On Feral Philosophy – Part 1: Deviant Engagements

“The age of philosophy is in a sense, again, that we are confronted, more and more, often with philosophical problems on an everyday level. It is not just that you withdraw from daily life into a world of philosophical contemplation. On the contrary: you cannot find your way around daily life itself without answering certain philosophical questions. It is a unique time where everyone is in a way forced to be some kind of philosopher.” - Slavoj Žižek

Sometimes I get emails from strangers who prompt me to reflect on what it is I am attempting to do here. As an applied anthropologist gone public health technocrat I no longer have strong attachments to my disciplinary roots. At times this distance gives me a profound sense of isolation from the fertile environment where I learned my most valuable and applicable skills and lessons. So when someone questions me about my background or theoretical commitments it agitates me to reconsider my positions and current inspirations. Such was the case with a recent email that included the following question:

“I have been reading you blog for some time now and I wonder why you post more about philosophy than anthropology, when you describe yourself as an anthropologist. Where are all the anthropology related posts?”

My initial reaction was to argue that what I do here is not strictly a disciplinary project. This blog is a laboratory for theory and collection site where I explore all sorts of issues and topics, including blogging about philosophy. When I venture into ontography and/or critical theory I do so from a decidedly post-disciplinary perspective. The only label I have yet to come up with for this is: feral theory.

Feral theory, or ‘feral philosophy’ operates outside of the civilizing processes of institutional and canonical strictures, and attempts to think wildly through the exigencies of practical and political life in opposition to homogenizing conventions. Of course, such theorizing is not without its influences, or founding premises, but it radicalizes those legacies, resources and logics by forging monstrous alliances between discourses and paradigms, while intentionally mutating them for explicitly pragmatic and strategic purposes. A feral theorist, then, is a bricoleur who preys on the theoretical fauna of numerous authors and subsists by plundering the cultivated fields of all available disciplines, carving out niches of praxis and resistance. At least this is how I frame what I do.

And this is not to say that I think disciplined discourse specialists are somehow less important, or are “sell-outs” to “the system”, because without the scholarship and rigor of these trained professionals the feral theorist would be unable to sustain their activities at the fringes. The academic and professional knowledges and products afford the feral theorist their sometimes oppositional, sometimes participatory opportunities for conceptual license and strategic deviance.

Regardless, the reader’s question is an appropriate one and deserves an answer. Why would a confessed practicing applied anthropologist focus so much on discussions with professional philosophers about seemingly strictly philosophical issues? My answer: because the philosophers I read and engage are thinking and doing work which stimulates my own mutant praxis the most. And the practical work that I am employed to do and the political work I am compelled to do is fueled by such deviant engagements.