the french intellectual class is terminally idealist. this inherited personality expresses itself in a few seemingly unrelated ways: desire and reverence of the french intellectuals for "virtuosos" like bergson or foucault; their old fashioned naivete and their obsession for their own history. but americans are anything but naive or old fashioned. only french intellectuals can still think of bataille as a "great thinker". it is not just absolute cretins like b.h.l; in the 80s reagan was really popular among the french intellectuals maybe even more so than their american counterparts. this subject always reminds me of the founding of the european union. french were not very eager to join the union at first since they saw that the germans would be the primary force in the organization. but the "intellectuals" among the politicians managed to convince the rest that while germans will have the industrial engine, they will hold the steering wheel. the french actually believed that they will rule the germans and their material power base with their ideas and plans, like a mind ruling the body. idealism at some point in history and beyond some uncertain line loses its charm and becomes embarrassing. some intellectuals like cocteau are actually proud to be ignorant of concrete political realities. they are like proud children refusing to join the sordid adults but they don't have the charm of children.
Absolutely -- outside of say the Chicago economists, French intellectuals have always been Washington's best friends in the academic world. Mountains of declassified CIA material confirm as much, one of my favourite being this VERY telling report: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP86S00588R000300380001-5.pdf -- also a great Gabriel Rockhill interview that I read in Monthly Review a couple years ago that I share basically everywhere. And yes -- you can literally read in this exact essay Cocteau PROUDLY brimming with fucking ignorance! It's incredibly arrogant and pathetic.
I used to have a long-running email chain with Chomsky (who I have my own issues with but he made a good interlocutor), back when he could still reply to those, and I asked him once about a claim I'd heard him make about how the French, arrogant as they are, refused to accept Darwin's theories until something like the 1960s. I'll copy and paste his response to that, says all it has to really:
"I asked a friend about it, a Nobel laureate in biology who did most of his work in France. He told me that not only is it true, but the main reason why there was a breakthrough at all [in accepting evolution] was that as a reward for his work in the resistance, future Nobel laureate Jacques Monod was permitted open a small research center, from which most of the great work by French biologists has emerged."
I've listened to that story of Chomsky in an interview and maybe the french's resistance to Darwinian theory had something to do with their scientific tradition, cuvier and the fight between uniformitarianism and catastrophism. it is possible we disagree on this but I like that some scientists don't easily go along with the Darwinian orthodoxy because among all the natural sciences biology is the most formidable and pernicious ideology.
I know chomsky hates the french but in fact he hates the whole "continental" thought. he'd really like to erase the portion of the european theory which came after kant. chomsky thinks hegel is ridiculous and he doesn't think marx is all that impressive. he considers j.s. mill as much better than these two. there is a certain superficiality and even banality to chomsky's non-linguistic writings, I find. specifically his political writings are quite narrow. again maybe you disagree. I like chomsky best when he engages with kant and descartes.
cocteau was a great filmmaker. but the problem with european artists begin when they walk into politics without noticing it. they don't realize that politics is its own thing, with its own rules and even its own transcendence. it'd be fine if they just shut up about politics but they rarely do that.
Chomsky's anti-continentalism is a bit extreme; Zizek is by most respects a clown but in their feud Chomsky really didn't approach the thing in good faith out an unwillingness to engage with the ideas at hand because of his analytic prejudices. He also likely has shady intelligence ties through MIT and is imo likely a figure of controlled opposition. I think a number of his polemics are good when grounded in history, but he falls flat as a "theorist" -- though he once told me he considers himself an "epistemologist" foremost in his work in linguistics.
And Cocteau is, of course, one of the greats, but this book was largely asinine. Continental European artists do tend to aestheticize politics too much and it usually winds up both a disservice to their art and to politics, but maybe that's just my prejudice as an anglophone. European communists have certainly gotten a lot farther than North American or English ones so who knows, maybe there's something to it we're missing.
chomsky reports that he had read "the phenomenology of the mind" very late, probably in his 70s while he was staying in the hospital and had nothing better to do. the implication is clear, he didn't really want to but somehow had to read the famous classic. he then laughs and says it was the most ridiculous thing he ever read. if you think that way about hegel, you can't really like marx so much. in fact and much more interestingly his writings about anarchism is similarly shallow and almost dismissive. he calls himself an anarchist but he obviously didn't think much of anarchists either. he was really just a liberal who doesn't call himself one. chomsky bases his linguistic theory on kant; on this he is very consistent. what makes a transcendental subject possible also makes language possible, in his theory but after kant it is all nonsense. I think that might be the main thing separating continental thought from anglo-americans. anglo americans stop at kant and refuse to go any further because really if you accept hegel you have to accept marx too. they sense that so have to stop at that line. you know neo-kantianism is a strong current in marxism too;, all those belong to the same reaction. if you refuse dialectics then all hope is lost to you.
