UPJA

Beau: Welcome to Conversations From The Region, my name is Beau and I’m an associate editor from the Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Australasia, and I’m very very honoured to be sitting here with Dr Bryan Mukandi from the University of Wollongong. I guess Bryan we’ll start with just introducing yourself a little bit – what are your philosophical interests? And what are you currently working on at the moment

Bryan (laughs): You’d think I’d know, right? First of all, thank you so much Beau, such a joy to do this with you. My name is Bryan, Bryan Mukandi, I’m a lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Wollongong. I have a background in medicine, public health, and philosophy. I work mostly, it’s funny – it’s hard to define what I do but I guess I work in social and political philosophy and in the health humanities. I’m really interested in ideas around social justice, about, I guess, social change, broadly defined, health and well-being of people belonging to marginalised communities as well as the social and political conditions necessary to bring that about. And I’m currently working on a book on East African writer, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and I’m trying to weave together a kind of, a political philosophy from his varied body of work.

Beau: That’s incredible and I really want to, at some point, come back to this book on Ngugi. Now, you’ve sort of had a non-standard journey into philosophy. You were initially in like, a medical background and didn’t come to philosophy for quite a while but – so what sort of, drew you away from, sort of, being you know, a doctor in Zimbabwe to philosophy?

Bryan: That’s a great great great question. I mean, I didn’t have the language for it, but I think ultimately it was moral luck, right? You know, ultimately, ultimately, ultimately the biggest determinant of your overall health and well-being is the postcode you’re born into; the kind of social and material conditions you grow up in. And I really struggled with just moral luck, with the fact that, you know, not having done anything to deserve it, some people end up having a much better time of things than others. And trying to think through what justice might look like. And I had a bunch of questions that I couldn’t answer, and growing frustration led me to a philosophy degree. Because I think I was looking for a conceptual language and ideas to help me make sense of things and once I ended up on that program, I was hooked, I fell in love.

Beau: Well, you did your masters in Ireland-

Bryan: That’s right.

Beau: And then your PhD at UQ, I wondered if you could just tell us a little bit about your experience at both of those institutions. And maybe the difference between, you know, I guess big changes between studying philosophy in Ireland and then in Brisbane?

Bryan: Okay excellent. So I did a masters in social and political philosophy at Queen’s University in Belfast. And you know, I gotta say, that was the richest and the best educational experience of my life. There was, it was a taught masters degree but there was a lot of – with a, kind of a big dissertation at the end. But there was a lot of time. You know, you’d only have about four contact hours a week and the rest of the time you’re expected to live in the library. There was small classes, lots of access to engagement with faculty and an incredible library, and an incredible and vibrant city with a difficult history and, and just lot of intelligent conversation all over the place. It was incredible. My masters was in a, you know, that department was very, very analytic. My bent was more, you know, I found continental European philosophy more to my taste and my liking. But there was space, you know like, Belfast forced me to read a lot of different things and engage in a lot of different ways. But also I could then focus and specialise on what I was most interested in, which was wonderful. So that was philosophy in Ireland. The University of Queensland, there are some wonderful wonderful people there, have incredible mentors, I was you know, I had the privilege of an amazing PhD cohort. And I think I learnt at the very least as much from my cohort as I did from kind of, institutionally. And also quite a lot of space, I think though the thing is, when you live in a place like Belfast, you feel like you’re caught up in the world. And the kind of contact with the rest of the world, and an engagement with things happening in the world is much more immediate. Whereas, you know, in Brisbane you are definitely in Australia and you are definitely in a part of Australia. And It’s a lot more insular, and that insularity makes it harder to think certain things and in different ways. I will say though, one of the things that was invaluable about the University of Queensland was the amount of research funding that was available to PhD students. I was a beneficiary of a scholarship, which was lovely, and also I won like, an international travel award which allowed me to spend time overseas and to engage with my American like, PhD counterparts. And that, that like, you know, that was transformative for me.

Beau: I love this – how you talk about your experience about like, living in these cities and these different parts of the world and I guess, how that effects the work that you do and what work you can do, right? Being caught up in the world of where you do philosophy, I guess. I would invite you to speak more, because I think it’s a fascinating and not talked about in philosophical circles, about how ‘place’, as in just the literal place where you study and study and read and write, has had, I guess, interesting impacts on how you think and who you think with, and the problems that you have, you know, I guess that would not only be in the Australian context but in Ireland and maybe Africa as well.

Bryan: Absolutely, absolutely. So when I was in Belfast, was at Queen’s, I was introduced to Hegel right. That department, there were a couple of people in that department who were really taken with the idea of recognition and the politics of recognition. And so Charles Taylor featured prominently, Axel Honneth, you know, Alastair Macintyre and others. And You know, I remember reading and having to read Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, which was again like, it ended up being one of those foundational texts for me. The original, people like [Robert] Pippin’s interpretation, [Terry] Pinkard’s interpretation, [Frederick] Beiser, you know, and critically for me, Fanon, Fanon’s reading of it. But, you know, the idea that subjectivity like is, you know, our subjectivity is wholly and fundamentally like, intersubjective. Profound. The one thing that Hegel evades or doesn’t kind of grapple with is the fact that this kind of, fight to the death between, you know, self-conscious agents, happens in a particular place. You know, for Hegel, place is incidental, place doesn’t even come into it, he’s interested in consciousness right? This kind of disembodied consciousness even though the story is about this fight to the death, it’s just, consciousness is grappling with consciousness. At some point, one day, I hope I end up writing about how it’s not just consciousness and consciousness but consciousness-consciousness and place. You know, place is similarly constitutive of our subjectivity. So the people, the prevailing culture, the histories of that place, the flows, the movements of capital, of labour. All of these things shape not just the place, but our interaction with the place. You know, spending a little bit of time, not very much, spending a little bit of time in Hong Kong, a while ago. Profoundly, had a profound, profound, profound impact on me. My sisters live in Canada. Being in Canada, and the ways in which Canada – generating relationships in Canada, making friends there as well introduced me to the Caribbean radical tradition. What introduced me to people like Sylvia Wynter, you know, Kamau Brathwaite, Walter Rodney, importantly CLR James. And CLR James, Notes on Dialectic in Hegel was a text, which because I was in Australia, you know, had I done my PhD in Canada, I imagine my thesis would have focussed on CLR James’ work. Because I was here, it was on Derrida’s work, long story. But you know, James just wasn’t – you know, in Australia if you say you’re interested in subjectivity, interested in racialisation, interested in Hegel, if you’re lucky someone will say to you: “why don’t you read Fanon?”. If you’re in Canada, someone will say to you: “ah that’s really interesting, have you read James? Have you read some of these other figures?”. You know, if you’re in Hong Kong, if you’re in mainland China, again there’s another tradition, right? There are other traditions. And so yeah, I think place is profoundly, profoundly important. And one other thing, the biggest, the biggest biggest biggest benefit, that being in Brisbane gave me was, I fell into a research assistant job working in Indigenous health. That led to developing friendships and professional relationships with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander colleagues and that opened up again, relationships, friendships and intellectual traditions that otherwise I wouldn’t have engaged.

