In the middle of May, a French technology entrepreneur named Brivael Le Pogam published an apology. Not a personal apology but a national one, on behalf of the French people, for the offence of having produced what the Anglophone world calls French theory. The post traced a now-familiar genealogy. Le Pogam outlines how France once gave the world Descartes, Pascal, and Tocqueville; but then, in the rubble of 1968, it gave us Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze. The latter trio stand accused of forging the ideological weaponry that today paralyses the West; their ideas crossed the Atlantic, married American puritanism and racial guilt, and begat wokism.
I saw the title and expected to hate this. It's very good. Thank you.
However, sometimes the compression becomes the thing. For example, "lead on, McDuff" is not the actual Shakespearian quote. However, it's the quote that everyone knows, so in a way it is the "real" quote.
Is one's legacy the entirety of one's work, or just what's remembered?
I've never read Rousseau, but I firmly believe him deserving of a deep circle in hell for his "noble savage" garbage. I have no idea if that's the center or the periphery of his work. It's what he's known for. That's sufficient. And, to be fair, it's not necessarily _his_ writing, but what others have taken away from it.
In a wildly unrelated example: Does Samuel German have a legacy? If you ask "who?" the answer is "no", despite being the person for whom German Chocolate Cake is named. Does the truth matter? Does it make a difference if most people think it's a cake from Deutschland?
Nothing is simple, but the cognitive load of being pedantic about everything is impossible to bear.
Mark - Last sentence first: quite right. That deserves to be considered in a balance with the dismissal of all specialty knowledge as a "waste of time" and "showing off." A seesaw that needs to be held in equilibrium. What do you say?
Middle paragraph: Rousseau said we're naturally empathetic and generally kind but when we get in company a kind of competitive instinct kicks in and we seek to create a self-aggrandizing and false picture of ourselves to impress others. We 2nd-guess what we think they want and we try to appear as that. We can even feel it as we abandon our simpler, truer self as it happens but we go down that route anyway Eventually, the selves we want to project overshadow our true selves and we lose some authenticity as we age. He said this before there was a field of Psychology to study in college.
Do you feel there could be any truth to that idea?
Re: Balance. I think Clausewitz applies: Simple is not easy. Complex problems (or knowledge) can have simple solutions/summaries, but that doesn't mean they're easy solutions. "accurate" can be substituted for "easy". This is a sometimes a strength of Wikipedia: One can drill deeper if the simple explanation is unsatisfactory. (Sometimes it fails and just throws you directly into the complexity.)
Re: Rousseau. Not having read him, I obviously cannot argue details. However, as best I understand, he may have been writing about philosophy/attitude, but he has been read as civics.
It's all well and good ("accurate" doesn't really matter here) to say "in noble isolation, humans are nicer". It's another thing entirely to say "because of that we should tear down civilization and revert to small tribal bands". I don't care _anything_ about the truth behind the facade someone presents as long as I have hot running water and air conditioning. If that requires drilling for oil, splitting atoms, building desalinization plants, or paving deserts with solar panels, let's get to it, already.
If that causes _you_ to have psychological problems with presenting your true self, that's a you problem. Don't make me suffer for it.
Rousseau: there's a history of authors who take issue with him, and get the better of the argument. No fight on implications or premises is forthcoming from me.
But no Rousseau-inspired anarchist is coming for your AC. And the "you problem" (as you present it) could be, on reflection, an issue we all contend with to some degree. If nothing else, it was an incredibly influential idea and deserves a pause for self-deliberation, I'd say.
You can back burner the threat you feel or disdain for the concept of noble savages and let one of his ideas sit inside your soul for awhile. Do you ever feel some of your affectations get the better of you while you're talking to someone? (It's happened to me.) Did it cost you anything to go with a knee-jerk impulse to play along with someone's impressions of you rather than insistently remaining who you are? While you were with someone who comes across as authentic was it refreshing, and did it encouraging you to be more frankly yourself?
Some ugly discourses came out of the French Enlightenment, I won't argue with that, but it's a babies & bathwater situation.
_You can back burner the threat you feel or disdain for the concept of noble savages and let one of his ideas sit inside your soul for awhile._
You're mistaking me for someone who cares about the history of French philosophy.
