Daily Dialectic

Emil Cioran, a Romanian philosopher, claimed that one could believe in philosophy and be healthy, or think, and be sick. I take this claim seriously, and ask about the state of health of our (the University of Queensland) philosophy department, by which I mean the work that you and I do and take ourselves to be doing as academic philosophers. The coordinates by which I triangulate my discussion are: the Socratic idea that to philosophise is to learn to die; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s suggestion that philosophy is about the creation of concepts; and the identification of desire with philosophy in thinkers such as Alain Badiou and Jean-François Lyotard. I end by asking whether our aim is, and whether it ought to be becoming thinkers who produce philosophy that is sick.