This is a good nudge to think deeply about how the "woke leftism and cancel culture" has used and distorted the grand French philosophers beyond recognition. The French don't recognize what we've done to the philosophy we appropriated. Our lefties are doing Frenchface... badly.
From the Daily Mail article:
The collection of intellectuals arguing that France is being contaminated by the leftism of America was buoyed on last year after French President Emmanuel Macron appeared to side with them. In a speech in October on the 'Fight against Separatism', Macron warned against leaving 'the intellectual debate to others' as he cautioned of the 'certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States'....
Entirely!
This month also saw the publication of a book by social scientists Stéphane Beaud and Gérard Noiriel in which they claimed that race is a 'bulldozer' that destroys other subjects.... Historian Pierre-André Taguieff argued... that the 'American-style black question' was a 'totally artificial importation' to France. He said that it was all driven by 'hatred of the West, as a white civilization'....
James Lindsay — author of "Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody" — has a response at Peterson's tweet: "They have a complicated relationship with those thinkers, who were wrong, yes, but who were also bastardized by American Critical Theory frauds the French would certainly not respect in the least."
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127 comments:
Say what you want about the French, but it's hard to be woke when you've turned virulent racism and antisemitism into an art form.
When you lose France......
Europe as it actually exists is nothing like the fantasy held by American leftists who wish we were more like Europe. (Same for Canada, which would not welcome the a sort of liberals who like to threaten to move to Canada if the election doesn't go their way.)
No successful country with a liberal government has a liberalism that resembles the American version in any meaningful way.
Peterson either hasn't read or is unable to read Derrida, and is proud of his ignorance.
Europe as it actually exists is nothing like the fantasy held by American leftists who wish we were more like Europe. (Same for Canada, which would not welcome the a sort of liberals who like to threaten to move to Canada if the election doesn't go their way.)
If Bruce Springsteen or Cher ever actually moved to Canada, the Canadians would be entitled under international law to respond by deploying Bryan Adams against us.
"race is a 'bulldozer'"
And intended to be that.
Standing on the sideline, cruelly neutral, arguing about how someone might feel hurt by some bad word, or questioning why oh why people say things in obvious bad faith, doesn't let you escape the bulldozer.
But I'm pleased, of course, that Althouse is watching closely.
Historian Pierre-André Taguieff argued... that the 'American-style black question' was a 'totally artificial importation' to France. He said that it was all driven by 'hatred of the West, as a white civilization'....
French intellectual points out what anyone sensible knew years ago.
If Bruce Springsteen or Cher ever actually moved to Canada, the Canadians would be entitled under international law to respond by deploying Bryan Adams against us.
They already deployed Bieber, isn't that enough???
The American left is doing their best impression of the "wokeness" of the French Revolution: All the zeal and with malice towards some and charity for themselves.
They already deployed Bieber, isn't that enough???
The UN needs to authorize a Truth and Reconciliation Commission regarding Bieber.
You know Twitter is itching to ban him. But I think that Europe is going to put some controls on Twitter and Google and Facebook.
Derrida demolishes the left:
``What appears to me unacceptable in the ``strategy'' (in terms of weapons, practices, ideology, rhetoric, discourse, and so on) of the ``bin Laden effect'' is not only the cruelty, the disregard for human life, the disrespect for the law, for women, the use of what is worst in technocapitalist modernity for the purposes of religious fanaticism. No, it is, above all, the fact that such actions and such discourse _open onto no future and, in my view, have no future_. If we are to put any faith in the perfectibility of public space and of the world juridico-political scene, of the ``world'' itself, then there is, it seems to me, _nothing good_ to be hoped for from that quarter. What is being proposed, at least implicitly, is that all captialist and modern technoscientific forces be put in the service of an interpretation, itself dogmatic, of the Islamic revelation of the One. Nothing of what has been so laboriously secularized in even the nontheological form of sovereignty (...), none of this seems to have any place whatsoever in the discourse ``bin Laden.'' That is why, in this unleashing of violence without name, if I had to take one of the two sides and choose in a binary situation, well I would. Despite my very strong reservations about the American, indeed European, political posture, about the ``international terrorist'' coalition, despite all the de facto betrayals, all the failures to live up to democracy, international law, and the very international institutions that the states of this ``coalition'' themselves founded and supported up to a certain point, I would take the side of the camp that, in principle, by right of law, leaves a perspective open to perfectibility in the name of the ``political,'' democracy, international law, international institutions, and so forth. Even if this ``in the name of'' is still merely an assertion and a purely verbal committment. Even in its most cynical mode, such an assertion still lets resonate within it an invincible promise. I don't hear any such promise coming from ``bin Laden,'' at least not one in this world.''
``Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides'' _Philosophy in a Time of Terror_ p.113
"Peterson either hasn't read or is unable to read Derrida, and is proud of his ignorance."
His "12 Rules" book has a couple pages about Derrida (though nothing about Foucault).
By the way, the UW Law School was ground zero for the development of Critical Legal Studies and Critical Race Theory, and I saw at least some of the prominent participants of that movement tapping into Derrida and Foucault. I don't think it was done in a way that corresponds to the professionalism of the field called Philosophy. Much of the writing that is called "scholarship" among law professors is advocatory and polemical.
Say what you want about the French, but it's hard to be woke when you've turned virulent racism and antisemitism into an art form.
Careful there, you are talking about a class of people who can’t be criticized without heads rolling.
"Much of the writing that is called "scholarship" among law professors is advocatory and polemical.”
I never knew you could spell ‘all’ as ‘m' ‘u' ‘c' ‘h'.
From Peterson's "12 Rules" (comparing Derrida to Marx):
"Derrida... substituted the idea of power for the idea of money, and continued on his merry way. Such linguistic sleight-of-hand gave all the barely repentant Marxists still inhabiting the intellectual pinnacles of the West the means to retain their world-view. Society was no longer repression of the poor by the rich. It was oppression of everyone by the powerful. According to Derrida, hierarchical structures emerged only to include (the beneficiaries of that structure) and to exclude (everyone else, who were therefore oppressed).... Derrida claimed that divisiveness and oppression were built right into language—built into the very categories we use to pragmatically simplify and negotiate the world. There are “women” only because men gain by excluding them. There are “males and females” only because members of that more heterogeneous group benefit by excluding the tiny minority of people whose biological sexuality is amorphous. Science only benefits the scientists. Politics only benefits the politicians. In Derrida’s view, hierarchies exist because they gain from oppressing those who are omitted. It is this ill-gotten gain that allows them to flourish. Derrida famously said (although he denied it, later): “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte”—often translated as “there is nothing outside the text.” His supporters say that is a mistranslation, and that the English equivalent should have been “there is no outside-text.” It remains difficult, either way, to read the statement as saying anything other than “everything is interpretation,” and that is how Derrida’s work has generally been interpreted. It is almost impossible to over-estimate the nihilistic and destructive nature of this philosophy. It puts the act of categorization itself in doubt. It negates the idea that distinctions might be drawn between things for any reasons other than that of raw power. Biological distinctions between men and women? Despite the existence of an overwhelming, multi-disciplinary scientific literature indicating that sex differences are powerfully influenced by biological factors, science is just another game of power, for Derrida and his post-modern Marxist acolytes, making claims to benefit those at the pinnacle of the scientific world. There are no facts. Hierarchical position and reputation as a consequence of skill and competence? All definitions of skill and of competence are merely made up by those who benefit from them, to exclude others, and to benefit personally and selfishly. There is sufficient truth to Derrida’s claims to account, in part, for their insidious nature. Power is a fundamental motivational force (“a,” not “the”). People compete to rise to the top, and they care where they are in dominance hierarchies."
Blogger Ann Althouse said...
By the way, the UW Law School was ground zero for the development of Critical Legal Studies and Critical Race Theory, and I saw at least some of the prominent participants of that movement tapping into Derrida and Foucault. I don't think it was done in a way that corresponds to the professionalism of the field called Philosophy. Much of the writing that is called "scholarship" among law professors is advocatory and polemical.
And here is the moment that Althouse crosses the Rubicon.
