Why Undergraduate Philosophy?

An Introduction

Ada S. Jaarsma

In the first meeting of our seminar on Jacques Derrida,

in winter 2013, the students in the course and I broached
the question of what it might mean to study philosophy
in the context of a university classroom that presupposes
certain exclusions. We talked, for example, about the
many individuals who werent able to join us as enrolled
students because of devastating provincial cuts to the
higher education budget. Several students described the
structural exclusions that result from the universitys in-
creasingly close relations to the marketplace. Along these
lines, we discussed how the corporatization of universi-
ties leads to exclusionary dynamics, ranging from the
disciplinary effects of the assessment of students (quanti-
fying their work into the aggregate of a GPA) to the ideo-
logical effects of the assessment of professors (as sites like
rate my professor inculcate a culture of entertainment
rather than a culture of critique).
 The activities of reading and conversing about texts
are caught up with market-driven imperatives, we mused,
regardless of whether we willingly confront such dynam-
ics or not. Derridas assessment of consumption explains
why we cannot take for granted how we engage with texts:
The mass productions that today inundate
the press and publishing houses do not form
their readers; they presuppose in a phantas-
matic and rudimentary fashion a reader who
has already been programmed. They thus end
up preformatting this very mediocre address-
ee whom they had postulated in advance.1
Consumer-based reading practices exclude creative and
critical thinking, according to Derrida, which means
that the terms of such overly programmed reading align
dangerously close with the existing order of values and
meanings.
On this account, philosophical study itself risks a cer-
tain unquestioning acquiescence to the exclusionary log-
ics of the market. While we might want to affirm activi-
ties like reading as resources for securing emancipation
and freedom, Derridas analysis disallows such naivet.
Of course, Derridas own method of philosophy prompts
a much more hopeful line of thought: how might philos-
ophy overcome these constitutive exclusions and equip us
with capacities for critique, as readers and interlocutors?
And what kinds of practices should we be enacting, both
within our classroom and beyond, in order to contest ex-
clusionary forms of repression and create conditions in
which critique and freedom flourish?
While this conversation marked the beginning of

1 Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview. Trans.

Pascal-Anne Brault & Michael Naas (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2011)
our semester-long seminar, its concerns ultimately over-
flowed the boundaries of our classroom. At the conclu-
sion of our course, the students moved the seminar into
the city, meeting in parks and cafs, shifting the focus
of seminar-discussion from Derrida to Spinoza and De-
leuze. Students from universities across town joined this
summer seminar, which was entirely student-led, and out
of this philosophical community came the decision to
launch the journal, AFFECTUS. In tracing the history of
the journal as caught up in some way with wide-ranging
reflections on exclusion, I would like, on the one hand, to
make the case for its critical aspirations and, on the other,
to reflect on its significance as a collaborative and stu-
dent-led project. In contrast to the preformatted reader,
constrained by mass marketing into reading solely along
predetermined ways, Derrida suggests that there is hope
that critique might emerge out of close readingfor texts
that form the reader pedagogically.
I see this journal, AFFECTUS, as an enterprise that
reflects such pedagogical hope. Above all, it was the la-
bour of undergraduate students, exclusively, that brought
this journal into being: students put out the call for pa-
pers, students from across the continent submitted an
array of excellent work, and students gathered together
for the difficult work of adjudicating submissions and
ascertaining the contents of this first issue. Rather than
the constraints that tend to govern the assessment of
student work, constraints that can impede rather than
inspire creativity, this peer-reviewed assessment reflects
the criteria that the editorial board of students developed
together. It seems worth emphasizing that these values
and ideals emerged out of student-led discussion. In his
analysis of the obstacles that often block critical resis-
tance in universities, Jeff Schmidt points out that profes-
sors were often themselves the best students, those who
excelled by playing by the rules. Conforming to institu-
tional norms, he explains, reflects the long-rewarded
behavior that got them [professors] into graduate school
in the first place.2 In other words, there are certain pre-
formed habits and dispositions in professors that can re-
inforce, rather than call out, the exclusionary tendencies
of the classroom. Schmidts gentle rejoinder to professors
suggests that resistance is more likely to be found within
student communities.
And, as we peruse the contents of this first issue of
AFFECTUS, we come across examples of the creative,
boundary-questioning work that demonstrate the pos-
sibility of critical resistance. In their inventive recasting
of Jean-Paul Sartres No Exit, Exit Time, Britanny Burr
and Syd Peacock move the drama of Sartres play from
the hellish afterlife into a modern-day university hallway.
Even when I am alone, I am existing with others, one
speaker admits, an insight that Sartres characters are un-
able to glimpse, let alone express, because of the trouble
that this admission would cause for the stubborn indi-
viduality of bad faith. It is no neutral declaration, this
acknowledgement that I, regardless of circumstance or
choice, exist fundamentally with others. As Lisa Guen-
ther explains in the interview with Michael Giesbrecht,
the study of philosophy ought to create time and space
for exploring existence, experience, and praxis, putting
us more on the hook for the world that we create together.
This kind of pedagogy intensifies our responsibility for
the shared nature of existence, especially in relation to
structural forms of oppression that affect all of us but
in grossly disproportionate ways. Since it is the hope for
solidaritya hope that is existential but also pragmat-

