This essay originally appeared as Lou Marinoff, “Dada as Philosophical Practice, and Vice-Versa,” in New Frontiers of Philosophical Practice, ed. Lydia Amir (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, Newcastle, 2017), 4–33.

It is republished here by permission of Lydia Amir.

Introduction

This calendar year, 2016, marks the centenary of the Cabaret Voltaire—the birthplace of dadaism (see Figure 14.1). The cabaret itself has known periods of counter-cultural popularity, decline, neglect, and renaissance. Although its current incarnation nestles comfortably in Zurich’s trendy Bohemian-cum-boutique quarter, catering to tourists in the immaculately polite Swiss shopkeeper’s way, the Cabaret still retains something of the essence of its rebellious founders. Dadaists did not conceive that dada could (or should) be bottled, sold, marketed, or branded, let alone boutiqued. Then again, since the founders and patrons of the Cabaret Voltaire were all heretics of one stripe or another, as dada requires, it would be problematic to accuse its current proprietors of heresy against dada. The spirit of dada demands heresy against everything, including (if not starting with) itself. True dada is, therefore, also anti-dada. So, as long as the Cabaret Voltaire stands, it stands for dada, even though one can now purchase souvenirs of dada there, using credit cards.

More significant perhaps than the Cabaret, albeit the physical epicenter of the cultural earthquake of dada, were the palpable aftershocks that propagated throughout Europe and the New World in the ensuing decades. Surrealism, Bohemianism, The Beat Generation, Hippie Counter-Culture, and—I shall argue—Philosophical Practice, were and are infused with dada.

A common denominator of all these movements is nonconformism, not simply for its own sake, but importantly as identification and rejection of absurdities ensconced in status quos and standing orders. This kind of nonconformism, in any milieu or genre, is quintessentially dadaist. Indeed, consider that the Cabaret itself is named after the author of Candide, who savagely satirized conformity with Leibnizian optimism by situating its avatar—the ludicrous Dr. Pangloss—in the midst of the sanguinary Seven Years’ War, and the catastrophic Lisbon earthquake.

This essay will make a number of salient comparisons between dada and philosophical practice, in several dimensions: linguistic, conceptual, aesthetic, and political.