Philosophy’s imperial claim to thought as such, it should never be forgotten, is a profoundly modern achievement. Its proprietorship of thought has been accomplished in part by designating the “philosopher” as an honorific for any thinker of repute. If we are to refuse philosophy’s sleight of hand in making itself coterminous with all forms of speculative thought, we could begin by listening whenever a thinker spurns the philosophical laurel. Simone de Beauvoir, for example, identified herself as an author (as opposed to a philosopher). Her interpreters have often waved away her refusal of the philosophical mantle as nothing more than mistaken modesty and have vociferously fought for her inclusion in the canon of Proper Philosophical Names. But what if philosophy is not automatically taken to be the only possible sign for thought as such? Albert Camus also famously insisted he wasn’t a philosopher, arguing that he “did not believe sufficiently in reason to believe in a system.” Camus, in his notebooks, identified himself as an artist rather than a philosopher, writing by way of explanation that he thought “according to words and not according to ideas.” Even if we are now inclined to trouble Camus’s opposition of words to ideas, his designation of philosophy as a specific discourse – one moreover, that has historically made a cult of reason and fetishized the idea over and against language – ought to be taken seriously. Hannah Arendt, for her part, was quick to point out that her work was in “political theory,” not philosophy. Few modern thinkers, of course, have offered as sustained a critique of philosophy’s parochialism as the Caribbean polymath, Sylvia Wynter. Rejecting philosophy as altogether too parochial, Wynter instead conceived of what she was engaged in as contribution to “thought.”

A refusal of philosophy, as Wynter’s thought brilliantly demonstrates, thus cuts deeper than present efforts to provincialize and periodize it. It also demonstrates that speculative thought transgresses the outer limits imposed on it by philosophy.