I'm merely pleased with your article pointing out that what's commonly believed about Derrida is incorrect. I appreciate knowing when "common knowledge" is wrong. I don't appreciate it enough to read his body of work to determine it for myself.
You may be equally correct about Rousseau - and I'm willing to take your word for it, even. However, I'm not going to read his work in order to find ideas to let sit in my soul (assuming I even have one).
Whether he intended it or not, he became the center of a movement to tear down civilization so we can all live in peace while we gather and hunt. Despite the idiocy of that idea, it's a real thing.
Derrida's definition of "deconstruction" may be very different from the aposematically (just learned that word; I love it) pierced and dyed American undergraduate and he does not deserve to be tarred by the latter definition. As my original comment implied: It sucks to be him, but it's hardly a unique circumstance.
Balance: Your Clausewitz/wiki comment makes sense; I think (or hope) my comment to you made sense; and I was responding to your comment about trying to be consistently precise ("pedantic" was your word) at the expense of too many brain cells, which I thought was very clear.
But -- there's a 'but' -- I'm having slight trouble connecting all three points. It may just be a brain fart. Please draw it out for dummies.
I'm a stupid old-timer who doesn't know how to navigate substack well enough to carry on a sidebar conversation with you. If you explain it to me I'd find it more comfortable to chat outside of the "Comments." I always feel like I'm talking past someone to an audience behind them, or trying to score polemic points when I'm simply responding.
I graduated from college before French Theory struck and went on to medical training where It wasn't a factor. This essay is enlightening. Derrida may have been abused, but something destructive has made academe toxic and politics woke. How do we reinstate truth, fairness. understanding and intellectual legacy?
Thank you, you're generous and encouraging but honestly I was just trying to reach -- in several senses -- Robert, who seemed to me gratuitously angry and not quite meeting people halfway. The opposite of your Project's goal, (to the extent I understand what you're doing); the contrary of the careful reading Maurice was ascribing and celebrating in Derrida's work.
I saw that Robert had responded to something I said -- in fact I found his response by accident; it had been blocked. But I let our rather trivial comments dialogue sink in and it brought this memory to light. I wanted to respond to him, personally, not really open the window and shout at him in front of others. I too have been a loudmouth with a chip on my shoulder, and getting into a back & forth is not just pointless, at times it's worse. The question, which means a lot more to me than being right about poststructuralism, is "Can I connect with someone who is hostile by asking out loud why I have the impulse to connect with someone who is hostile?" Can some cycle of empathy short-circuit escalating rage bait?
I'm frankly ashamed at how inept I am on substack; I really should take the time to figure how to direct my speech, what tone of voice to use, appropriate length, etc. I just find following each successive trend in social media toward its inevitable obsolescence exhausting. Right now I feel as if I've taken too much of your time and my own.
Thank you, David, for this gracious response. My apologies for confusion — I agree that substack can be a bit arcane in places and I’ve had plenty of procedural uncertainty learning my way around it myself. I will say that I found your comment meaningful and valuable, even though it wasn’t in the end addressed to me. It has stayed in my mind and has made me think, and so I thank you for that.
Derrida is very commonly misread, true. His work is rigorous, and I have found it fun to read. I have not, however, found it very useful, and I have seen it badly misused. As to the salvation of civilization, that's just plain nuts.
When in 1978 I started teaching film production at a technical college whose new staff had been freshly recruited by the new Marxist dean, I found the strongly feminist semiologist students were reluctant to engage with the idea of storytelling- they were studying French theory at the same time - especially semiotics. They lived in a slogan driven world in which narrative was inherently patriarchal.
They embraced Lacan, Foucault, Barthes, as well as Derrida, not understanding that Deconstruction - post structuralism - was a denial of Structuralism. I had come from the BBC where my films were based on story telling. I tried to get these zealous students to ditch their overly self conscious approach- and to trust their instincts. I had seen what this total embrace of theory had done to my cinematic hero, Jean Luc Godard. It was Bande Apart that in 1964 inspired me to be a filmmaker. But through the 70’s Godards attacks on storytelling progressively undermined his entire oeuvre. His work became more and more unwatchable, just as Modern Art succumbed to the same theoretical self reflection and became unavailable to the ‘uneducated’ public. I admire Quentin Tarantino because he never allowed his admiration for Godard to push him over an anti-narrative cliff.
