interview

Introduction

Introduction

I’m endlessly fascinated with one particular book by Jacques Rancière, namely The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (the original French was published in 1987; the English translation appeared with a fine introduction by Kristin Ross in 1991).

Steffen Böhm (SB): Larry, you and your colleagues have been at the forefront of the critique of carbon markets for almost a decade now.

When I recently asked Simon Critchley in a TV-show how he ended up as a philosopher he laconically proclaimed: ‘failure’. He claimed to have failed not only as a musician and a poet, but also as a political activist.[1]

Stephen Dunne (henceforth SD) I’d like to begin with a question that will serve to put your contribution to this interview into some sort of context. That way it will be easier for your audience to explain your comments away with recourse to your background! Ok, the first thing that is apparent, on this question of your background, is that at the time of interviewing, you all work within Universities, indeed within Business Schools.

Thomas Basbøll (henceforth TB) In your 1993 book, Philosophy, Rhetoric and the End of Knowledge, you say that your work is situated within “the profound ambivalence that Western philosophers have had toward the equation of knowledge and power” and you explain this ambivalence through the disciplinary specialization of philosophy into, on the one hand, epistemology, i.e., the study of knowledge, and, on the other, ethics, or what we might call the study of power.