I don't have time to fully flesh out this post right now (or to edit it properly), but I wanted to get a thought out there before it slips away.
Much breath has been used (wasted?) on the so-called divide between the approaches of analytic, more properly called Anglo-American, and continental philosophy. Clearly enough, there are differences, and especially recently, at least the Anglo-American side has been interested in re-thinking or re-characterizing that divide. Perhaps the most prominent version of this account has been Brian Leiter's discussion of the divide as one based on assumptions of realism (Anglo-American) vs. assumptions of anti-realism (continental). There are also, of course, the inherited definitions against which the recent work has taken a position. Those definitions are familiar enough that I don't think they need to be discussed here.
I take this topic up for a few reasons. First, I work in an English department, which means I tend to be exposed far more to continental thought than analytic. Second, because Leiter's account, although useful, seems no less reductive than past accounts. Third, because I spend the early part of this morning reading a couple of interviews with philosophers over at 3Am: one with Gary Gutting and one with Lee Braver. Both of these philosophers take up the so-called divide in helpful ways, especially because the interviewer Richard Marshall (who does an excellent job with all his interviews) would appear to fall on the analytic side. That means that both Gutting and Braver have to articulate a basic defense of continental thought to a skeptic, always a useful exercise which allows for good nutshell accounts. But again, I find myself thinking that the defenses offered don't fully flesh out why this divide exists.
I tend to think that any account of the divide between Anglo-American and continental thought, although it clearly does have to do with subject matter, use of language, different traditions, realism and anti-realism, needs to take account of another issue--that of reading. I want to argue that one basic and fundamental difference between the two schools rests in how they approach texts, here meaning anything that is "read" philosophically, including culture. I don't know if this difference is the foundational one, but I think it's more than symptomatic of another, larger issue such as realism vs. anti-realism.
What brings me to this issue of reading? One of the most common complaints about much continental thought, especially the broadly post-structural strain, is that it consistently and problematically misreads. An example of this accusation occurs in the Gutting interview, in which Marshall brings up Foucault's apparent misreading of Nietzsche. Leiter, too, has been attacking Heidegger for years concerning his misreading of Nietzsche. A few other examples: Searle famously argues that Derrida misreads Austin, Raymond Geuss argues that Paul de Man misreads Hegel, etc.
Perhaps the most famous example of the misreading accusation, which Braver lumps in with the tu quoque fallacy, is Bricmont and Sokal's Fashionable Nonsense. Now, there is a key difference between, for example, Searle's critique of Derrida and the argument in Fashionable Nonsense. To wit, while it is one thing to accuse a philosopher of misreading philosophy, it would appear to be quite another to accuse her of misreading a scientific theory. Instead of getting into the argument for why this is so, which would seem to rely on certain assumptions of truth that continental philosophy will generally see as problematic, I want instead to bring up the act of reading itself.
Much of continental philosophy is based on reading, but reading construed broadly. Foucault reads history, "culture," and human sexuality in the same manner that he reads Nietzsche. Badiou reads set theory. Zizek reads Marx, Lacan, and films. Deleuze reads film and philosophy. Heidegger reads a certain philosophical tradition. Adorno reads culture. Nietzsche reads the history of morality. Benjamin reads translation, architecture, and culture.
Ok, so doesn't Anglo-American philosophy read? Of course it does, and well, and just as broadly. But the difference is that often Anglo-American philosophy reads with the assumption that a text can be read correctly. A text, let's say the work of Hegel, means something on its own terms, a meaning given to it (and no doubt agonized over) by its author. Thus, the key to Anglo-American reading is rigorous fidelity to meaning.
Continental thought, on the other hand, wants to engage in productive (and sometimes de[con]structive) readings that often mobilize the text's meaning against itself. These are acts of interpretation, sometimes violent ones, that don't so much de-contextualize a text as re-contextualize it in a productive manner. Think of Heidegger on the Greeks. Does he get the Greeks wrong? Many think so. Does he use his idiosyncratic "misreadings" of the Greeks to develop a far-reaching theory on meaning and Being? Yes. The question of whether the result excuses the process is one I can't take up here, but it seems clear enough to say that to say that Heidegger or Kojeve or Foucault misreads something and should therefore be ignored is to fail understand what each is up to. These kinds of misreadings are neither wrong or right; in fact the only useful way of judging their value is to argue whether or not they are productive of further thinking, and even praxis, or not.
To say all this is not to excuse sloppy or lazy misreadings or to say that Anglo-American thought is inflexible or doctrinaire. Indeed, the charges that the practice of misreading skips over meaning and does violence to it, and that opening the field to unending interpretive misreadings threatens to make all texts into nonsense, are grounded ones borne out in the "high theory" years. On the other hand, to read innovatively is central to what makes reading important. Gadamer and Derrida are not so far away on this point, nor are Heidegger and Adorno. One thing that has to occur for these two schools, both which contain tremendous variegations, to be able to speak to each other is that the Anglo-American school has to stop saying that the continental school is misreading, full stop. Instead, it should be asked whether the "mis"reading is productive or not. The implication being, of course, that there are different kinds of readings and misreadings and that to say that something has been misread is not to say that it hasn't been read well, or interestingly, or productively. By the same token, the continental school needs to realize that rigorous attention to producing fidelity to meaning can birth readings as productive and compelling as "misreadings" can, that reading idiosyncratically does not in and of itself produce useful results.
Addendum: At the heart of the difference in approaches to reading that I'm trying to work through here lies a really fundamental difference relating to the status of philosophical texts. The idea of a correct reading that prioritizes fidelity to meaning approaches philosophical texts as essentially different from other kinds of texts. While it is false to say that an analytic philosopher would not see a given philosophical text as a product of culture, it is the case that the fidelity to meaning approach makes assumptions about reason that are perhaps just as radical as are explicit critiques of reason coming from the continental side.
