity. To my family: Danielle, Kristin, Luke, John, Robert, Grace, Abigail, Lydia, Khyber, and Sara for their strange and relentless questions over the years. To Dad, who sparred with me so early. To Kris, who wanders so well. And to Dani, my first and last companion in inquiry. Lastly, to Marie, for her patience and her faith. vi Introduction This work is concerned with curiosity in relation to philosophical method and the politics of difference.1 Philosophy and politics, however, are not the typical referents for the term curiosity. In the media today, curiosity usually appears rather in relation to science and pedagogy. Science, in this more colloquial context, appears to be the ultimate expression of a trained curiosity. From observation and hypothesis to experimentation and results, science is both driven by the need to know and directed by strategies for knowledge. Now, if science is the pinnacle of curiosity, pedagogy is its foundation. Through pedagogy, natural curiosity is identified, trained, developed, and matured. One might wonder, then, why take on curiosity under such unusual guises as philosophy and politics? Why not analyze it through a philosophy of science or education? Such a project is quite viable in its own right and could fruitfully be undertaken. Nevertheless, I propose that, within the contemporary scientific and pedagogical discourses, the questions of philosophical method and a politics of difference are surreptitiously raised. By addressing them head-on, perhaps we can assess what would otherwise have been missed. There is an insidious side to the figure of curiosity. It is not just some neutral drive or a positive impetus. It is a word bandied about to dismiss or valorize thoughts and persons, to critique or defend liminal thinking and being. As such, curiosity exists squarely at the heart of philosophy and politics. 1 I will refer, throughout, to a “politics of difference.” Although I am informed by Luce Irigaray‟s “ethics of difference,” as developed in An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1984; New York: Cornell University Press, 1993), I am relying in this work primarily on Iris Marion Young‟s Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). For Irigaray, ethics paradigmatically concerns individual deeds, it happens between you and me. Whereas politics, for Young, relates to social or group deeds; it happens between us. How one understands and enacts a politics of difference is certainly an ethical question, but I will emphasize, nevertheless, the collectivity necessarily involved in that action. 1 Since November 2011, curiosity has been making headlines, not as some abstract human impetus to explore but as NASA‟s new Mars Rover: “Curiosity.”2 This rover, equipped not only to collect but to test data on site, will, with any luck, answer the now age-old question of whether or not Mars ever sustained life. In one sense, naming the Mars Rover “Curiosity” is hardly surprising: the rover, much like its namesake, is an expression of the human mind, catapulting simultaneously into the past and the future, intent on knowledge. In another sense, however, the name is strange. “Curiosity” is an oddly lifelike machine, with six legs, one arm, a head-like antenna, and a brain in its belly. Outside of its own organic structure, it serves as the eyes and ears of many scientists. It is a monstrous mechanical object. It bends and breaks our ideas of intelligence and organism. It acts formulaically, without any emotion or instinct of its own, and yet it is adaptive and experimental. “Curiosity” both tackles and reflects the strange, the unknown, and the otherworldly. One might even think that our curious drive mimics its own object, embodies its object in the process of understanding it, whether as a tactic or as a price. But curiosity‟s appearance as the Mars Rover was not its only splash in 2011. In August, the Discovery Channel aired a new series called Curiosity, which then returned in 2012.
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