Forms of Transference: On Charles Johnson’s Philosophical Fiction

i want to begin by thanking my good friend Richard Hart for the invitation to be part of this wonderful panel in which we are honoring while also being challenged by the work of Charles Johnson to think differently about our discipline. I also want to thank the organizers of SAAP for hosting this important series of lectures, in which we are invited to engage the work of thinkers who challenge us to think differently because they either come to our problems from different disciplines and fields, or teach us to see their problems as ours. From the outset, I must admit my trepidation at engaging Johnson’s work, which spans nearly half a century and a variety of genres. Johnson began as a cartoonist, then became a novelist, and as he was pursuing his doctoral work in philosophy, then became one of the most astute commentators on US literature in general, and African American literature and letters in particular, when and if we can actually make that distinction. He was whisked away to teach writing before he finished his philosophy PhD, which surely was a loss for philosophy, but a gain for literature. He has hosted television shows, written television and movie scripts, and published extensively on race and American literature. He has mastered the art of the interview, as he has mastered the martial arts. His short stories and essays are gems of philosophical literature.

I first became aware of Charles Johnson when his novel Middle Passage was published in 1990. At the time, I was still in graduate school, living in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I remember being electrified by this amazing book, but also thinking that it was indeed strange that one of the most dramatic events in the history of humanity had received so little attention from novelists, and philosophers, for that matter, up to then. Here, I am referring to the enslavement of millions of human beings, who then were shuttled forth across the world, but mostly to the Americas, as slaves, as commodities, in cargo ships not designed for humans but for wares and things. It was much later, however, that I got to meet Charles Johnson in person, and to learn about all the work he had done since the early 1990s. This was in 2013, when I organized a reunion of the Philosophy PhDs from the Philosophy Department at Stony Brook University. For this reunion, I persuaded Don Ihde, the founding chair of the PhD program, to endow an alumni prize to recognize the work and accomplishments of its alumni. Charles Johnson was the first alumnus of the Philosophy Department to receive the Don Ihde Distinguished Alumni Award. The selection committee without question or hesitation selected Charles Johnson to receive this award because of his incredible accomplishments: an Endowed Chairship, National Book Award, MacArthur Fellowships, and many literary prizes. Charles Johnson’s corpus is indeed vast, distinguished, and above all, original and ceaselessly provocative. In the space that I have, and because I cannot do justice to such an encompassing and rich body of work, I want to focus on some key themes in Charles Johnson’s lecture “At the Crossroad of Philosophy and Literature.” I want to think with Charles Johnson and follow him through the “crossroad” he has traced for us in his lecture. Let me anticipate the themes by naming them in a general way: language and philosophy, metaphor and temporality, and genre and generativity.

Charles Johnson’s lecture begins by reminding us that “philosophers are not just thinkers; they are also writers” (Johnson 19). I would want to add that because philosophers think in language, and not simply through language, their work is always literary. With Jorge Luis Borges, we could say that philosophy is a species within the larger genus of “literature,” because of its uncircumventable dependence on language. There is no meta-language that could be made the purified, formalized, and precise language of philosophy. All philosophy is dependent on some sort of natural—that is to say, historical—language. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in What Is...