I suspect a lot of people who came of age in the academic humanities during the 70s, 80s, and early 90s have similar sorts of stories — if you were there for the process of ideological capture, it was there to be noticed and seen. The aggression with which it was done is signaled, even today, by how much silence surrounds that time.
On the late 1970s, Jacques Derrida—along with other prominent French intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Michel Foucault—signed controversial petitions organized in France. These petitions, including one in 1977 addressed to the French parliament, called for the decriminalization of consensual sexual relations between adults and minors under the age of 15 (the local age of consent), or the elimination of the age of consent entirely.
Robert - One of Foucault's ideas was that a truth takes place in a social context. To present a truth is a form of self-assertion in that context. "There's nothing stronger than a idea that's time has come" (William James?) is a covert way to acknowledge the "power-effects" of truth-telling.
As a matter of self-examination, I feel the pull of this notion of a productive power/truth mixture. I've read some Foucault (if I took the time to understand "panopticism," eg, am I, according to you, a "wretched fan"?) and I type these words with a certain amount of self-confidence. You entered the conversation with (let's be honest) some hostility and a fully-formed judgment. Our sentences are competing bids for the title of "Speaking Truth."
From this side of the screen I can't tell if you've actually earned the "disgusting old fraud" remark but, thanks to some rudimentary grasp of his writings, I recognize an intellectual power-play when I see one. "That French post-structural nonsense isn't worth paying attention to"... presumably you have some other stuff on your bookshelves much better. If you want, tell me what they are. I feel somewhat indebted to you because I haven't thought about this stuff in years and your comments made me reflect on it.
On your behalf, I'd add there was a fanboy element back then, no doubt. That's how intellectual fads work. Like old, fashionable outfits can become embarrassing.
Please take a minute and let the idea sink in before you argue with me.
I write both as a lawyer and as a storyteller. I found your reference to lawyers' labor over the meaning of text especially interesting. A fundamental principle of statutory or constitutional interpretation is that the reader begins with the plain meaning of the text as it is written. If there's ambiguity, only then do you begin to probe into the drafting history, motives, and intentions of the drafters. Typically, the final product is a compromise, not the sole vision of one author. You note Derrida was a man of extraordinary discipline, and I agree. Who among us non-academics could spend such time and energy to know the context and subtext of the writer? It takes an enormous force of logic to identify assumptions and premises the writer himself denies or is unconscious of using. But the bottom line in my work is how complex and subconscious the factors are that make up a character, real or imagined.
I have not and almost certainly will not ever read Derrida.
But I just loved the themes Maurice touched on so eloquently, especially his emphasis on exercising the discipline of reasoning and the discipline of questioning.
When it comes to reading, reasoning, debating, writing and questioning, the exercise of "discipline" is all important: it is the best defense against being foolishly, stupidly, ignorantly wrong.
Personally, I believe too many of us seeking "Truth" are obsessed with being "right."
Once we have made a decision, the **nature of our thought process changes,** and we become unyielding in our belief that our decision is "Truth." (This is a known psychological phenomenon.)
Thus ends the discipline of self-analysis, and that hinders or precludes the modification of our belief.
I think a far better approach is for us to think in terms of building a provisional decision that is "defensible." One that is not necessarily true, but one that, after your disciplined analysis, is likely not altogether wrong.
IMO, discipline is necessary to pour though as many different viewpoints as possible, as expressed by those who hold those viewpoints, not some news anchor.
If your goal is to creat "the best defense I can create for the time being" you will have exercised discipline.
You will also be more open to changing your opinion.
Totally agree about the importance — and waning popularity — of discipline. It is critical for discernment, and must be dispassionate — another value we’ve all but abandoned in our era of rabid tendentiousnessness.
This is so thoughtful and thought inspiring. Never read Derrida but am looking forward to it now.
Absolutely delighted to hear this! Thank you!
Fascinating essay. Intellectual. rumor never rests, and posts like these are the perfect antidote.
Thank you so much for the kind and encouraging words!
I saw the title and expected to hate this. It's very good. Thank you.