Lindsay’s book Cynical Theories is excellent, although a bit like chewing rope at times because he is scrupulous in conveying those theories both fairly and accurately, in all their turgidness.
Probably not a word, but ought to be.
The issue with post modernism & identity politics I have not seen addressed is how certain individuals are able to escape the tyranny of language (aka "The Woke").
Is it by effort of will? That would seem to be a problem since the will must come from somewhere that has already broken through the tyranny of language.
If one becomes "Woke" by education, well, education is itself the means of installing the tyranny of words, and education has to come from somewhere, presumably from previous "Woke" educators.
If "Wokeness" comes via revelation, who is doing the revealing?
wendybar said...
"If Bruce Springsteen or Cher ever actually moved to Canada, the Canadians would be entitled under international law to respond by deploying Bryan Adams against us."
They already deployed Bieber, isn't that enough???
Canada has a "Canadian Content" law requiring that broadcasters dedicate 35% of their airtime to Canadian artists. So much of Bryan Adam's work is either co-written by non-Canadians or is recorded elsewhere that they had to rewrite the law in the early 90's so radio stations could get credit for playing him (there are only a few Canadian acts that don't suck, and the content law itself is part of the reason).
French intellectual points out what anyone sensible knew years ago.
I wonder if they delayed making their unwokeness 'newsworthy' until it couldn't help Trump.
ooooooooo so we are going to study French history now? Won't that be interesting.
Politics only benefits the politicians
Even a broken clock...
I suppose this is how you get a critical race theory that holds that poor white people are privileged and oppress rich influential black people.
rhhardin @ 9:31: "Peterson either hasn't read or is unable to read Derrida, and is proud of his ignorance." Maybe so, but James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose have read Derrida, are able to read him, and share their understanding in "Critical Theories." Well worth reading for those of us mortals who are trying to make sense of the hifalutin bafflegab.
...I see you then (@ 9:42) quoting Derrida at his most lucid --perhaps scared into intelligibility by the very real terror of the fundamental Islamists. Funny how actual violence can sober up the big talkers in the philosophy department faculty lounge.
Peterson isn't the final word in these matters but I do admire his intolerance for BS. And Lindsay/Pluckrose are his companions-in-arms.
Easiest Derrida for women "The Post Card" and for men "Spurs" (skip the preface by somebody else).
By way of being enjoyable without much work.
A while back ago I devoted a lot of time and effort to reading and learning about Derrida, Foucault, de Man, and other postmodern luminaries. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I came to the conclusion that they were, all of them, fools and bullshit artists.
The French still have an assimilationist, "melting pot" view of culture, rather than a multicultural view. A big reason why they do is because the regard French culture as under threat from the dominant American culture, so everyone has to be as French as possible. Americans don't have that problem and we (or our elites) are bored with our homogenized mainstream culture and have encouraged minority group consciousness. Canadians don't like American culture either, but they believed they could create a Canadian identity through multiculturalism. The irony may be that assimilationist France has been doing a worse job of assimilating immigrants, precisely because being "French" doesn't come as easy as being "American" or "Canadian" or "British."
I don't like all the blaming of outsiders. Adorno and Horkheimer aren't responsible for what the US has become. Derrida and Foucault aren't either. Whatever Critical Race Theory says isn't responsible for France's problems. Countries get what they deserve -- or at least what other countries in similar stages of development get.
"Ah, the French..."
-- Orson Welles
I think the Foucault I’ve read, dans la politique gauchiste, il n'y a pas de vocation plus élevée que d'être une sale petite merde, properly translated reads “in leftie politics, there is no higher calling than to be a nasty little shit”
- Krumhorn
This is gonna be fun, watching jingoistic Trumpkins suddenly defend American Wokeness.
Theyve just seen this story before.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=V67r48_4Ol4
Derrida was a dishonest literary critic and Foucault was an dishonest historian. Foucault birthed the political movements that led to mass violence in the streets and mass homelessness among the severely mentally ill. Both would gluttonously revel in the consequences of their ideas because the suffering of others was proof of their ideological powers. Intellectual serial killers, marching through the institutions. At least they finally caught the boat back to France.
I am in full agreement with Macron and the anti-woke but ... it’s unlikely to succeed. This is a new religion. Religions spread.