Beau: One of the things that I guess, at UPJA that we’re really sort of concerned with or are interested to hear about is, what is an Australian philosophy or philosophy in Australia? On country and in land, in a specific place and I guess, and there are you know, so many directions that I could sort of, take to ask you about this but, I guess first off I sort of wanted to quickly – you said long story before, but maybe you could give a short version of it, but to me, you know, it seemed like it’s quite surprising to me in the year 2024 to hear that there would – that somehow your PhD ended up being about Derrida, than CLR James. I think at this point in time, well both would be sort of, rejected. But I am interested as to why that was the sort of, why that trajectory sort of happened and from then I guess, how maybe I might ask you about how you think philosophy in Australia or maybe just in Brisbane has sort of developed since then.

Bryan: You know, it’s funny. A really really long time ago, so I mean, you know; my kind of like, you know, Michelle Boulous Walker, one of my supervisors and primary mentor. And one of her teachers, Max Deutscher, he a long time ago began articulating – arranging this question of “what does Australian philosophy look like?” Like, what is, what does it mean to do an Australian philosophy? And that’s really interesting, because for him, he’s thinking about continental European philosophy in Australia, predominantly. You know, today if somebody asks you what an Australian philosophy might look like, you might kind of think about people like Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Irene Watson, Martin Nakata, but at that point, you know, Max Deutscher is asking, even within, mainstream, white philosophy in Australia; for him, he’s grappling with this question of this, this kind of tendency to copy and paste stuff that’s happening in Europe. And again, and this despite, I mean Jeff Malpas is this Australian giant who works on place, but that hasn’t translated to a question on what does a philosophy that emerges in the Australian context really look like, right? You know, work of people like Mary Graham, is more marginal than central to the sort of, main discourse of philosophy in Australia today. And it doesn’t take very much, even as an undergraduate student to recognise that the bounds of acceptable discourse within the philosophical establishment in this country are pretty narrow. I looked around and I was like, I wanted, because I was interested in my kind of, African identity and I’d read Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self- Sources of the Modern Self and I thought it was a brilliant brilliant book, I thought it was amazing. And I was interested in something similar that, where I was part of the story. And I kind of felt in Taylor that I wasn’t part of Taylor’s story, you know, my genealogy, intellectual history and genealogy wasn’t there. The best that I could do, was like, well Derrida, he leaves Algeria when he’s nineteen, you know. He’s received as a French philosophy but he’s essentially, like, Algerian. And I was like, alright I’ll read Derrida, someone might supervise a PhD for me around Derrida. It was really hard, it took me a really long time to convince my supervisors that I was worth banking on. Firstly because I was coming from Ireland so there was a kind of, foreignness and secondly, because my preoccupations with my identity were read as foreign, right? We have a very, for the most part, very narrow view of what constitutes legitimate philosophy and tied to that is a view of what a stereotypical philosopher looks like.

Beau: There’s something that you said just at the end there that, preoccupation with your identity was read as foreign. And I wonder because I guess, there are always constant debates within philosophy as well, about this sort of, I guess identity politics, right? Or whatever. There are certain strands of philosophy which are highly abstract, and desire that sort of, objectivity or the ‘view from nowhere’ and I guess in sort of most social philosophy there has been a pushback against that. But I wonder as well, even in the – before when you mentioned what the visions of first nations philosophers that might make up an Australian philosophy, which ones get taken up and read, and what ideas get read and are allowed to be philosophy and what is not allowed to be philosophy. The question that I want to ask, which is for, you know, a lot of people from marginalised groups, whom have some form of preoccupation with a subject position or an identity, you have to fight a sort, two-sided battle: one against the essentialising claim of identity politics, in which case the key thing becomes identity which becomes a totalising or essentialising claim; and also well then, ‘I guess I’ll do something new and different’ which is usually a bit more… unmoored? Ungrounded? And new, and that starts to seep into the nun-philosophical. So, maybe this is a very broad question: but for undergraduate students coming through, or other people of colour or marginalised people in philosophy, how you’ve personally sort of, navigated that or perhaps, it should be navigated. Is it a problem with philosophy? Maybe, maybe it’s just a problem with philosophy.

