Continental philosophy

“Hey, baby, what's your sign?”

~ Oscar Wilde on Michel Foucault

“What the fuck is a signifier?”

~ Oscar Wilde on Foucault's answer

Continental philosophy is neither a method of doing philosophy, nor an apt description of the segment of the world in which this particular brand of philosophy, or philosophical discourse (should discourse be considered as philosophical in the strictest sense), originates. Indeed, the very concept of originationism can be doubted thanks to the revelations of post-structuralist thought; as the concept of a center implies a phallogocentric, heteronormativity which is the very innovation of post-structuralist thought to doubt: the binary opposition between "Continental" and "non-Continental" philosophy ceases to exist and is, indeed, fractal while self-swallowing, always already absorbed into/unto itself. (See: Goedel's Theorem, Mobius Strip.)

Basically, it's about Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger: therefore, it is virtually synonymous with fashionable elitist academic bullshit. In the English-speaking world, Continental philosophy is, despite its name, rarely found in philosophy departments, which may well be dominated by reactionary lumpenproletariat who suffer from false consciousness but are nonetheless canny enough to identify a comprehensible premise before writing a dissertation.

In the Beginning, There was Hegel

Yep. It was invented by Germans.

After the Germans, came the French. In the 21st century, the Spanish will probably inherit Continental philosophy as it continues its unstoppable westward march.

Transcending the boundaries of space/time (because space and time are heteronormative and socio-cultural contexts,and the fantasy blah, blah, blah) in order to communicate, Heidegger, Hegel, and Husserl decided to invent a new brand of philosophy after seeing British philosophy as a bunch of tea drinking boring otherising weirdo's. Up until that point, most philosophical inquiry had been conducted by means of inflicting pain: John Locke comically dropped bowling balls onto, placed banana peels in the path of, and handed cakes full of lit sticks of dynamite painted to look like birthday candles to Descartes, Berkeley, and Hume in order to convince the three that they did, in fact, exist (they were not convinced). The three H's, by contrast, decided that this was fruitless.

Immanuel Kant had already written extensively on the noumena and phenomena of the perceivable world; Heidegelusserl (the Continental equivalent of Kripkenstein) decided that inventing new words and stringing them together into increasingly complex sentences whose beginnings soon faded into the distant past and whose endings faded equally far into the distant future, allowing the meaning of the dialectical phenomenology to coalesce into a sentence performative of the experience of stomping through mud, was great fun. This is what literary theory has taught us. Do not worry. You will learn this one day and it will not hurt you.

After Friedrich Nietzsche got everyone riled up for some reason or other and Sigmund Freud invented sex, the game was afoot.

The Twentieth Century

This particular branch of the great and glorious tradition of Western culture really spread its wings and discovered itself in the mid-twentieth century. It came out to its parents and went on to found the veritable obelisk of knowledge that it is today.

Deconstruction

See: Jacques Derrida

Deconstruction is the idea that meaning is always already deferred and no longer easily captured and consumed, mostly because people in the Victorian era, when meaning was easy to come by, used it all up and now we just have to fight over table scraps, those fuckers. Some people refer to it as "deconstructionism" -- thus falling prey to ideologism -- but most of them are assholes and/or Republicans.

Psychoanalysis

See: Jacques Lacan

Psychoanalysis plays an inestimable role as a heuristic and hermeneutic device in Continental philosophy. Some, such as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, have argued that psychoanalysis is just another repressive force representing big bad daddy and that we need to transcend it in order to become bodies without organs, which is quite strange, since I appreciate my organs. I'm sure that many of you do, as well; as it is currently New Year's Eve, I'm sure that in but a few hours, many of you will especially appreciate your livers.

Feminism

The most well known feminist in post-structuralist thought is Judith Butler. First a general situating. Indeed, building upon (like in "la" "up"-"on", not to be confused with "le" "up"-"on) the binary opposition between not understanding and understanding Foucault's notion of the faggot, Butler states that the only way to understand the faggot is starting from exactly the internal other of it: not understanding Foucualt. Simply put: by not-understanding, you can understand.

As Butler is attacking the feminist movement with milk out of her boobs (traditionally a strategy used by feminists to attack men and gain power) from inside-out of the movement, she can be considered the internal other of the feminist movement. Simultaneously, she's the understanding internal other of the concept of faggot itself, as allready suggested above. Integrating these two othernesses upon (this time the other understanding of "upon", being: "le" "up"-"on") eachother Butler herself concludes out of this, exactly by not understanding it, that she transcends both the concept "faggot" and the concept of "milkfeminism".

Her theory itself can be not understood easily as follows:

Consider this common feminist statement (see feminism): "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle". She claims that the gender binary, through the heterosexual matrix, consists of three regulating aspects: sex, gender and desire. In our socially constructed view of society, we pressupose a fixed ontological relation between the three concepts: women (sex) like bicycle-men (from sex and gender to desire) and men like fish-women. The fishness of women and the bicycleness of men are, indeed, no existing identities in the subject itself, by are constructed by constantly performing fishness and bicycleness (women doing fish and men doing bicycles) in a coherent way with the heterosexual matrix. Every peformance that contests this performance, like men doing fish instead of bicycles for example, creates "rust trouble". This is because when you throw a bicycle in the surrounding of fish, let's say "water", the bicycle becomes rusted. So with exchanging the seemingly fixed categories, the categories itself become contested. This latter process is problematically understood when understood, that's why you shouldn't try to understand it, but focusing instead on not understanding it.

By actively not understanding all of this, fish and bicycles are "undid", and we can go all back to our normal life of eating bicycles and riding fish.

Ps: for a good understand of Butler, also see marihuana, and do it in a strict unresponsable way, and NBA jam, since those things have absolutely nothing to do with the subject, and thus will help you understanding it post-structurally, that is: actively not understanding it.

Structuralism

See: Structuralism

Basically, there are signs and they represent things...

Post-Structuralism

See: Michel Foucault

...but fuck if you'll be able to figure any of it out.

Post-Modernism

At a certain point, it was decided that the world no longer meant much of anything at all because the last shred of meaning was consumed by Philip Seymour Hoffman in a Bacchanalia the likes of which would have put the Roman emperors of the decadence to shame. Jean Baudrillard postulates (he's dead but I can use the present tense because Jean Baudrillard's death did not take place) that the loss of meaning results in a nihilistic free-for-all where anything and everything goes and capital is king. He was proven correct when the Wachowski Brothers almost deliberately misinterpreted his work and sold it to the masses as Battleship Potemkin.

Conclusion

Continental philosophy is a pretty cool nerd—it fights socio-cultural norms and doesn't afraid of anybody. It kicks the analytic tradition's logical ass and then transcends the fantasy to your momma. Further, Continental philosophy seeks to reassure the borgiouse that no one else gets it either, but one day we'll go back in time and explain it to ourselves, unless Habermas gets there first.

See also

• Analytic tradition, everything you don't like about Continental philosophy turned into a math equation by Brits. No one understands this, either, but they pretend to because that lets them scoff at the French.