This is gonna be fun, watching jingoistic Trumpkins suddenly defend American Wokeness.
Who needs to defend it? Wokeness is a poison and the French are correct to oppose it.
Its good how the French have a sense of intellectual nationalism. Good for them.
I’m not sure what hardin’s passage indicates, other than siding with a coalition of general secular humanism over Islamism.
Considering Derrida, Henri-Levy and Camus were either French-Algerian, or had deep ties there, might illuminate such a position better.
Additionally, the authority and influence of Sorbonne and Paris was complicated for such men, and relative to Anglo thinkers, it might help contextualize a more radical French culture in some ways (sexual libertinism, a post Rousseau worship of intellectual rock stars, the deep mistrust of institutions like the royals and the Catholic Church and a more radical everyman posture towards institutions).
The Revolution was a mess, and then came...well...
On the other hand, go out into the countryside and you’ll find some serious country Catholicism and ways that haven’t changed for a long time. Or you’ll find a serious masculine culture (as the feminists might say) embedded in the rather stale and authoritarian bureaucracy which all heads to the Riviera for the entire month of August or serves in the French Foreign Legion.
It’s complicated, but a lot of disaffected people, often ‘intellectuals’ in the US (nearly always seeing themselves as stepping outside of and against) have fetishized Derrida’s take on the text, AND they’ve gotten a lot of things right about him
I think there are many better directions to head.
Not to quibble but I think Duke had the first critical legal studies; they called it Law and Literature but the content was the same. It had nothing to do with literature but with replacing the study of the practice of law with the practice of using obscure French theorists to destroy our legislative codification of equal justice.
Lurker21
In Canada, as you note, there has long been a debate between the multiculturalists and the melting potters. I am a melting potter, and we were comprehensively routed. The result, obvious to me but denied by most, is that we have become more and more Americanized in our culture. The only people up here who both notice and object are the Québécois.
Dishonest, yes ... that too.
Those who find this surprising know little of modern France or the Left. For more than 150 years, class was the animating idea of the left-wing mind. Woke Americans want to replace that with race and tribe. The French properly see that as a perversion. See, you can negotiate politics of class because class has interests, but you can’t negotiate politics of race because racists are evil.
No True Deconstructionist . . .
American Puritanism in yet another guise.
I don't think it was done in a way that corresponds to the professionalism of the field called Philosophy. Much of the writing that is called "scholarship" among law professors is advocatory and polemical.
That would explain Senior Lecturer Obama (if he had actually bothered to write about the law).
People like Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard came out of the left, but they questioned many of its assumptions. You could say something similar for Adorno and Horkheimer. Much that's ambivalent and contradictory, much that changed over time, tends to get interpreted in simplistic, unambiguous way by people with a polemical axe to grind. That goes both for people who glorify such thinkers and those who attack them.
Obviously Adorno, Derrida, Foucault and the others weren't Reaganites or Trumpites. Obviously they weren't going to think much of Middle America; that wasn't their world. If they found themselves saying things that could be seen as critical of the left eventually they'd remember themselves and affirm their commitment to the left as they understood it, but if you don't treat them as just voting or cheering for their side, you'll find things in their writings that are quite critical of the left, as well as of the right.
Althouse: "The French don't recognize what we've done to the philosophy we appropriated."
Leftists don't care what you notice or when you notice it just as long as you parrot today's official line which could be completely contrary to whatever was claimed 15 minutes ago.
Woke Americans want to replace that with race and tribe.
Which is the foundational tenet of fascism.
The French properly see that as a perversion.
As did Paul Johnson. Writing in "Modern Times," he observed that fascism was a Marxist heresy, replacing class and universalism with, respectively, race and nation ("blood and soil).
Derrida is even worse in French
Derrida on prayer youtube, listen to the first question and answer, thru about 28 minutes.
Who doesn't miss Trump Tweets after reading all that pompous bullshit?
There are really bad transcriptions of that answer of Derrida's in books and so on. No proofreaders, or no editor who cared.
Deconstructing Derrida. That’s not fair!
Derrida, who always works with both object and the observer in play, will look leftist to the right and complicated to the left.