Bryan: I mean, look, we’re at the very beginning, I think – and I mean others have been doing this for a while, but we’re still at the very beginning in this country of grappling with this question. I think it’s disingenuous for anyone to say there isn’t a problem, because there is, yeah, straight up. There are plenty of wonderful people, you know, people who identify with marginal communities or marginalised communities and people from mainstream communities who are engaged and invested in things being better, but there’s also a lot of entrenched interest in the status quo, and again like, if you don’t look a certain way, and if you don’t– if you aren’t asking the same old questions, you will experience, you’ll just have a harder go at it, you know. So firstly I just want to acknowledge people who struggle with that, and just legitimate that struggle. You know, really good friend, mutual friend, Helen Ngo, we constantly laugh because on the one hand, you say to yourself: ‘I don’t want to be pigeonholed, I don’t want to be like, well of course he’s interested in race, or of course she’s interested in gender, or of course they’re interested in embodiment’. And so on the one hand there is a pull towards – there’s a wonderful quote by Jean-Michel Basquiat where Basquiat says to an interviewer: “I promise you I can draw”. You know, and because you don’t want to be reduced to this exotic, unskilled, but colourful figure, right? So you want to do work that people can tell that you can draw, it’s always a temptation you know. On top of that, I really really like Kierkegaard’s work, and I want to you know, who is it? Terrence? The Roman playwright from Northern Africa, there’s this quotation of his where he says that “I am human, nothing human is alien to me”, and you want to assert that, you know? I’m human so, and you know like, if I’m interested in an obscure nineteenth century Danish philosopher or a twentieth century, you know like, mainland Chinese political philosopher, the fact of my Africanity ought not in any way be thought, you know, that ought not get in the way of studying what I want to study. On the flip side of it, I don’t know, when you’re caught up in a particular community, and you’re caught up with particular types of questions, there’s a line in Black Skin, White Masks where Fanon says: “it ought not be the case that the Black is faced with this dilemma: whiten yourself or disappear”. And it ought not be the case that people belonging to marginalised communities are forced into the dilemma where it’s a case of leave your preoccupations and identities at the door, otherwise you can’t do philosophy; that’s unjust. I think practically what we end up doing, is we end up doing a little bit of work that demonstrates that we really can draw, and we try to smuggle in as much work that’s true to our actual interests as possible. And if you’re fortunate, if over time the academy accommodates you then you try to do more and more of the things that really matter to you.

Beau: I guess, sort of just to keep going on this sort of topic of doing that you really want to do. When you’re talking about Kierkegaard, you quoted Basquiat and Terrence, neither of which are philosophers. And so I guess the other question that I find myself also doing a similar thing, and I see quite a lot of people doing this where, despite having to operate within obviously, a philosophical tradition and an Australian philosophical tradition which has been historically, you know, staunchly analytic, metaphysics, philosophy of science, philosophy of language right, to operate within that and then one potential point of I guess, pushing against it is a recourse to the non-philosophical, to poetry or literature or something like that. I just thought it was really interesting that you quoted the two of them, is that something you do like, consciously or find solace in or, does it just sort of happen? Because that type of work is much closer to what you, perhaps, philosophy could be or should be in certain areas, or something like that.

Bryan: Such a great question. I mean, so, I guess part of it is, part of my attraction to philosophy is the kind of, intellectual freedom right? Philosophy isn’t as methodologically circumscribed as say, psychology or sociology or a bunch of other social science and humanities disciplines. There’s a kind of sense where you need to demonstrate rigor but rigor can take many forms, and you have this privilege of freedom, you know? You read some of Nietzsche’s work and you think, in fact Fanon’s got this wonderful line again in Black Skin, White Masks where he’s like: “the Black look at this white man (and this young white man is Soren Kierkegaard, he’s talking about Kierkegaard now) the black stares dy-mouthed looking at this young white man singing and dancing on the tightrope of existence”. And I guess what that looks like, singing and dancing on the tightrope of existence is the ability, you look at all the sort of, kind of, references he makes, the freedom that a Kierkegaard has in his work. And I guess, for me, it’s like I read widely, I engage in a wide range of things and I want to quote the images that come to mind, you know, the things that come to mind and some of those will be philosophical you know, many won’t. I just taught a world philosophy course and I made my students read Kuan-Hsing Chen’s Asia as Method, because I thought, I think it’s some profound profound work, philosophically incredibly rich and that Heideggarian question, What [Is Called] Thinking? You know, I think a lot of propositions in that book call for thinking today. It’s a cultural studies text, but in the same way that Derrida, a lot of his work jumped around from works of art or works of poetry, or from you know, works of literature; Derrida’s essay on Jabes, the poet, is deeply philosophical and generative right? His memoirs of the blind, you know, meditations on these artworks of the Louvre, and it’s not new – and in fact, the lesson, a good lesson in Australia for us to learn without taking from continental European philosophy, is just how capacious it is and the ways in which it draws on and engages thought in a variety of forms and contexts.

Beau: So far we’ve talked about the importance of place and of doing philosophy in a specific place, and I guess I wanted to drill down and ask you a little bit about your own personal, I guess, strategies or networks or people that you relied upon both in Dublin and Queensland as both being Western countries and sort of how you navigated those spaces as a person of colour-

Bryan: Okay so it was Belfast, not Dublin.

Beau: Ahh okay.

