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September 18, 2003
Just a note in passing.
I came across this comment by Brian Micklethwait late last night. Brian runs Brian's Culture Blog and the post is about the Anglo-Saxon reading/reception of French "postmodern" writing. Brian links to this entry at Two Blowhards.
Both blogs are good, informed, and interesting. So why mention this particular post?
I'm struck by the prejudice to French 20th century culture that sits beneath the civilized surface.
At the Two Blowhards we discover that postmodernism means Lyotard, Baudrillard, Foucault, and Derrida---what we philosophers call poststructuralism. The question asked is: Why do we in the Anglo-American world read the French? Since we are reading them here in Australia the answers given refer to us.
Friedrich over at Two Blowhards says:
"I guess the real question is not why the French see something of themselves and their situation in Postmodern thought, but rather what American academics see in it? Whatever our own issues are, America clearly lacks that peculiarly French culture-schizophrenia. Is it possible that our academics miss it, or do they perhaps actually long for it? Or have they simply not read enough history--either French or American?"
This is a negative image of us. We are reading the French texts because we are ignorant because we don't know enough history, or we are longing for schizophrenia. That is pretty dismissive.
And the ideas? What about the ideas? What has happened to them? Could we not be reading this material (Bataille and Klossowski) because the poststructuralist thinking owes so much to Bataille? Could not Bataille be a key signpost?
Brian, who lives in England, doesn't buy into Friedrich's account of the American reception of French poststructuralism. He comments on this passage thus:
"No I think it's simpler than that Friedrich. I think that American academia (at any rate the bit of it that worships Postmodernism) is a little slice of La France in America".
I know this is the voice of cultural conservatism. But Brian is critical of the stark left right duality that is so pervasive in our culture.
So why do I make the charge of prejudice?
Because French poststructuralism is dismissed by both Friedrich and Brian without an evaluation of its ideas; or an attempt to dig into its roots through trying to uunderstanding the French reception of German philosophy (Hegel and Nietzsche) in the 1930s and 1940s. Hence our reading of Pierre Klossowski
And the effect of prejudice? Cultural conservatism is blind to the ideas of the French philosophers, cultural critics and writers. It has decided that there are no good ideas there and so there is nothing worthwhile to discuss. Hence there is something wrong with those in Anglo-American culture who do read it and discuss it. You put a question mark over the lefties in the academy by implying that these Europhiles worship the false gods.
The Anglo Saxon prejudice used to be directed at the Germans (Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger). Now it is the French who are the object of cultural disdain.
As I said, there is no consideration that we read the French postructuralists and their existential forebears because some of their ideas are good ones and well worth the effort to understand them.
Well, folks, that is why we are reading the French at philosophical conversations. It has nothing to do with us living in a little slice of La France in Australia, longing for schizophrenia, or not having read enough French history. It is about the ideas. So we are misrecognized.
As I said. Just a note in passing.
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Since I'm cautious enough to avoid equating a given society's "best and brightest" with the intellectual and/or political views of its mainstream, I second your chagrin at tossing out every perspicacious French baby along with its cultural bathwater.
Derrida and Foucault, to take just two examples you referenced, have contributed much worth pondering regarding the supposedly "unremarkable" nature of everyday discourse.
Perusing French opinion polls and national newspaper columns, I too have long since concluded that the majority of present-day French men and women are, not unlike the majority of their otherworldly European relations, demonstrably "schizophrenic" and delusional.
That judgment, however, cannot reasonably be generalized to each and every French philosopher. Ideas and arguments, from whatever source, should be judged on their merits--as you quite rightly advised.
Ad hominem attacks justified by nothing save casual cultural generalizations reveal more about their authors than their subjects.