Derrida will look as if he's using feelings to undermine dogma, except he's not feeling so much as noticing. So not a woman.
Obviously Adorno, Derrida, Foucault and the others weren't Reaganites or Trumpites.
Reading their works had the effect of making me tired of living. Fortunately, I was able to shake off the influence of their pernicious influence like a dog shaking off water.
It isn't surprising. The French are, as a whole, very nationalistic and patriotic. Anything that would denigrate France coming from a foreigner isn't going to get a warm reception, rather it would receive a very hot one.
The play’s the thing
rhhardin said...Derrida, who always works with both object and the observer in play, will look leftist to the right and complicated to the left.
Liberals never notice liberal bias.
Left and right depend on a center.
There is no center.
Where are my cigarettes?
I like France and the French. I very nearly love them. More so than the English and Britain's Mini-Me Canadians.
"Race is a 'bulldozer' that destroys other subjects . . ."
A bulldozer can clear things away, but also is used to smooth things out. It would be hilarious to watch the woke urban CRTites try to use a bulldozer properly.
Camus and aron, were the only ones who had it close to right, in the modern era finkelkraut and theres another zemmour.
--Foucault :)
Note complicated semiotics in topic. How to read? Must deconstruct.
I approve of the appendage "frauds" after every use of "Critical Theory" in any text.
Blogger Roughcoat said...
I like France and the French. I very nearly love them. More so than the English and Britain's Mini-Me Canadians.
Right on man. At least they gave us all French Kissing. The British gave us, "close one's eyes and think of England!"
Awesome. Madison, WI is fucking up Paris, France too.
I'll make sure to tell everyone in Waukesha County, WI we're not alone.
Vive la France! Vive la Republique! Vive le secularisme!
Honestly, why does this surprise? French intellectuals have been disdainful of, or disgusted by, much of American (and other) culture since, well, a long time. It's a brand.
The long passage quoted by rhhardin is a solid bit of historically-aware reasoning. The sooner influencers in the West realize that Islam really is an existential danger to the future of human civilization the better, but I don't see that happening while criticism of Islam remains a taboo. (Raciss, donchyaknow?)
Narr
I'd take Bryan Adams over Celine Dion and Neil Young, FWIW.
A not-insignificant portion of the Right is not-so-secretly delighted with the Left’s slide into racial essentialism because they too are racial essentialists, and would prefer the fight to be conducted on those terms. Some of them even comment here from time to time.
...but who were also bastardized by American Critical Theory frauds the French would certainly not respect in the least."
It is unclear to me, and I've been reading modern French philosophy since the early 80's, that any theory of justice can be eked out of it, especially any theory of justice as finicky as what the Critical Theory folks want to have. Post-structuralist & post-Marxist French philosophy is critical in its outlook, meaning it looks at structures, be they social or linguistic or whatever, and analyzes them into their components and assumptions. I don't think that it gives the French philosophe the tools to them judge the components & assumptions as to their moral or philosophical merit.
And, to give credit were credit is due, one of the first American authors to point out that modern French philosophy was being wrongly appropriated by the American Woke Left was Camille Paglia.
I like and respect France and French culture, and most interactions I've had in that country have been friendly; I hope to travel there again some day, but don't count on it.
Narr
I don't even hate de Gaulle!
It's the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks all over again. The Left will be fighting among themselves to see who's more pure, or who's purity is more righteous. Everyone else to be destroyed by the side of the road as they fight over what they believe is their turf.
Except that this is the most armed citizenry in the history of the world and not likely to take kindly to seeing the entire thing blown up. There will be a match struck at some point.
Yes, much of postmodernism came from France and critical theory from Germany, but serious Frenchmen and Germans were used to having crazy theoreticians in their midst and knew when and how to keep them in their place. You never saw Bismarck or Stresemann or Adenauer or Kohl or DeGaulle or Mitterand fall for this sort of garbage, and they kept it in check in the great universities, the Grand Ecoles and Heidelberg, Berlin, etc.