Bryan: But yeah, Belfast and Brisbane, no no no it’s all good. Yeah, it’s a really great question. I mean it’s interesting right, I remember like in Belfast, yeah in Belfast my closest friends, the people I ended up drawing most on, it was really really interesting because I was commuting, I was there most of the week but not completely completely there, also you know, I just had a young child and was in a relationship, which is different to most of my cohort where most people are, you know, single and free so it was complex. But, I found community in a couple of interesting places: there was Maggie who was a really very very clever kind of, if I remember correctly her parents were quote-unquote “mixed”, like one catholic one protestant. But you know, Irish musician, studying philosophy, Maggie was a really great friend in terms of locating me and situate me in a nationalist politics in Ireland and help me to kind of, interpret what I was seeing. Ruth was incredibly, just a wonderful friend and she’s queer, and like you know, queer and protestant and just educated me, educated me heaps. I knew very little about queer theory, and having a friend who’s like a genuine friend first, and I guess this is a bunch of love and space to ask questions and to learn, in ways that, you know, you stumble over things and you get things wrong but where there’s genuine community there’s also an opportunity to – and genuine relationships, there’s an opportunity to like learn learn. And so Ruth was just an invaluable friend for me. And then there was a couple of really interesting faculty members, there’s Eric who studied Mozambique and Portuguese colonialism, who was a member of staff but, and again was married to a Mozambican woman and he was Swiss, and there was something about our shared outsiderness and maybe the fact that– I don’t know like, you know how sometimes people like, well you meet people and they kind of, provide community, right? And then there was Stefan Andreasson, amazing, amazing, amazing guy, supervised my masters dissertation. He’s a political theorist, comparativist. And again, for no– again sometimes you don’t know what it is, neither Stefan nor Eric treated me as a student right like, and they were both just very kind to me. And that was my community in Belfast and I mean, it’s interesting like it was other outsiders and it was people kind of grappling with other forms of marginalisation, and that allowed for you know, it’s not always the case that other folks who are also marginalised, even marginalised the same ways that you are, are necessarily empathetic or you’re going to get on with them or anything like that. A lot of the times, you know, the fact of marginalisation allows for a kind of attunement to others’ pain and it can, when people let it, it can provide a basis for, for care and for growing community across difference. And I don’t want to make it, I don’t want to Kumbaya it too much, like, cos like it’s messy and it’s difficult; but that’s where I found community in Belfast. And in Brisbane it was similar right, you know I have a wonderful friend, Dr Laura Roberts and Laura is like a feminist philosopher, she studies Irigaray, she’s from a part of the Irigaray circle and I was always really jealous because there was this thing called the Irigaray circle right, and there was something that felt to me, like a community, a community of scholars, a community of practice. And I didn’t really feel like I had the same thing, Laura and Leah Miller [?] were amazing friends, as fellow PhD students but there wasn’t, I didn’t have a sense of like, these are my people, this is my community. I ended up finding a community in a, you know, amongst an Aboriginal/Torres Strait Islander community academically led by Chelsea Watego, and kind of working in the Poche Centre for Indigenous Health at UQ, there were friendships that I developed, and again, it was– the place where I found the most interesting and the most urgent thinking happening when I was in Brisbane, wasn’t in the philosophy department, it was kind of in this critical indigenous studies space and I think a part of it is, like the stakes are different, right? You know, if you go to a philosophy conference, you can predict before you get there what half the papers are going to be about, and I mean no disrespect, exegesis is important and giving conceptual clarity, you know, is important. But often it feels as though you know, I’m a Derridean right, by training like, there’s a fetishisation of ‘play’, like a delight in the frivolity of it, you know? I once remember asking a philosopher a question about the lived implications of what they were saying and his response was “I’m a philosopher, I don’t have to care about the lived implications of anything”. And I just thought that was a terrible response, a terrible response! Because what motivates me you know, is my own situation and the situation of others, you know, there are people in the world who are grappling with urgent things, and yeah, I’m more drawn to practices of philosophy that are motivated by and attendant to, you know, tangible and urgent things than I am play. I mean there’s a place for play, absolutely, but it can’t all just be play, at least I don’t think it is, at least not given the backdrop of the brutalities in the world today. And I guess I’ve found, I keep finding among folks who’re attuned, who’re similarly turning to philosophy as a means of attending to those brutalities, right. I mean, another community I have is a community of incredible, incredible scholars, people like, you know, I’m actually not going to name folks because I’ll leave somebody out but like, incredible incredible, mostly Caribbean scholars in Canada. And amazing, amazing, amazing scholars in Melbourne, present company included right, you know, so yeah I mean like, people, like, David Austin, Beverley Mullings, Alissa Trotz, and others in Canada. People like Helen Ngo, Ryan Gustafsson, yourself, Thao, Thao Phan. Just giants. And you’ll notice like, for people who know these people ah– in the US [unknown], there’s a bunch of folks, Uchenna Okeja, half of those people are philosophers, you know, the other half are just really really really smart, deep, deep thinkers in their various kinds of fields, yeah. I guess that’s where I’ve found community, among who are seriously and earnestly grappling with ideas that have some baring on the state of the world and the hope of thinking towards a better one, as cheesy, as Kumbaya as it sounds.

Beau: There are so many super interesting threads that, I don’t know, I don’t think we’ll be able to get to all of them, I mean when you-

Bryan: And long-winded!

Beau: Sorry?

Bryan: Sorry man, I’m long-winded! (laughs)

Beau: No it’s wonderful! When you were speaking about like, solidarity across marginalised groups, and the sort of difficulties that come with that, and this term community– I guess maybe we’ll drill down I think into something that I’ve found interesting when you were speaking which was when people think about philosophy generally, as you were saying, when you know, when you go to a lot of philosophy conferences, there’s a sort of like, abstractness or something like that, you might say that. But the other thing that happens, is that, it’s very much done by one person just sort of sitting there and having some thoughts and reading some books and giving a paper; but there was, you know, a massive emphasis in your answer given to the thinking done with others, with and about friendships and that term you continue to use, ‘in community’. Maybe this is a very broad question but I’d like to ask what you think, I guess, what you think about that, about that first conception of philosophy done, you know, armchair philosophy, and then the difference between that and doing philosophy in community, thinking with others, or maybe what philosophy would look like if it was done more in those sorts of settings, if that makes sense.