2 Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Profes-

sionals and the Soul-Battering System that Shapes Their Lives. (New
York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000).
icthat emerges from this line of critique, we confront
an insistent challenge: namely, to find ways to cultivate
solidarity with others, through our actions, choices, and
relations.
What is the significance, then, of choosing some phil-
osophical frameworks over others as we make decisions
about such actions and choices? In Democracy Promo-
tion as a Political Project, Jeta Mulajs careful parsing of
the implications of democracy-projects foregrounds the
political stakes of how philosophical arguments about
democracy are elaborated and then carried out as pro-
grammatic visions. Identifying prevailing paradigms as
political projects of the powerful, Mulajs analysis in-
vites us to grapple with the dissonance that arises from
reading Plato and Aristotle alongside a contemporary
thinker like Jacques Rancire. It also prompts uncom-
fortable and deeply pressing questions about what our
normative ideals should be for how philosophy and poli-
tics come together and how they might inform the nature
of our shared world.
In Rhythm as Logos in Native-World-Ordering, Si-
erra Mills Druley shows us that our reflections on philos-
ophy and politics are limited if we are not also equipped
with resources for confronting our cosmological assump-
tions. Drawing out a nuanced account of indigenous phi-
losophy, Druley proffers an important intervention in
how we think about relationality, especially in terms of
the spatial and temporal dynamics of rhythm. Rhythm,
Druley suggests, can be seen as revelatory, prompting
a kind of learning that is not literate or visual but vis-
ceral and real. Druleys conclusion points to a vision of
humanity in communion with the whole of the pulsing
world, a vision that is inspiring and that provokes re-
flection on the methods by which we might participate in
such communion.
 Jason Walsh, in his The Nature of Oz: The Cultural
Logic of Nature Documentaries and Prison Films, draws
our attention to the ways in which ideological construc-
tions mediate our cultural conceptions of life, nature and
freedom. While shows like Oz represent the panopticon
in ways that align with Foucaults descriptions, Walsh ex-
poses how such simulations of reality work to undercut
critical resistance on the part of consumers. And while
nature documentaries dramatize the plight of global
warming, they pacify us with the domesticating logic of
capitalism (enterpreneurs will save us) and of natural-
ized survivalism (there has always been conflict). Walsh
concludes his essay by citing a rhetorical question from
Foucault: Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories,
schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?
This indictment by Foucault of the allegiance of modern
institutions with capitalism reminds all of us who work
and study in universities of the importance of resistance.
We will be celebrating the launch of this inaugural is-
sue of AFFECTUS with an event at Mount Royal Univer-
sity that has been organized around the question, Why
Undergraduate Philosophy? While this query is ulti-
mately an open one, with no delimited set of answers, I do
think that we can read this first journal issue as supplying
some initial responses. Why undergraduate philosophy?
One answer has to do with the insights, challenges and
commitments demonstrated by every writer in this is-
sue. Rather than closing down debates by appealing to
authorized interpretations, each essay advances innova-
tive lines of thought. We can see the thematic coherence
of the issue in the very investment by each contributor in
the tasks of close reading, analysis, and dialogue. Anoth-
er answer has to do with the community of students who
initiated this project in the summer of 2013. Not content
with an approach to philosophy that keeps it constrained
to the classroom, these students bring philosophy outside
of the universityto the parks and cafs where conversa-
tion thrive, and also to this new undergraduate journal.
The hope, then, is that these essays will incite further de-
bate and will foster ongoing community, community in
which solidarity is an ever-present ideal and in which the
boundaries of the classroom remain contested.

Bibliography
Derrida, Jacques. Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview.
Translated by Pascal-Anne Brault & Michael Naas. Melville
House, 2011.
Schmidt, Jeff. Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried
Professionals and the Soul-Battering System that Shapes Their
Lives. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000.

Dr. Ada S. Jaarsma is an Associate Professor of Philoso-

phy in the Department of Humanities at Mount Royal
University, where she teaches continental philosophy and
feminist philosophy. Her current research examines the
intersections of existentialism with evolutionary theory.