However, sometimes the compression becomes the thing. For example, "lead on, McDuff" is not the actual Shakespearian quote. However, it's the quote that everyone knows, so in a way it is the "real" quote.
Is one's legacy the entirety of one's work, or just what's remembered?
I've never read Rousseau, but I firmly believe him deserving of a deep circle in hell for his "noble savage" garbage. I have no idea if that's the center or the periphery of his work. It's what he's known for. That's sufficient. And, to be fair, it's not necessarily _his_ writing, but what others have taken away from it.
In a wildly unrelated example: Does Samuel German have a legacy? If you ask "who?" the answer is "no", despite being the person for whom German Chocolate Cake is named. Does the truth matter? Does it make a difference if most people think it's a cake from Deutschland?
Nothing is simple, but the cognitive load of being pedantic about everything is impossible to bear.
Mark - Last sentence first: quite right. That deserves to be considered in a balance with the dismissal of all specialty knowledge as a "waste of time" and "showing off." A seesaw that needs to be held in equilibrium. What do you say?
Middle paragraph: Rousseau said we're naturally empathetic and generally kind but when we get in company a kind of competitive instinct kicks in and we seek to create a self-aggrandizing and false picture of ourselves to impress others. We 2nd-guess what we think they want and we try to appear as that. We can even feel it as we abandon our simpler, truer self as it happens but we go down that route anyway Eventually, the selves we want to project overshadow our true selves and we lose some authenticity as we age. He said this before there was a field of Psychology to study in college.
Do you feel there could be any truth to that idea?
This place has the best comments.
Re: Balance. I think Clausewitz applies: Simple is not easy. Complex problems (or knowledge) can have simple solutions/summaries, but that doesn't mean they're easy solutions. "accurate" can be substituted for "easy". This is a sometimes a strength of Wikipedia: One can drill deeper if the simple explanation is unsatisfactory. (Sometimes it fails and just throws you directly into the complexity.)
Re: Rousseau. Not having read him, I obviously cannot argue details. However, as best I understand, he may have been writing about philosophy/attitude, but he has been read as civics.
It's all well and good ("accurate" doesn't really matter here) to say "in noble isolation, humans are nicer". It's another thing entirely to say "because of that we should tear down civilization and revert to small tribal bands". I don't care _anything_ about the truth behind the facade someone presents as long as I have hot running water and air conditioning. If that requires drilling for oil, splitting atoms, building desalinization plants, or paving deserts with solar panels, let's get to it, already.
If that causes _you_ to have psychological problems with presenting your true self, that's a you problem. Don't make me suffer for it.
Rousseau: there's a history of authors who take issue with him, and get the better of the argument. No fight on implications or premises is forthcoming from me.
But no Rousseau-inspired anarchist is coming for your AC. And the "you problem" (as you present it) could be, on reflection, an issue we all contend with to some degree. If nothing else, it was an incredibly influential idea and deserves a pause for self-deliberation, I'd say.
You can back burner the threat you feel or disdain for the concept of noble savages and let one of his ideas sit inside your soul for awhile. Do you ever feel some of your affectations get the better of you while you're talking to someone? (It's happened to me.) Did it cost you anything to go with a knee-jerk impulse to play along with someone's impressions of you rather than insistently remaining who you are? While you were with someone who comes across as authentic was it refreshing, and did it encouraging you to be more frankly yourself?
Some ugly discourses came out of the French Enlightenment, I won't argue with that, but it's a babies & bathwater situation.
_You can back burner the threat you feel or disdain for the concept of noble savages and let one of his ideas sit inside your soul for awhile._
You're mistaking me for someone who cares about the history of French philosophy.
I'm merely pleased with your article pointing out that what's commonly believed about Derrida is incorrect. I appreciate knowing when "common knowledge" is wrong. I don't appreciate it enough to read his body of work to determine it for myself.
You may be equally correct about Rousseau - and I'm willing to take your word for it, even. However, I'm not going to read his work in order to find ideas to let sit in my soul (assuming I even have one).
Whether he intended it or not, he became the center of a movement to tear down civilization so we can all live in peace while we gather and hunt. Despite the idiocy of that idea, it's a real thing.
