[...] in the institutional mode, participation often refers to the progressive “authorization” to partake in what Judith Schlanger in Penser la bouche pleine would call a professional economy of seriousness, by which academic disciplines, forms of expertise and judgment, sources of funding, as well as criteria of publication and employability, become established. [...] If the practice of thinking-with poses a different kind of challenge, it is because it belongs to the intimate question of whom one is learning to think with, and as such, situates this apprenticeship as a demand to resist an unthinking participation in the way in which seriousness circulates in thought. To recall the Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar, who is perhaps the school’s most secret member and who once asked, “Who will save us from seriousness?” (La Vuelta al día, 54), the difference is between citing others in order to be right, in order to seek authorization, and citing others because we “want to gather our friends together.” In this way, the attempt to think with others confronts one directly with a kind of influence that is neither that of the historical determinations by which a given epoch determines what matters—what or how it may be relevant to think—nor that of the socializing processes by which one may become a ‘serious’ thinker. My sense is that what is put into play is a much more intimate and felt influence– a veritable reverberation that shakes up the surface of our being, and whose aim is not that of restoring thought to its origins but of bringing new thinking into existence. To borrow the words of Schlanger again, to think-with is “to find in ourselves the doings of others as well as our doings upon those others, it is to think that we become,” and to become as we think, “through the profound company of others” (Le neuf 31). It seems to me that the kind of adventure involved in “thinking with” is therefore one that plays out in an encounter with practices to which the questions are not simply about what they “say” or what they “do,” but about what they cultivate in their doing– about what, through their careful gestures, they enable to come into existence, as well as what they attempt to resist. This is a plane of thought where what is at stake is the cultivation of certain sensibilities, certain tones and dispositions of feeling that, as William James in The Will to Believe would put it, make rationality more of a sentiment than a faculty, and that rather than tell us what to think, force us to come to terms with the open problem of taking care of how we think.
Martin Savransky, “The Humor of the Problematic”