Bryan: Yeah yeah yeah yeah, absolutely. And I mean like, yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, I’m a philosopher philosopher, right? I value deeply abstraction, you know, I love and I value theory you know. I read widely and deeply, yeah, and there’s a beauty and a joy in it, and also I benefit from work that does this kind of deep, dry unrelenting exegesis. Like, it’s not my favourite work to read, but when I’m trying to work something out and I’m like, what does that concept mean to me and how do we get to the nitty-gritty of this particular thing, I think that work is valuable. At exactly the same time you know, my friend David Austin will ask, what are the stakes? For what end? And for me, it’s the ‘to what?’ question and ‘for whose benefit?’ question that I often then get stuck on. Again, the bulk of my PhD was spent like, a lot was spent with Derrida and a lot was spent with Fanon, right. I value both immensely, publicly I like to think I’m more aligned with Fanon than with Derrida but if anyone takes time to read my work, like, I don’t know if I’ve ever written anything where Derrida wasn’t present, explicitly or implicitly, right? But at the same time, at the same time, you know, I think, Paulin Hountondji, who’s interesting, he’s from Benin, he was a student of Derrida’s actually. Hountondji is interesting, he’s a phenomenologist who ends up writing two very important books, and he finishes, like, he finishes everything in the French system, he works with all of the people you’re supposed to work with, I think Ricœur, he works with Derrida, Ricœur’s one of his supervisors. He’s credentialed, in the ways that you’re supposed to be credentialed. And he’s a Husserl scholar, and you know, all of these people are waiting for him to write his monograph on Husserl because that’s the fashion of the time. But instead he goes off and he writes, basically he grapples with, he grapples with the difficulties confronting the African continent at, you know, at the birth of the post-colonial nation states. And one of the essays in his first book, what’s it called again? It’s on my shelf somewhere, anyway his first book I think it’s myth and something else, African philosophy, myth and reality– Myth or Reality is what it’s called. There’s an essay there about Amo, this West African who’s captured by the Germans, enslaved, he ends up getting an education in Germany, and he ends up doing a PhD in philosophy in Germany and he’s a contemporary of Kant and others. And Hountondji thinks that Amo is this tragic figure because Amo ends up in this social context, that’s what he knows, and all of his work is directed at the preoccupations and the interests of this German philosophical intelligentsia, and his philosophical work has little bearing on Amo’s own condition and situation or the situation that his people find themselves in, right? And for Hountondji, this sort of alienation is just really, really, really tragic. And in a lot of ways that’s how I read Derrida, as this tragic figure. He’s brilliant, but he’s also a bit of a tragic figure in the sense of like, he ends up doing all of this work, to prove that he really can draw, and he really does fit in to this kind of French establishment. But I can’t find in his work, the person who leaves Algeria at the age of nineteen and is kind of confronted with questions of imperialism, colonisation, de-colonisation, he just runs away, for me he’s somebody who through theory ends up evading reality. So philosophy and abstraction becomes a means, I think, of evasion as opposed to, of engagement, right. My struggle with most philosophy conferences is anytime I ask myself what is the stake of this talk I’m currently in, more often than not I think, this person is playing a game of trying to prove to other people in the room that they really can draw. And I’m like, if they succeed yay good for them, but if they don’t, oh well. But so what? I have an impatience and I just think there’s something obscene, in a world with so much injustice and harm, among a community of people who understand their task as bringing conceptual clarity to bear, I think there’s something really really obscene when that ends up becoming a narcissistic endeavour. As opposed to a means of engaging and intervening in the world. And if you’re interested in engaging and intervening in the world, then it doesn’t take too long to recognise that, in the words of my former prime minister, Tony Abbott: “No one is a suppository of all human knowledge” (laughs). I mean no one is a suppository of all human knowledge! Then you’ve got to kind of think and engage with other kinds of folks, right? And if you’re pursuing wisdom, then an arbitrary distinction like ‘well is that person actually a philosopher’ is just dumb, right? Because like, I’m pursuing a question, I get it, like my favourite definition of philosophy is one I don’t understand. Derrida’s got this line in Violence and Metaphysics where he says philosophy is a community of the question about the possibility of the question, quote. And whatever he means by the convoluted, beautiful phrase, the question is at the centre of it, right? Like, so if what it means to be a philosopher is to be in pursuit of questions, of some question, or something like that then you go to where that pursuit leads you. And for me, part of what that means is, then sitting with and talking to, and learning from really, really smart people, smarter than I am, in whatever discipline and whatever endeavour they’re pursuing.

Beau: I think that’s so incredibly valuable and probably, really nice to hear for, you know, sort of undergraduates coming through looking to form their own communities and friends to go to the pub with and talk about philosophy, or something like that. You know, the importance of others and as you mentioned, non-philosophers in just thinking through these difficult problems, these pressing questions, that sort of call us to attention or something like that, right.

Bryan: You know, a broken clock, right a couple of times, yes Heidegger the whole national socialism thing was unfortunate but this idea of things calling for thinking, is like a really really really, clever, insightful sort of observation, right? There are various things that call for thinking, and again, Alia Al-Saji’s work for me is really great in this regard, like lingering, tarrying, hesitating over these things that call for thinking. And again I think that Alia is a wonderful model right, I mean show me a more theoretical, more abstract, and I mean that in the best possible sense of the term, a more rigorous thinker, like I dare you, right. But I mean, in thinking, what are the stakes? What are the stakes in how we understand the ways in which veiled Muslim women are racialised. You know, the way we understand the ways in which the past returns for colonised people, like. And you know, again when everything is said and done, Alia is one of the most careful Fanon scholars I know, but you know, if we’re like at her core-core; the risk of getting in trouble for that, at her core-core I think she’s a Husserl and a Bergson scholar, right? And again, show me more abstract thinkers, like, and so you can be deep, deep, deep into like, Descartes who I have a lot of time for, you know, Bergson, Spinoza, Kant even. Although, alright, Kant even! You know, no judgement. The question though, is to what end? And I think like, Alia Al-Saji is a wonderful model of, of the fact that, you know, sometimes people use the idea of being a theorist or being invested in pure reason or theoretical philosophy as a means of evading the fact that, again, that they’re engaged in narcissistic, in ultimately a narcissistic project. And again the thing is, I mean see it over and over and over again. If you want a pat on the head, you know, if you want to be told how clever you are, if you want to be embraced, particularly if you come from a minority group within philosophy, then yes, the fastest route to that is some narcissistic nonsense. The thing is, I often teach this, there’s that bit at the very beginning of Derrida’s Specters of Marx, he calls it an interesting name which means, anyway, Derrida being Derrida, showing how clever he is. But, you know, he invokes dressage, the show-pony and he meditates on this phrase, what does it mean to learn how to live? And he’s afraid, he’s terrified of when learning becomes a kind of training, a kind of dressage, and I think, again, my big problem with lots of philosophy conferences is just being surrounded by dressage and I’m like, you look pretty. You know, you’re a really great show-pony, you see these bright young men and bright young women and they’re these pretty show-ponies and it just seems like such a waste, to me. Big normative claim (laughs).

