Examined Life - The Movie

I saw Examined Life recently: it's a film of interviews with a bunch of big-name philosophers: Cornel West, Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor.

Cornel West rapped away, interesting right up to the point where he mentioned 'white supremacy' and lost me. Are people still going on about that? Haven't they realised that it's only some white men who have the power and the rest of us are as screwed as everyone else? Appiah made sense at the time but nothing stuck. Singer is... Singer. Avital Ronnell made very little sense but sounded the part – that's what translating Derrida and studying with Kristeva will do to you. Michael Hardt rowed round Central Park, as he admitted that the idea of “going to the mountains, forming an armed cell and starting a revolution” was totally outside his experience. I got the idea he wanted some kind of revolution, but not what or how. It vanished into the mists of his syntax. Judith Butler takes a walk with the painter and activist Sunaura Taylor through the graffiti walls of San Francisco and they buy a sweater at a thrift shop. They talked about what it meant for someone in a wheelchair to “take a walk” and made the usual kinds of remarks about gender and disability being social constructions. Nussbaum mentioned capabilities and how she agreed with Aristotle that the aim of a society should be to allow each of its members to develop their abilities. I couldn't help thinking that she's a very handsome woman – but then I'm shallow like that. Zizek was huge fun, wandering around a rubbish tip, suggesting amongst a hundred other things that Nature is a series of catastrophes and not a beautiful system in fragile balance threatened by your breathing too hard. At one point he picks up a scrap from a porn mag and shakes his head “oh no, you call this porn?” suggesting a robust knowledge of the real stuff. The ICA audience laughed out loud. Of all of them, he's the best value for money.

The selection is not representative of modern philosophy, it's representative of the best-sellers of modern American philosophy. All of these people - except Nussbaum - are influenced by the French superstars: Barthes, Baudrillard, Lacan, Derrida, Kristeva, Foucault. They're all more Hegelian than Popperian, more inclined to using words at the edge of their meaning rather than using a plain-speaking style. None are technical philosophers: epistemologists, philosophers of science or mathematics, metaphysicians or logicians. But then perhaps those guys don't examine life, only knowledge and its relatives.

The philosophy section in Foyles is packed with the French superstars and their backing bands and influences. There are few of the British Analytical Philosophers I grew up with (though Gilbert Ryle must have had a birthday or something because there's a chunk of his stuff). These people are the current thing. But then Peter Strawson was a star once and while I don't wish to speak ill of the recently departed, his signature work Individuals was one of the more unreadable and pointless uses of the human mind until the minor String Theorists got going.

Props, however, to Astra Taylor for making the movie. She looks to be the next Brian Magee, a sensitive and informed populariser of philosophy, and we've been overdue one of those for a while. I found I "got" some of them the better for having seen them: having seen Judith Butler, her performative theory of gender makes a lot more sense (even if it still doesn't quite work at more than the hand-waving stage).