SubStance

Reading this collection of articles is a troubling experience because, each in their own manner, they produce something like a “portrait of a philosopher with her problem” – to recall Gilles Deleuze’s proposition about how to characterize the work of a philosopher. I am most grateful to Martin Savransky and those who accepted his invitation because, in order to obtain such a “portrait,” they needed not to stop at the obvious but respond, each in her or his own way, to what has been a learning process rather than the obstinate development of one ever- recurring problem.

Indeed, as many of the contributors emphasize, my work can hardly be associated with such a development. It may rather look like an opportunistic trajectory related to encounters and collaborations. When questioned about this trajectory, I used to describe it as an amoeba-like locomotion – as when a pseudopod encounters what might be food and the whole amoeba follows, shifting its form around it. Obviously, the point of this image is not capture and digestion, but it nevertheless refers to sustenance. It may well be that I became the kind of philosopher whose portrait, here proposed, cannot be separated from what I first felt as my “personal” problem: the incapacity to feel sustained by the resources my “milieu” provided me with.

This looks like a psychological problem – the feeling of not fitting, the desire to be like others who seemed to be satisfied with the available resources and would actively compete for their possession; the temptation to just mimic them, but with the “idiotic” awkwardness which comes from being unable to really enjoy what you wish to be satisfied with. Gilles Deleuze’s idiot, the one who slows down where others rush, as if “there was something more urgent, but she does not know what,” has since come to matter for me, but the idiot is the figure of a force, a conceptual persona, who can make you think but cannot sustain you. It may be that in another epoch I would have fitted the psychosocial type of the Lacanian hysteric, the one who looks for a master, only to convince him, or herself, of his imposture, and I might have turned into a reflexive, critical thinker. I believe that my luck was to have effectively felt that “another life was possible,” that maybe the lack of sustaining resources was not “my” problem but that of the milieu, when that milieu was suddenly affected by the ripples of the May 1968 event, but also through what I learned from the feminist so-called second wave. [End Page 146]

The capacity of situated collectives to generate, as a transformative truth, the experience that “the personal is political” was the first “pseudopodal” encounter with a resource to think with, that is, to live with. It was also my first encounter with what I would later call a practice, with its pragmatic artificiality. In such encounters, personal experiences were convoked but not as confessions or as indictments. They were not to be discussed or interpreted. It is the way they made sense for others, the way they entered into resonance with each other, that transformed their signification, separating them from their hold, “depsychologizing” them. Laughing together was both a challenge and the transformative realization of the commonality of what we had experienced as our own shameful inadequacy.

However sustaining and generative, this experience has not turned me into a feminist militant. It may be because I was not ready to engage in the feminist theoretical enterprise, to become an analyst of “the power” at work beyond or behind gender differentiation. What I had encountered was not the call to go beyond or behind. It was an experience that can only be cultivated, not theorized. Donna Haraway has written that I embraced “the pragmatism of witches in order to stay true to the crafts of sciences” and, as usual, she touches on the vital point. What I have stayed true to is the way such crafts, in spite of their epistemological theorization, are able to transform their practitioners, to produce a form of collective intelligence I had never experienced with militants. Philosophy, as...