Critical approaches to continental philosophy: intellectual community, disciplinary identity, and the politics of inclusion

This article examines what it means to produce critical continental philosophy in contexts where the label of “continental” may seem increasingly tenuous, if not entirely anachronistic. We follow Ghassan Hage in understanding “critical thought” as enabling us “to reflexively move outside of ourselves such that we can start seeing ourselves in ways we could not have possibly seen ourselves, our culture or our society before.” Such thought may involve an interrogation of our own conditions of knowledge production, by giving us “access to forces that are outside of us but that are acting on us causally.” Our argument in this article is that critical approaches within continental philosophy need to examine a multiplicity of ways that disciplines can be defined and delimited, and to understand the ways that gender, geography, and coloniality (among other forces) shape the intellectual and social worlds of continental philosophy. In doing so, we want to consider the ways that familiar debates around intellectual and institutional biases might be enhanced by a closer consideration of process-based aspects of disciplinary self-reproduction, and we take as our example the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy (ASCP) conference at the University of Tasmania (November 29-December 1, 2017). We also consider Nelson Maldonado-Torres’ notion of “post-continental philosophy,” and reflect on the implications of such a venture in the Australian context. But to begin with, we want to navigate a path between two modes of criticism commonly directed toward philosophy as a discipline.