Beau: I guess to move then from conferences to the classroom, in a similar vein: I guess I would like to hear from you about your thoughts on the future of philosophical, like, pedagogy, and I use that phrase to specifically avoid using the word ‘training’ then. You know, this future of sort of like, philosophy in the classroom, how we should teach and I think, as well, this would also bear upon the ongoing attempt to sort of, quote-unquote ‘decolonise the curriculum’ or something like that. And the effect of that on teaching philosophy, especially at an undergrad level. I don’t know if there was a question in there but (laughs)

Bryan: No no there was. Okay look, this is going to be scandalous, I don’t know what it means to decolonise the classroom, you know. I mean mostly when people talk about decolonisation, and again Derrida’s Specters of Marx, I think it’s an invocation, but an invocation in the Derridean sense of calling forth but also removing, you know? That kind of double gesture. I don’t know what it means to decolonise philosophy and I don’t know what it is to do and whatever it is I don’t know if it’s possible. I think what is possible, you know, is Kuan-Hsing Cheng has this amazing book called Asia as Method and in it he says like, you know, when everything is said and done, continental European philosophy is a kind of area studies, right. It’s parochial, right. It is a tradition, it’s one tradition, Macintyre is really good about this, about writing in moral traditions and you know, rival intellectual traditions. It’s one tradition’s grappling at things. The power that that tradition has, the overwhelming influence that it has is not because of its superiority of the intellect of the people who established. It isn’t because of the superiority of the ideas put forward, it’s as Althusser would say, it’s a result of– this is the cultural state apparatus at work, right? It is a result of guns and violence, yeah. I think as philosophers, the first step to philosophical pedagogy, both on the part of those who teach and also on the part of those who sign up to be taught, because you know, I think learning is a dialogical process; the first thing to ask, again this is why I like Derrida, it’s the question of ‘what are we doing? How and why?’. At the moment, the mainstream of philosophy in Australia is white nationalist, right? It’s like a parochial white nationalist endeavour, sometimes the fact that it’s a parochial white nationalist endeavour doesn’t mean that if I put my mind to it I can’t benefit from it. And so there’s a, you know, I think the first thing is a need to attend to our orientation, Helen Ngo’s Habits of Racism, for me is a magnificent text, and it’s magnificently, magnificently helpful to help us think through the positions we hold, the orientations to the world that we habituate ourselves to, magnificent. And what, you know, if someone studying accountancy allows themselves to be indoctrinated in a particular mode of being in the world, I can’t, I’m not angry at them because the educational process in an enculturation and again, in Macantyrean terms, they’re being inducted into a particular community of practice, which is accountancy. You know, it’s on the tin, it is what it is. I think there’s something oxymoronic about a philosopher allowing themselves to be indoctrinated in any which way, if the thing itself is about grappling with questions, is about thinking, again Hannah Arendt, thinking and other non-moral considerations, thinking causes you to stop, thinking is painful, paralysed, Alia Al-Saji her paper when thinking hesitates, if what we do is about thinking, then an easy submission and a non-resistant induction into like, kind of the white nationalist project that is philosophy as it is most commonly taught, is troubling, right? Now, I’m speaking predominantly about, you know, most of the social, most of the aesthetics and social and political philosophy that goes by the name of anglo-american and continental European philosophy. I go, the thing that you’re doing, why? You know, I’m running a course on the philosophy of race and gender this semester, okay that’s clearly different but I’m also running one on political philosophy. And you know, the hardest thing that I had to do in that course in political philosophy, was getting myself with being okay with not teaching Rawls, then Dworkin, then Nozick, then maybe Bryan Barry, and then Charles Mills, then maybe Martha Nussbaum and then maybe Amartya Sen, you know. The Iris Marion Young, Iris Marion Young stayed because I think she’s amazing, but you know what I mean? Even I struggle to teach political philosophy in a manner that’s something other than dressage, yeah, I dunno, I think I have very little faith in those of us who have a vested interest in the status quo, who benefit from the status quo, I include myself to some degree in that category right. I think if things change, I think, I think the teaching of philosophy will become more, more faithful to itself, only if students demand it.

Beau: I’m going to totally change what I was going to say, and hone in on the last thing that you said, about the power of students. Because I think that that’s a sort of potentially underrated force in the sort of, you know, change in maybe philosophical direction or something like that, or culture, or to try and teach and learn philosophy differently to how it’s typically being done in the university currently. There’s obviously lots of calls for decolonising the curriculum or doing all these other sorts of things which would come about from administrative or like a teaching side, and I guess I would ask you to speak more about the power of students and their sort of contribution to the changing landscape of philosophy at the university.

