Jan 08 2009
What a Rant
Just finished Elisabeth Roudinesco’s Philosophy in Turbulent Times. Youch. The book reads like an extended rant by somebody who’s kept it all bottled up, where “it” is the general intellectual and cultural attitude in France (and more generally) since the 1980′s. Centered primarily on (normalized) psychology, it turns into a long polemic against the nouvelle philosophie, and a corresponding defense of the philosophers who “heroically” demolished the “norm” (Canguilhem, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida). All very interesting, if you’re interested in that sort of thing, but the tone was really the knife-twist. You don’t often see stuff like the following snippet at the conferences or in the journals, but maybe that’s a bad thing. In this localized rant, she’s beating up on James Miller’s (truly asinine where not totally unreadable) book on Foucault:
According to Miller, Foucault’s father so humiliated him by forcing him to watch an amputation that Foucault lost his virility and remained fascinated all his life by the opening up of cadavers and the sight of torture. Likewise the sight of the mattress on which the sequestered woman of Poitiers had lain had given him a taste for enclosed spaces, labyrinths, and incarceration. As for his feelings of jealousy toward the Jewish students exterminated by the Nazis, it lay, according to Miller, at the root of Foucault’s conviction that fascism had to be opposed, not just as a historical phenomenon, but as a power that determines, without our knowing it, our most routine actions. In any case, these three repressed traumatic experiences guided Foucault, on Miller’s showing, down the tortuous pathways of a death cult – the sole explanation of his suicidal passion and his “desire” to contract AIDS.
One is left speechless at the stupidity of this putatively Freudian interpretation of the work and life of Michel Foucault, resting on nothing but extravagant hypotheses and reaching the most banal conclusion possible: Every book originates in the lived experience of its author. (90)
I don’t know about you, but I want to one day be able to say “One is left speechless at the stupidity of this putatively…” Burn.
I’m with you on the pleasure of rants. Probably why we both blog. Perhaps European conferences are more open to polemic than U.S. ones? Is that just my fantasy that life is better elsewhere? I am currently in the middle of a rant by Alain Badiou — “The Meaning of Sarkozy.”
Meanwhile, an friend of mine recently asked on FaceBook whether anyone knows of movies about the Frankfurt School. But here’s the kicker — the movie can’t be a documentary. Any thoughts?