Americans had no such history and knowledge when such as the Frankfurt School and Paul de Man showed up here, spouting nonsense. On the contrary, our "elites" thought anything from Europe must be superior to anything Americans could come up with. Our leadership and academic classes took them as serious thinkers rather than oddball entertainment and potentially dangerous.
2 or 3 generations later, it has metastasized and starts to infect Europe, and European leaders understandably go, "WTF??? You BELIEVED them???"
@Tina Trent,
Foucault birthed the political movements that led to mass violence in the streets and mass homelessness among the severely mentally ill.
Maybe. I can see how one could say his Madness & Civilization contributed to the anti-psychiatry movement. But, if I had to say, I would put more of the blame on the oeuvre of Deleuze & Guattari.
The Woke are doing Deconstruction all wrong.
Lol.
It’s all a result of academic competition.
Eventually people will tire of paying for pampered dilettantes.
But not today.
I've been looking for a safe haven country for when the US completes it's journey into 1984. I hadn't thought about France, although I like France and the French (Paris excepted.} I'm going to take a hard look at it, probably somewhere in the Dordogne Valley - Normandy - Dijon triangle.
A not-insignificant portion of the Right is not-so-secretly delighted with the Left’s slide into racial essentialism because they too are racial essentialists, and would prefer the fight to be conducted on those term
Spoken like a true leftie seeking comfort and company with his own racism. To the extent that any conservative holds such views, it is a very insignificant portion of the whole....unlike the lefties for whom EVERYTHING is about skin color
- Krumhorn
BTW, if anyone wants to read a good & lucid introduction to post-war French philosophy, here's a book I mightily recommend: Vincent Descombes: Modern French Philosophy.
There's a companion German volume by Rudiger Bubner. It's okay, but too accepting of the modern German Hermeneutic tradition a la Gadamer for my tastes
"They have a complicated relationship with those thinkers, who were wrong, yes, but who were also bastardized by American Critical Theory frauds the French would certainly not respect in the least."
The French looking 'Monsieur' John Kerry was unavailable for comment.
They are all frauds just as Marx and Freud were frauds. Consider the absurdity of reading anyone's authoritative explanation of the world who denies that there is objective reality. Why would I read the thoughts of someone who argues that all thoughts are simply a reflection of class, or race or some other external influence?
It would be like asking for life advice from a strict determinist.
This stuff doesn't even pass a cursory logical examination, and yet it has enthralled overeducated fools for a century and a half.
I don't blame the French. They've got good food, good wine, a nice climate and the English and Americans to save them from the Germans periodically. Why should they worry about the nature of reality?
For Anglosphere to have fallen for the BS is inexcusable.
Ann Althouse said...
Power is a fundamental motivational force (“a,” not “the”). People compete to rise to the top, and they care where they are in dominance hierarchies."
This describes Critical Theory advocates much better than it describes anyone else.
Martin said...
You never saw Bismarck or Stresemann or Adenauer or Kohl or DeGaulle or Mitterand fall for this sort of garbage, and they kept it in check in the great universities, the Grand Ecoles and Heidelberg, Berlin, etc.
Europe has seen the baby tossed out with the bathwater more than once and they know the effects of civil strife.
Americans had no such history...
Correct; with one notable exception, but the aftermath of that was only felt by one specific group.
Lindsay’s book Cynical Theories is excellent, although a bit like chewing rope at times because he is scrupulous in conveying those theories both fairly and accurately, in all their turgidness.
Yeah, was going to say, Peterson may not have read Derrida closely, but Lindsay sure has. His website New Discourses has many good articles worth reading, and in more accessible format perhaps than his books. And he's a bold and effective twitter warrior in the best sense. I admire his intellect, courage and spirit.
Also he's a wiseass, a funny one, so he's got the full constellation of admirable characteristics as far as I'm concerned.
The danger to the French is much deadlier and immediate. Wokism and its allies will have them all submitting to Islam inside of 40 years- they can see it coming now- their minorities are not our minorities. In the US, it won't be Islam, it will be something that we have convinced ourselves won't be so awful.