Derrida's definition of "deconstruction" may be very different from the aposematically (just learned that word; I love it) pierced and dyed American undergraduate and he does not deserve to be tarred by the latter definition. As my original comment implied: It sucks to be him, but it's hardly a unique circumstance.
I feel you.
Balance: Your Clausewitz/wiki comment makes sense; I think (or hope) my comment to you made sense; and I was responding to your comment about trying to be consistently precise ("pedantic" was your word) at the expense of too many brain cells, which I thought was very clear.
But -- there's a 'but' -- I'm having slight trouble connecting all three points. It may just be a brain fart. Please draw it out for dummies.
My original three examples are only connected by the thread of "what actually was and what is currently believed do not match".
When turned inside out - what do Shakespeare, German Chocolate Cake, and Rousseau have in common? - it makes no sense at all.
I'm a stupid old-timer who doesn't know how to navigate substack well enough to carry on a sidebar conversation with you. If you explain it to me I'd find it more comfortable to chat outside of the "Comments." I always feel like I'm talking past someone to an audience behind them, or trying to score polemic points when I'm simply responding.
I graduated from college before French Theory struck and went on to medical training where It wasn't a factor. This essay is enlightening. Derrida may have been abused, but something destructive has made academe toxic and politics woke. How do we reinstate truth, fairness. understanding and intellectual legacy?
Erin -
Thank you, you're generous and encouraging but honestly I was just trying to reach -- in several senses -- Robert, who seemed to me gratuitously angry and not quite meeting people halfway. The opposite of your Project's goal, (to the extent I understand what you're doing); the contrary of the careful reading Maurice was ascribing and celebrating in Derrida's work.
I saw that Robert had responded to something I said -- in fact I found his response by accident; it had been blocked. But I let our rather trivial comments dialogue sink in and it brought this memory to light. I wanted to respond to him, personally, not really open the window and shout at him in front of others. I too have been a loudmouth with a chip on my shoulder, and getting into a back & forth is not just pointless, at times it's worse. The question, which means a lot more to me than being right about poststructuralism, is "Can I connect with someone who is hostile by asking out loud why I have the impulse to connect with someone who is hostile?" Can some cycle of empathy short-circuit escalating rage bait?
I'm frankly ashamed at how inept I am on substack; I really should take the time to figure how to direct my speech, what tone of voice to use, appropriate length, etc. I just find following each successive trend in social media toward its inevitable obsolescence exhausting. Right now I feel as if I've taken too much of your time and my own.
Have fun,
David
Thank you, David, for this gracious response. My apologies for confusion — I agree that substack can be a bit arcane in places and I’ve had plenty of procedural uncertainty learning my way around it myself. I will say that I found your comment meaningful and valuable, even though it wasn’t in the end addressed to me. It has stayed in my mind and has made me think, and so I thank you for that.
If only this article could be amplified as much as that pseudo’s inane tweet…an ironic microcosm of the problem with the modern world.
So glad this resonated! Thank you for the kind words!
Derrida is very commonly misread, true. His work is rigorous, and I have found it fun to read. I have not, however, found it very useful, and I have seen it badly misused. As to the salvation of civilization, that's just plain nuts.
When in 1978 I started teaching film production at a technical college whose new staff had been freshly recruited by the new Marxist dean, I found the strongly feminist semiologist students were reluctant to engage with the idea of storytelling- they were studying French theory at the same time - especially semiotics. They lived in a slogan driven world in which narrative was inherently patriarchal.
They embraced Lacan, Foucault, Barthes, as well as Derrida, not understanding that Deconstruction - post structuralism - was a denial of Structuralism. I had come from the BBC where my films were based on story telling. I tried to get these zealous students to ditch their overly self conscious approach- and to trust their instincts. I had seen what this total embrace of theory had done to my cinematic hero, Jean Luc Godard. It was Bande Apart that in 1964 inspired me to be a filmmaker. But through the 70’s Godards attacks on storytelling progressively undermined his entire oeuvre. His work became more and more unwatchable, just as Modern Art succumbed to the same theoretical self reflection and became unavailable to the ‘uneducated’ public. I admire Quentin Tarantino because he never allowed his admiration for Godard to push him over an anti-narrative cliff.