I feel that way about fallout too, I feel a part of that world, even when I am not playing the games. the world exists on its own. that is quite an achievement for me. but how is that possible? fallout doesn't take itself at all seriously so the narrative elements have a lightness and richness to them but the game stands on solid ground in real places and real history. it might be the only game to get that close to being "art". you know when you are reading a very good novel, you are living the events alongside the novel's characters but you are also above the story, somehow and can see things from afar. it is this fruitful contradiction which makes a good novel in my opinion. it is both a world of its own but also a mirror of yours. fallout achieves the same thing.
the french intellectual class is terminally idealist. this inherited personality expresses itself in a few seemingly unrelated ways: desire and reverence of the french intellectuals for "virtuosos" like bergson or foucault; their old fashioned naivete and their obsession for their own history. but americans are anything but naive or old fashioned. only french intellectuals can still think of bataille as a "great thinker". it is not just absolute cretins like b.h.l; in the 80s reagan was really popular among the french intellectuals maybe even more so than their american counterparts. this subject always reminds me of the founding of the european union. french were not very eager to join the union at first since they saw that the germans would be the primary force in the organization. but the "intellectuals" among the politicians managed to convince the rest that while germans will have the industrial engine, they will hold the steering wheel. the french actually believed that they will rule the germans and their material power base with their ideas and plans, like a mind ruling the body. idealism at some point in history and beyond some uncertain line loses its charm and becomes embarrassing. some intellectuals like cocteau are actually proud to be ignorant of concrete political realities. they are like proud children refusing to join the sordid adults but they don't have the charm of children.
Absolutely -- outside of say the Chicago economists, French intellectuals have always been Washington's best friends in the academic world. Mountains of declassified CIA material confirm as much, one of my favourite being this VERY telling report: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP86S00588R000300380001-5.pdf -- also a great Gabriel Rockhill interview that I read in Monthly Review a couple years ago that I share basically everywhere. And yes -- you can literally read in this exact essay Cocteau PROUDLY brimming with fucking ignorance! It's incredibly arrogant and pathetic.
I used to have a long-running email chain with Chomsky (who I have my own issues with but he made a good interlocutor), back when he could still reply to those, and I asked him once about a claim I'd heard him make about how the French, arrogant as they are, refused to accept Darwin's theories until something like the 1960s. I'll copy and paste his response to that, says all it has to really:
"I asked a friend about it, a Nobel laureate in biology who did most of his work in France. He told me that not only is it true, but the main reason why there was a breakthrough at all [in accepting evolution] was that as a reward for his work in the resistance, future Nobel laureate Jacques Monod was permitted open a small research center, from which most of the great work by French biologists has emerged."
I've listened to that story of Chomsky in an interview and maybe the french's resistance to Darwinian theory had something to do with their scientific tradition, cuvier and the fight between uniformitarianism and catastrophism. it is possible we disagree on this but I like that some scientists don't easily go along with the Darwinian orthodoxy because among all the natural sciences biology is the most formidable and pernicious ideology.
I know chomsky hates the french but in fact he hates the whole "continental" thought. he'd really like to erase the portion of the european theory which came after kant. chomsky thinks hegel is ridiculous and he doesn't think marx is all that impressive. he considers j.s. mill as much better than these two. there is a certain superficiality and even banality to chomsky's non-linguistic writings, I find. specifically his political writings are quite narrow. again maybe you disagree. I like chomsky best when he engages with kant and descartes.
cocteau was a great filmmaker. but the problem with european artists begin when they walk into politics without noticing it. they don't realize that politics is its own thing, with its own rules and even its own transcendence. it'd be fine if they just shut up about politics but they rarely do that.
Chomsky's anti-continentalism is a bit extreme; Zizek is by most respects a clown but in their feud Chomsky really didn't approach the thing in good faith out an unwillingness to engage with the ideas at hand because of his analytic prejudices. He also likely has shady intelligence ties through MIT and is imo likely a figure of controlled opposition. I think a number of his polemics are good when grounded in history, but he falls flat as a "theorist" -- though he once told me he considers himself an "epistemologist" foremost in his work in linguistics.
And Cocteau is, of course, one of the greats, but this book was largely asinine. Continental European artists do tend to aestheticize politics too much and it usually winds up both a disservice to their art and to politics, but maybe that's just my prejudice as an anglophone. European communists have certainly gotten a lot farther than North American or English ones so who knows, maybe there's something to it we're missing.
chomsky reports that he had read "the phenomenology of the mind" very late, probably in his 70s while he was staying in the hospital and had nothing better to do. the implication is clear, he didn't really want to but somehow had to read the famous classic. he then laughs and says it was the most ridiculous thing he ever read. if you think that way about hegel, you can't really like marx so much. in fact and much more interestingly his writings about anarchism is similarly shallow and almost dismissive. he calls himself an anarchist but he obviously didn't think much of anarchists either. he was really just a liberal who doesn't call himself one. chomsky bases his linguistic theory on kant; on this he is very consistent. what makes a transcendental subject possible also makes language possible, in his theory but after kant it is all nonsense. I think that might be the main thing separating continental thought from anglo-americans. anglo americans stop at kant and refuse to go any further because really if you accept hegel you have to accept marx too. they sense that so have to stop at that line. you know neo-kantianism is a strong current in marxism too;, all those belong to the same reaction. if you refuse dialectics then all hope is lost to you.
I feel that way about fallout too, I feel a part of that world, even when I am not playing the games. the world exists on its own. that is quite an achievement for me. but how is that possible? fallout doesn't take itself at all seriously so the narrative elements have a lightness and richness to them but the game stands on solid ground in real places and real history. it might be the only game to get that close to being "art". you know when you are reading a very good novel, you are living the events alongside the novel's characters but you are also above the story, somehow and can see things from afar. it is this fruitful contradiction which makes a good novel in my opinion. it is both a world of its own but also a mirror of yours. fallout achieves the same thing.