Derrida is way more interesting than Foucault, and probably per something rhhardin posted here, I've gone back to some old stuff of his and searched out stuff on youtube (Derrida on prayer). It's unfair to lump all those pomos/post-structuralists together even if it's equally unfair or worse for us to have to remember the various taxonomies they've devised for themselves. Also unfair: trashing them for what has come afterwards, including the bowdlerization of their work by fans and haters alike. I still like Stephen Hicks' Understanding Postmodernism and recommend it as a good polemical work and reductive summary of much of this thought, but it doesn't do justice to all the thinkers it savages.
I can't wait until France is take over by the Muslims and their legal system is 100% Sharia Law.
There are consequences for not fighting for your culture.
There are consequences for unchecked legal and illegal immigration.
It may even happen in my lifetime.
A mosque on every corner. A halal chicken in every pot.
Oh, I forgot...drive all the Jews into the Seine.
Spoken like a true leftie seeking comfort and company with his own racism.
I threw a shoe into a pack of dogs and you happened to be the one who yelped?
I have come to consider Derrida and Foucault as troll philosophers >>>
Foucault isn't quite what the Left wants him to be (and just made shit up when it suited him, if you check his claims about historical anything).
Derrida, well, never made any damned sense to begin with.
(daskol may find him interesting, but I find him impenetrable and, at best deliberately obscure and trying way too hard to say things in not-useful ways.
Philosophers often need editors - Derrida needed one with a lead pipe, perhaps.
Not as bad as Baudrillard; I think it was The Transparency Of Evil I bought, attempted to read, and wanted to throw across the room for being unintelligible.)
(Source: Have philosophy degree, have read Foucault, attempted to read Derrida, but the Postmodernists are frankly all nonsense trash, which even some of the Postmodernist scholars would admit on the side if pressed, from my personal experience.
And not because I'm against Continentals or the French; I devoured Merleau-Ponty, but he was actually doing something vaguely rigorous, rather than word-salad pretending at meaning.)
Someone asked about how it is that some people can see through the obfuscation that entralls everyone else in this materialist and determined existence. Marx and Engels answered that in the Manifesto.
It's because . . . reasons.
Narr
It's the old philosophical game
drive all the Jews into the Seine
Not so long ago they were driving Muslims into the Seine.
Did you hear about the little French girl who fell off the Eifel Tower and went mad?
Narr
She was in-Seine
Houllebecq seems to in the derrida way, but he sees how its a dead end
"Not so long ago they were driving Muslims into the Seine."
Citation?
Sigivald mentions Baudrillard. He's definitely hard going--they all are, and IMO haven't added anything important to Fred Nietzsche's ideas--but Baudrillard wrote something short and I think penetrating soon after the demise of the USSR. (I think it was in Harper's.)
The main idea IIRC was that the failure of the USSR presaged a more general failure of Western culture, and reflected an inability to think outside self-imposed boxes that is a feature of where we are now. They went down first because they were farther up their own asses than we were, but we're gaining.
Narr
We have the Intertubes!
I don't think that Peterson was scoffing at France and saying, "You're one to talk. Look what you wrought." I think this was directed at North American academics, and saying "See, even the French who birthed Foucault and Derrida, whose work your theories are based on, say you've gone way too far."
1961 under fmr milice chief maurice papon.
Mes pronoms est le, la, l apostrophe, et les
Thanks...looks like he was part of the Vichy government and was an equal-opportunity jerk.
But in the here and now, it is not Muslims who are in danger in France.
They are sacred cows, to mix religious metaphors...
In 20 or 30 years they will rule the entire country.
"Call It a Day for Democracy" _The Other Heading_ p84-109 might be good for the politically minded. On public opinion and public opinion surveys.
"Why must parliamentary democracy protect itself from what in fact resembles the source of its legitimacy?"
The invisible distinctions between public opinion and the right to vote.
As I've previously stated, some of the most pro American Euros are non-Parisian French.
Obviously if they're pro-American, they're not leftists.
I've never read anything by Foucault or Derrida. My intuition tells me that what little of their writing I understand I will disagree with. When I was younger, I gave Sartre a shot. That guy is a pill. Camus is pretty good though. He's about the closest a French intellectual has ever gotten to Orwell.....You'd think that what with all their practice, the French would be a lot better at revolutions....I used to watch Eric Rohmer movies so I'm not totally antagonistic to French intellectuals. Reading the subtitles alone was the equivalent of reading a novel, and there wasn't much nudity for a film of that era.
