This collection of conversations, loosely organised around the subject of hope, is between Sydney-based freelance philosophy writer, Mary Zournazi, and other contemporary philosophical writers whom she admires. Most of these people are academics, based in Europe, the US and Australia. The best-known are probably psychoanalytic thinker Julia Kristeva and Gayatri Spivak, the translator of Derrida.
Zournazi is to be congratulated for having tracked down so many important professional critical thinkers (although all on the B-list rather than the A-list) and to have done so despite, as she asserts, being the daughter of migrants to Australia and not having ‘lived out [her parents’] dream of success in the new country’. To have been able to spend three years travelling around the globe interviewing her favourite philosophers sounds pretty successful to me.
The interviews are not conventionally philosophical. Take sentences and part-sentences like ‘What if hope was like another human “sense”—like some kind of anatomical part of us, not physically but allegorically? Hope as a sense that is visceral and ever-present, much like the kaleidoscopic experience of a fair’. These (in this case, Zournazi’s) words, like a great deal of the book, need to be read with a certain lack of attention, otherwise you’re stuck wondering what an allegorical part of your anatomy could be like, or how the ‘experience of a fair’ can be ever-present. There is certainly something meant here, but it’s hard to discern what.
But if you can bring yourself to read that way, there are interesting and valuable things to be found. It is tempting to write them all out as aphorisms, and to then dispense with the book altogether. Take these aperçus from Michael Taussig: ‘Hope is against the evidence … it comes out in spite of what went before’ or ‘Life is not a matter of one initiative after another.’ Or Alphonso Lingis’ observation that ‘a lot of intellectual activity, at least in the 20th century Western cultural orbit, correlates lack of hope with being smart, or … with profundity.’ Or Ghassan Hage’s rather un-P.C. thought that ‘racism … provides [migrants] with a good reason to hate people they already hate for a “bad” reason’ or that ‘There is a priestly element in the intellectual disposition’.
Indeed, the priestly status of these contemporary intellectuals is manifest in the book by liturgical reiteration of their various dogmas (the gift, the body, the other) or authorities (Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, Walter Benjamin),