Left-Wittgensteinianism

Presentation of a research project as part of the "Jeudis de la Maison Suger", a residents' research seminar.

This session will welcome Alice Crary and Sandra Laugier for a presentation on contemporary uses of Wittgenstein’s thought within critical theory. Drawing on readings alongside the work of Cora Diamond, they will explore the emancipatory dimensions of a “political Wittgenstein”, offering renewed philosophical perspectives for the left in response to the impasses of rationalist liberalism and poststructuralism.

Presentation of the project

Since the years just after Ludwig Wittgenstein’s death in 1951, scholars and lay readers of have proposed an array of claims about the political significance of his philosophy. Most take Wittgenstein’s thought to have either a conservative bent or a leaning toward liberal-tinged relativism. Simultaneously, in the 1950s and 1960s, insightful readers—at Oxford and Harvard and in Paris—argued that these receptions of Wittgenstein overlook a singularly significant, oppositional, and politically liberating lesson about what the world is like and what’s involved in knowing it so as to critique, and transform it.

A version of this struggle to identify “the political Wittgenstein” has, over the past forty years taken place among Critical Theorists and other political thinkers persuaded that Wittgenstein’s philosophy is generative for Leftist politics. After a hostile reception by members of the Frankfurt School’s first generation, Wittgenstein’s later philosophy became briefly, in the 1980s, central to debates between Critical Theorists and Poststructuralists. But Wittgenstein is awkwardly appointed to both sides of these debates.

Responses to these failures flowered into a set of projects in political theory that breathe life into a “new political Wittgenstein.” Building on the foundational work of philosophical trailblazers such as Stanley Cavell, Iris Murdoch, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jacques Bouveresse, political theorists and philosophers, such as the current speakers, underline the emancipatory power of Wittgenstein’s thought. They show that Wittgenstein equips us to glimpse the theoretical void at heart of liberal political theories, of sorts extolled by Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls, that try to secure free and rational political forms via supposedly unimpeachable modes of reflection.

He enables us to dispel the confusions of such rationalistic liberalisms without indulging the proclivity to skepticism about reason characteristic of poststructuralism. His philosophy is liberating in that, like Hannah Arendt’s, it lights up our revolutionary potential to undertake “the new”. Wittgenstein is carving a path to liberating prospects by inviting us to question the scientism of modernity and to exchange it for an outlook that returns our sensibilities and situatedness from their banishment as supposed scourges of reason.

Simultaneously, he is urging a Leftist philosophical reorientation that brings to light ongoing challenges of genuinely inclusive democratic community. This seminar will discuss these topics in reference to recent work of Crary and Laugier. It will be conducted in English and French. 

Speakers

• Sandra Laugier is Professor of Philosophy at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and Deputy Director of the Institute for Legal and Philosophical Sciences of the Sorbonne (UMR CNRS–Paris 1). Among her publications: Wittgenstein. Politique de l’ordinaire, Vrin, Paris, 2021 ; Wittgenstein. Les sens de l’usage, Vrin, Paris, 2009. Traduction anglaise, The University of Chicago Press, 2025.
• Alice Crary is University Distinguished Professor (Philosophy, Liberal Studies and Gender & Sexuality Studies) and also Visiting Fellow at Regent's Park College, University of Oxford. She was Chair of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research (2014-2017) and Founding Co-Director of the Graduate Certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies (2014-2017).