The French also gave us de Maistre and Celine, IIRC.
Narr
Et l'ordre mixte
"Surprising words from the country that gave us Derrida and Foucault :)"
Les deux étaient pleins de merde.
Your velvet words of purple tint
In France it would be famous
Like all that belly-button lint
From Kierkegaard and Camus
Me: Hey, you're Jean Sartre. You used to be big.
Sartre: I still am big. Its the minds that got small.
What in God's name is "frenchface?"
A more mature French philosopher would be Mike Rowe.
I ask that woke people fix themselves first by getting a job, picking up litter on a daily basis, and being kind to animals. Once woke people can accomplish that I would be willing to listen to them.
Blogger gadfly said...
What in God's name is "frenchface?"
French Face
What in God's name is "frenchface?"
...asks the guy who puts on greekface.
When I read the term 'frenchface' I think of John Kerry. Which is darn weird when you think about it.
Mitterand had a classic one, IMO. Adolphe Menjou. And M. Chevalier.
Narr
Zank heaven for liddle girls
After the U.S. military forces are stood down to eliminate conservative members, maybe the French will declare war and invade the U.S. They'd prolly whup the asses of the gurly men, metrosexuals, queers and trannies that would be the mainstay of the U.S. fighting force.
My professor wanted me to write an essay on existentialism...
So I passed in a blank sheet of paper
Did you hear about the dolphin who went thru a existential crisis?
Turns out, he lost his sense of porpoise.
"Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French." ― P.G. Wodehouse, The Luck of the Bodkins
https://www.timesofisrael.com/a-famed-french-jewish-philosopher-is-afraid-to-leave-his-home/
Joe Smith said...
I can't wait until France is take over by the Muslims and their legal system is 100% Sharia Law.
There are consequences for not fighting for your culture.
There are consequences for unchecked legal and illegal immigration.
It may even happen in my lifetime.
A mosque on every corner. A halal chicken in every pot.
Oh, I forgot...drive all the Jews into the Seine.
2/10/21, 11:46 AM"
And Muzzies with nuclear subs with ICBM's. Be careful what you wish for.
arciso said...
https://www.timesofisrael.com/a-famed-french-jewish-philosopher-is-afraid-to-leave-his-home/
2/10/21, 6:14 PM"
Well one of the few things almost Europeans have in common is anti-Zionism and antiSemitism.
"And Muzzies with nuclear subs with ICBM's. Be careful what you wish for."
I'm kind of beyond caring at this point...
More closer to home, the french aided the eradicateurs in algiers after 1992, this is ostensibly why beghal began bombing the subways.
Derrida demolishes the left:
Well, to be fair to the guy, English wasn't his primary lingo.
Thanks, that's an interesting Derrida essay, and helpfully posted in full alongside other stuff as a pdf.
Gina Carano got #canceled from Star Wars Mandalorian for her political views which Disney deemed anti-Semitic. Her offense? She used the lessons of how Nazi’s convinced normal Germans to hate Jews as a warning for today’s climate of hate for people with differing political opinions. That’s, like, exactly the warning we need and she got #cancelled for it.
Our society really sucks right now. I really don’t know if it’s worth remaining American.
I worked in Europe and Asia for six years. In my experience, the USA is the LEAST racist country I've ever visited.
The Swedes have no self-awareness regarding race. "I got on the train in Chicago at the airport and I was the only white person. I was scared to death!" Not an acceptable comment in the US. Or, another Swede, "My buzz-cut makes me look like I escaped from a Polish prison!" Really?
In Spain they throw bananas at black soccer players. In France Asian women are routinely cat-called, "Hey China, fuckee fuckee?" Neither raises an eyebrow.
The Chinese are unapologetically Asian Supremacist.
Fair point, Young Hegelian. Too bad Paul De Man turned out to be the Nazi. That man could write, and also read literature.
An old but good “one”. I will have no cream with my coffee. No M. Sartre we are out of cream. Then I will have coffee with no milk.
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