Bryan: Yeah absolutely. One of the smartest people I know, Edwin Bikundo, one of the smartest philosophers in the country. He’s hilarious, he’s like an Agamben scholar and he likes to say ‘Bryan, ever since I read Agamben, I grew lazy, now all of my ideas aren’t mine, they’re just variations on Agamben’. I don’t believe him, you know, he’s brilliant but, but I kind of understand what he means at the same time right? I think often when I’m thinking through something it’s like trying to cross a river when you’re jumping on these rocks in the river, and these different rocks are these different people whose work has been illuminating for you. And for me the three rocks, and the way of me answering your wonderful question, my three touchpoints are Kuan-Hsing Chen, Joy James and Jacques Derrida, yet again. So, so Chen has this thing, like, one of the– so Asia as Method is an incredible book, people should read it, subtitled towards de-imperialisation. One of the most profound books I’ve read in recent times. And in it he grapples, what he really really grapples with is what he terms sub-imperial desire. He’s like the thing, you know, with imperialism, with colonisation is a kind, you know, it’s the ways in which it recruits us into the, I don’t know, let’s call it the libidnal economy of the imperial centre, you know. We– the ways in which it shapes our desires to the point where we have a situation is what we desire is what’s desired by the imperial centre, right. In Wretched of the Earth Fanon talks about this right, Fanon talks about colonised desiring the life of the coloniser. To be the coloniser, to become the coloniser. And so often when people talk about decolonisation, too often for me, what people are talking about is being granted a seat at the table that already exists, right? It’s not a fundamental realignment or a restructure, more often than not. More often than not it’s like “alright, we teach in twelve weeks, to date it’s been ten weeks of dead white guys and maybe one or two white women and then we might have one or two people of colour at the end.” And people like, to decolonise means “ooft if we’re really ambitious, maybe we’ll have six dead white guys and women, and six people of colour, yay we’ve decolonised something”. You know, and again Derrida says something different, right? I find most of his work very difficult and I’m never sure if I’ve understood it; but in Given Time, you know, The Gift of Death, he talks about the figure of the beggar. And he’s like, the beggar is a figure that society needs, society needs this person, you know, bougie people need this figure that they can give alms to, that they can give charity to. As a means of kind of almost doing penance, almost expiating the sin upholding an unjust social system, right? And what concerns me is that more often than not, what goes by the name of decolonisation is a, you know– sorry, and in that work, in that work when he’s meditating on the beggar, Derrida talks about this introversion, you know. This intro–yeah this kind of like being sucked in you know. And as something that’s necessary to maintain the given structure. And what we don’t realise, I think, is just how much diversifying the curriculum or decolonising the curriculum, ends up being what maintains and what allows the sustenance and maintenance of an overall structure which is bankrupt, right. So if you can recruit Confucius to like, your kind of, discussion of Aristotle or Macintyre, then you know, now it’s like a global thing– like you know what I mean? Liberal feminism has been accused of the same thing, and I think we should learn, I think people calling for decolonisation, we should go to school with kind of non-liberal feminists. You know, anyway, and my third touchstone, again, I am really really taken by Joy James’ work. Joy James is an amazing political philosopher, African-American woman, whose really clear in her work about the difference between liberal reform and revolution, like these aren’t the same things. You know, you and I were party to a discussion about Charles Mills’ liberal reform kind of agenda as opposed to a more you know, his earlier more radical work. If a really intelligent person with that kind of integrity can land on the side of liberal reform, then I can’t chuck it out completely. Like it’s clearly got its place and its purpose and its uses. But I think it’s important to be clear-sighted, I think it’s important to be clear-sighted about the limits of what the kind of quote-unquote ‘decolonisation’ of philosophy teaching can accomplish. But even as I say that, even as I try to be kind of open and generous, I just think you know, Fanon’s got that line right, decolonisation as he understands it means guns and knives and bullets. It just seems like, again among philosophers like, it just seems like there’s a categorical mismatch, my social epistemology colleagues need to help me out here. But it just seems like there’s something categorically that’s being done wrong here, like logically, epistemologically there’s something that doesn’t quite seem to work there. Yeah, I can’t quite put my finger on it but, yeah. So given that, given my– given that, I’m more interested, and again this goes back to Kuna-Hsing Chen, I’m more interested in a philosophy that’s plural. Like what does it mean to think not just trapped on the rail lines of one tradition? What does it mean to be educated in multiple traditions? You know, most of us in academia complain about the corporatisation of the academy right, and rightly so but if that’s what it is the alright, well let’s work with that right? I think that students are a very powerful constituency, right. The fact of the matter is, generations ago, students were just students, now students are paying customers, incredibly valuable and because of that, the demands that students can make, you know students can demand to be taught adequately. And especially like, if I was a young white philosopher, I would hope that I’d have the foresight to think “the world isn’t going to tolerate white nationalism forever, like I need to be able to learn, to be able to navigate the world beyond the imaginings of you know, of just, Euro-western… fantasies about what the world actually looks like”. And so given that, an actual education means learning to think from the basis of other traditions, along other kinds of axes, you know. On other kinds of kind, you know, along the patterns of other kinds of traditions and I think students should demand that. Like you know, I think students should demand more than just one course in which they will learn something about Buddhist philosophy and maybe Confucian philosophy. I think students should demand kind of preparation to be able to actually navigate the world, and then those of us who are tied to come out from, have interest in other traditions, I think we should all kind of demand that the university also serve us, you know? And also give us an opportunity to engage in the kinds of deep reflection and genealogical work.

Beau: Well I guess before we round out–before we run out of time, I do want to ask you about your book on Ngugi wa Thiongo’o and I guess whatever you want to sort of say about that and that project, and maybe even relating that to, sort of thinking other philosophical traditions, his importance for you, and maybe again, also sort of like this philosophical community.

