Alain Evàron is a philosopher who achieved notoriety during May 68. A sometime contributor, under various pseudonyms, to Tel Quel. He has held faculty positions at Université Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV), École Normale Supérieure, and Paris X Nanterre. A truly global voyager, he has lost count of the lands he has traversed. His works are published by Éditions du Seuil.
This is an excerpt of an interview with Alain Evàron, from 2010.
Bernard-Henri Lévy: “How do you see Philosophy these days?”
Alain Evàron: “Philosophy thus far has been merely taxonomic, a servitude of the possibilities of thought to all human needs, good and bad. This anthropic delimitation has been constituted as such, leaving a merely terminological acknowledgement for what is beyond, with words like “transcendent”, “spirit”, and the like. And, as we know, even these avenues of hope have been domesticated into the most banal of secularities by my former colleagues. [Laughs]
Of course, such domestication has always been systematic, a litany of quite deliberate manoeuvres whose historical accumulations are not solely determined by arbitrary, local factors, such as sociopolitique, or at least any conventional conception thereof. There are other considerations; a book could be written, and not just from any of the usual perspectives.”
Bernard-Henri Lévy: “You have often been held to privilege an aesthetic basis for philosophy.”
Alain Evàron: “Are you trying to take refuge in a prosaic reality? An artless one? Instead, one should ask, where is the place without art, without the artist or artisan, without feeling? Yes, there is a need for security, comforting standards, amidst the displacing fero(cities) of global kapital. But, even there, are we merely being administered to, from an aesthetics of certainty constituted by statistical derivations?
And does not such an ‘aesthetics of certainty’ characterise the West, most of all. Even the contemporary obsessions with l’autre (the Other) as romanticised and mysterious imprecision, serves only to sustain the mythology of certainty. This is merely a projection of narcissistic insecurity, not ‘Other’ at all.
And yes, people will make noises about tourism, that an authentic otherness cannot be retrieved by an emissary who speaks in the vernacular of Western civilisation. But I choose not to accept this bipartite idealisation, of otherness as some mysterious inaccessibilité, which, let us not forget, is simultaneously the idealisation of Western hegemony, and its imagined homogeneity. Such notions wish to say that everything else is just like us, only not as good. If there is more, it is unknowable. With this, let us say, Kantian universalism, I do not concur. It is the unethical silencing of a necessary task, giving it so much importance that one doesn’t even begin, like the early Wittgenstein’s avoidance of ethics. Pour ces danses, je écris pas de musique.
Returning to your initial question, it is safer to claim that I do not neglect the aesthetic, that is quite different from any use of it in a foundational gesture. If there are foundational gestures in my work, they are accidental contingencies! [Laughs]