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.
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.
You should be smothered in baked beans and tossed out in the garbage