I suspect a lot of people who came of age in the academic humanities during the 70s, 80s, and early 90s have similar sorts of stories — if you were there for the process of ideological capture, it was there to be noticed and seen. The aggression with which it was done is signaled, even today, by how much silence surrounds that time.
he was a pedo.
On the late 1970s, Jacques Derrida—along with other prominent French intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Michel Foucault—signed controversial petitions organized in France. These petitions, including one in 1977 addressed to the French parliament, called for the decriminalization of consensual sexual relations between adults and minors under the age of 15 (the local age of consent), or the elimination of the age of consent entirely.
Wonderful, thank you for sharing!
Thank you!
Brilliant, thought provoking and honest. Thank you!
Thank you so much for the kind words, Carrie!!
In fairness, practically none of Foucault's wretched fans have read what the disgusting old fraud has actually written either.
Robert - One of Foucault's ideas was that a truth takes place in a social context. To present a truth is a form of self-assertion in that context. "There's nothing stronger than a idea that's time has come" (William James?) is a covert way to acknowledge the "power-effects" of truth-telling.
As a matter of self-examination, I feel the pull of this notion of a productive power/truth mixture. I've read some Foucault (if I took the time to understand "panopticism," eg, am I, according to you, a "wretched fan"?) and I type these words with a certain amount of self-confidence. You entered the conversation with (let's be honest) some hostility and a fully-formed judgment. Our sentences are competing bids for the title of "Speaking Truth."
From this side of the screen I can't tell if you've actually earned the "disgusting old fraud" remark but, thanks to some rudimentary grasp of his writings, I recognize an intellectual power-play when I see one. "That French post-structural nonsense isn't worth paying attention to"... presumably you have some other stuff on your bookshelves much better. If you want, tell me what they are. I feel somewhat indebted to you because I haven't thought about this stuff in years and your comments made me reflect on it.
On your behalf, I'd add there was a fanboy element back then, no doubt. That's how intellectual fads work. Like old, fashionable outfits can become embarrassing.
Please take a minute and let the idea sink in before you argue with me.
I write both as a lawyer and as a storyteller. I found your reference to lawyers' labor over the meaning of text especially interesting. A fundamental principle of statutory or constitutional interpretation is that the reader begins with the plain meaning of the text as it is written. If there's ambiguity, only then do you begin to probe into the drafting history, motives, and intentions of the drafters. Typically, the final product is a compromise, not the sole vision of one author. You note Derrida was a man of extraordinary discipline, and I agree. Who among us non-academics could spend such time and energy to know the context and subtext of the writer? It takes an enormous force of logic to identify assumptions and premises the writer himself denies or is unconscious of using. But the bottom line in my work is how complex and subconscious the factors are that make up a character, real or imagined.
Thanks for this wonderful and thought-provoking comment! Much to mull and consider, which is the best of all things.
I have not and almost certainly will not ever read Derrida.
But I just loved the themes Maurice touched on so eloquently, especially his emphasis on exercising the discipline of reasoning and the discipline of questioning.
When it comes to reading, reasoning, debating, writing and questioning, the exercise of "discipline" is all important: it is the best defense against being foolishly, stupidly, ignorantly wrong.
Personally, I believe too many of us seeking "Truth" are obsessed with being "right."
Once we have made a decision, the **nature of our thought process changes,** and we become unyielding in our belief that our decision is "Truth." (This is a known psychological phenomenon.)
Thus ends the discipline of self-analysis, and that hinders or precludes the modification of our belief.
I think a far better approach is for us to think in terms of building a provisional decision that is "defensible." One that is not necessarily true, but one that, after your disciplined analysis, is likely not altogether wrong.
IMO, discipline is necessary to pour though as many different viewpoints as possible, as expressed by those who hold those viewpoints, not some news anchor.
If your goal is to creat "the best defense I can create for the time being" you will have exercised discipline.
You will also be more open to changing your opinion.
JFWIW
Totally agree about the importance — and waning popularity — of discipline. It is critical for discernment, and must be dispassionate — another value we’ve all but abandoned in our era of rabid tendentiousnessness.
There's a lot of good here but he'd dislike right justification (it's weird and hard to read).
He did not believe in the possibility of a gift, much less a pure gift. He was wrong.