Bryan: That’s a great question, that’s a great question. You know it’s funny I was actually thinking to myself, you know, this business of kind of, spurring students on to demand stuff, just didn’t end well for Socrates (laughs). I need to watch myself maybe, ‘that Bryan guy, he was cool but what happened?’ Yeah, the Ngugi book was a complete accident, it was one of those things where, it was a couple of things I guess. I mentioned him in passing too quickly in my PhD thesis and one of my examiners was like hey, there’s kind of something here but you’re not doing it justice. And I was like, I’m just trying to finish, you know, I’ll come back to this later, but I said it in a polite way. And then there’s this book series on political philosophy and they were conscious, Matt Sharpe was one of the series editors, and they were really conscious about this thing that we’re talking about right. How you have a lot of the same kinds of people appearing in the series, and again they were really intentional, these editors, about just a more plural body of work. And one of their suggestions was Ngugi, which was interesting because you know, there was a small bookshelf in the home I grew up in, and his A Grain of Wheat was on it, and so when I saw the name I was just, yeah it took me back. And again, I mentioned my not-knowing exactly, my having-questions, philosophical questions around decolonisation. Ngugi is someone who has lived and worked and thought and written through anti-colonial struggles, the postcolonial moment and the kind of souring of a moment of possibility, of a moment of postcolonial and anticolonial possibility. And I just thought, if I have these questions, I think Nelson Maldonado-Torres’ paper on the coloniality of being is brilliant, but his, his anchors are Levinas and Heidegger right. Which is absolutely fine, it’s just I think even the Latin-American coloniality, decoloniality movement, Dussell, Mignolo, Maldonado-Torres, it’s based on third-world experience but conceptually it draws from continental European philosophy which isn’t necessarily a problem, but again you know, the end of Wretched of the Earth Fanon’s like you know, we need to turn over a new leaf you know. We need a new skin, we need to–new, you knew. And for me, part of that is like, again, what does it look like to think this through from a different vantage, particularly if it’s a vantage that is both theoretical but also is drawing on the kind of lived, historical experience of this thing that we’re meditating on, right. So that was a thing, and also, Ngugi is really fascinating for me because I think he is Pan-African and cosmopolitan but also incredibly parochial and I think, also nationalistic in some ways. And the contradictions are just incredibly, so like wonderful things to think through and think with. So I decided I would work through his body of work, not in an encyclopaedic way but you know, just read his–as much of his work as I could and, and use that as the basis to kind of articulate and think through a political philosophy. One whose, which is, I mean I’m the one doing this thinking so my training is, you know, a lot of my training is in continental European philosophy but you know, I’m also explicitly with and thinking through African philosophy and African letters, I live in Australia. You know, my thinking has been marked profoundly by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island thinkers and ideas, and geographically you know, I think Australia will be much much better off once we understand ourselves as Asian and as part of a broader like, Asian community. So like yeah, with kind of south and east Asian influences. You know, Solzhenitsyn calls the Gulag Archipelago, he subtitled it a literary experiment. I’ve always loved that, I, yeah, I think my book is a kind of philosophical experiment, an attempt to articular something, I’m not exactly sure right now. The hilarious thing, the hilarious thing is I’ve got a chapter and a half to write, I’m hoping to have a full draft around January, and I’ve just found out there’s a guy who’s going to publish something what looks like like, really similar in a few months time. (unsure) I’m super looking forward to reading his book. My first thought was oh crap maybe I should just publish some journal articles and give up on it. But then I was like, look, how many books are there in the world about Heidegger or Foucault, you know you think there’s space for a couple of Ngugi books, so yeah hopefully reading his doesn’t intimidate me into silence (laughs). Hopefully I’m kind of like, you know there’s a thing when Sartre wrote about Genet and Genet read Sartre writing about him and Genet couldn’t write for a while he was like “there’s nothing left for me to do”. Hopefully it’s not like, I read this and I think there’s nothing left to say.

Beau: I, for one, am incredibly excited about reading that book, eventually when it comes out.

Bryan: You know it’s scary though right! Yeah no, putting your ideas out there is terrifying!

Beau: Definitely.

Bryan: But I think, I, look, do you know why I love philosophy? Math or chemistry or whatever, you know, my first job was working as a doctor and I remember being told by a surgeon, theatres shouldn’t be exciting, if it’s creative or exciting then you’re doing it wrong and you’re dangerous, don’t. It should be nice and boring. There’s a freedom we have as philosophers were you don’t have to tread the path laid down before you and I just found that so incredibly generative and liberating.

Beau: Unfortunately I think we are sort of running near the end of our time but if you just have any sort of, parting words for our listeners.

Bryan: Oof, parting words, like something super deep? Ahh you’re killing me (laughs) I don’t know… no I think I go back, okay, I’m going to end on Derrida again because he has this wonderful, wonderful, wonderful image when he draws on the poet Jabes and it’s of Moses coming down the mountain with these two tablets of stone, right. And these two tablets of stone supposedly like, the divine has written on them, there’s a kind of like, they represent, I think, immediacy, a kind of direct access to the infinite, to… I don’t know, energy, life, the almighty, whatever. There’s something really profound about them. And there’s an accident, something happens and they fall to the ground and they crack, right? And then there’s this story of this weed growing between these cracked tablets. And I mean, for Derrida, his primary preoccupation is look, you know, this is a beautiful kind of telling of or rendition of a lack of access to immediacy, how everything is mediated for us, right. And he’s like, whoever it is, the rabbi who tries to reappropriate what was marked on those tablets by way of exegesis or the poet who tries to do something similar by means of a very different kind of route: both of them are still caught between those cracks right, like neither of them have access to this kind of immediacy. And he wants to say, I read him as saying, so the exegetant needs to be humble because, you know, let’s not, you know, let’s not fetishise, let’s not overinvest in what the rabbi tells us, and also let’s take a bit more serious than we otherwise might, the significance of what the creative, what the poet does with these tablets, you know. Because these are two different paths to the same kind of inadequacy. And again, like you know, there’s this– that image is how I understand philosophy. The hardcore logician, the very serious analytic philosopher, the person kind of teaching you, you know, kind of like Buddhist philosophy or a variety of traditions of Chinese philosophy or African philosophy or whatever it is. You know, or kind of continental European philosophy, because some of my favourite philosophers are white, some of my best friends! (laughs) all of them are as inadequate as each other, right. At the same time, there’s as much promise in all of them as each other, and I think that simultaneous move of not fetishising, not overinvesting in the status quo just because it’s the status quo. And also taking seriously the potential riches in de-valued approaches. If you can hold these two things and kind of grapple with those two things, I think that allows for an approach to philosophy that may have something worthwhile to contribute to the world.

Beau: Thank you so much Bryan, I’ve had such an enjoyable time talking to you.

Bryan: Thank you, that was fun! Always so good to talk to you.