Critical Approaches to Continental Philosophy: Intellectual Community, Disciplinary Identity, and the Politics of Inclusion

This article examines what it means to produce critical continental philosophyin contexts where the label of “continental” may seem increasingly tenuous, ifnot entirely anachronistic. We follow Ghassan Hage in understanding “criticalthought” as enabling us “to reflexively move outside of ourselves such that wecan start seeing ourselves in ways we could not have possibly seen ourselves, ourculture or our society before.” Such thought may involve an interrogation of ourown conditions of knowledge production, by giving us “access to forces that areoutside of us but that are acting on us causally.” Our argument in this article isthat critical approaches within continental philosophy need to examine a multiplicity of ways that disciplines can be defined and delimited, and to understandthe ways that gender, geography, and coloniality (among other forces) shape theintellectual and social worlds of continental philosophy. In doing so, we wantto consider the ways that familiar debates around intellectual and institutionalbiases might be enhanced by a closer consideration of process-based aspects ofdisciplinary 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 sucha venture in the Australian context. But to begin with, we want to navigate a pathbetween two modes of criticism commonly directed toward philosophy as a discipline