In Introduction to Philosophical Romanticism Nikolas Kompridis says that all the crossing and recrossing in recent years between Anglo- American and European philosophical traditions has opened up a depoliticized philosophical space between ‘‘analytic’’ and ‘‘continental’’ philosophy. As a result questions and issues are being approached from a much wider and much more illuminating range of perspectives. And this makes possible previously unthinkable conversations across considerable historical, cultural, and philosophical distance.
He adds that:
For many of us it is a welcome sign that the categories ‘‘analytic’’ and ‘‘continental’’ have lost some of their ideological power to shape philosophical outlooks. While they still play an institutional role as political categories, as philosophical categories they are becoming increasingly irrelevant. That doesn’t mean, however, that they are going to disappear anytime soon as an unstoppable wave of toleration and cooperation spreads throughout the academic philosophical world; but their ideological power has weakened enough to allow us to see the real philosophical divisions that run through it more perspicuously.
He then mentions the real philosophical divisions:
The deepest and most decisive of these is the line dividing naturalistic from non-naturalistic views of agency, intentionality, reason, and normativity. Of course, this dividing line runs through the whole culture of modernity, and not just through philosophy. Philosophy merely articulates this division, providing us with one of the most salient expressions of it .... A second dividing line, almost as decisive, but not as extensive or deep since it runs only through philosophy, intersects the line dividing naturalism from non-naturalism. On one side of this second line is a philosophical orientation and self-image derived from the natural sciences; on the other a philosophical orientation and self-image derived from the humanities. If scientism threatens philosophy from too close an identification with the sciences, then syncretism threatens it from too close an identification with the humanities.
In this interview at Broken Lines Wendy Brown is asked to say a few words about j walls and anxiety, or just anxiety in a broader picture, of how you think anxiety plays a role in shaping contemporary political discourse. Brown's response is this:
I am so aware of how much anxiety is a feature of everyday discourse in the US when people are just describing their personal state. One of the things I’ve been trying to think about – it is not quite related to the walls question but we will go back to that – is whether the sheer level of anxiety in human beings has been increasing in ways that are commensurate with the loss of certain kinds of boundaries, the denigration of defining features of communities, all that we associate with globalization. I think the answer is probably yes, and I hope somebody will do a study on this: historicizing anxiety and thinking about the history of the human subject in terms of a more anxious subject today than ever before. There are lots of reasons that students, for example, are anxious in ways that I don’t remember being anxious as a college student. There are concerns about performance and job markets, but I am really talking about a world of anxiety that is quite disseminated and quite general and does not simply pertain to the high ambition end of the American middle class.
I think that part of what walls are doing is addressing a very understandable anxiety about the loss of bounded political entities. I talk about that at length in the work on walls in terms of a decline of state sovereignty but I also would talk about it in terms of the decline of a sense of place that the nation, among other things, has provided for these last several hundred years. Globalization is tearing at that. It is tearing at it in the sense of both leaving people without a sense of what the nation is as it becomes ever more heterogeneous, as immigration transforms the literal population and culture of the nation. But it also is a decline in the sense of the nation as something that one has membership in and belongs to in a way that is significant in comparison with the sense of being part of a planet or a globe.
The reason for this is not only because of intense mobility, but because of the loss of a sense of the containing dimensions of a nation.
I think walls very much address that; in a fantasmatic way they produce the image of a bounded, settled jurisdiction and of a we. They produce a we and they produce a they that is hardly real, and hardly significant at a demographic level but is very significant at the level of political imaginary. My answer to your question is yes, a lot of anxiety about not having that we can be addressed by building a wall and saying: this is us, this is who we are. I also think it can work to produce a purified, idealized sense of the nation. This is an old we; this is a white we in the case of Europe or the US; this is a we that has at its door an other that endangers it sense of identity.