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Abandon all hope ye who subscribe here. Varn Vlog is the pod of C. Derick Varn. We combine the conversation on philosophy, political economy, art, history, culture, anthropology, and geopolitics from a left-wing and culturally informed perspective. We approach the world from a historical lens with an eye for hard truths and structural analysis.
Varn Vlog
Unraveling French Philosophy: Influences and Challenges with Jon Repetti
Join us for a thought-provoking exploration into the intricate world of French philosophy and its significant impact on leftist thought, featuring insights from our esteemed guest, Jon Repetti of the Five Good Hours Substack and a PhD candidate at Princeton. What hidden influences shaped Althusser's theories, and how did Lacan's medieval Catholic roots contribute to his work? This episode promises to unravel these complexities, offering listeners a comprehensive understanding of how French intellectuals like Lacan, Althusser, Deleuze, and others perceive and critique the state.
Our conversation takes a fascinating turn as we delve into the complex relationship between Marxism, existentialism, and psychoanalysis, exploring the critiques and contributions of pivotal figures such as Althusser, Sartre, and Badiou. We question the left’s embrace of Lacan and investigate how Lacanian psychoanalysis intersected with Maoist ideologies, influencing French intellectual circles in the post-1968 political landscape. The discussion further explores how these ideas were transformed within American theory, highlighting the challenges of teaching and popularizing French theory within U.S. academic discourse.
Unpacking the pedagogical challenges of presenting complex theories without oversimplification, we examine the cultural power and influence of French theorists like Foucault and Kristeva in the American academic scene. Listen as we reflect on the ongoing legacy of French theory, the role of educators in presenting these ideas effectively, and the intriguing cultural dynamics between French and American intellectual traditions. Whether you're a seasoned philosopher or new to the world of continental thought, this episode offers valuable insights into the enduring relevance and transformation of French theory across the Atlantic.
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Hello and welcome to VornVlog, and today I'm here with John Ripetti of the Five Good Hours Substack. He is a PhD candidate at Princeton and I'm not going to hold that against him.
Speaker 2:Everybody else does, you might as well. I deserve it Like let's be.
Speaker 1:So we're here to talk about the relevance of continental philosophy for the left, and we're going to start with one of my favorite bugbears. John here is going to convince me not to hate Team France. So between my studies of French left communism and French theory, which is both overlapping and also not quite the same thing, with the exception of Leo Torgue and Baudrillard I tend to not be on Team France. I'm notoriously skeptical of Lacan. I think the mirror phase is legitimate and everything else is sus. I have come around on not hating Althusser as much as I used to, which is just to say I think he has some useful things to ponder. But I tend to be of Team Germany, even though I also have my deep-seated suspicion about German idealism's ultimate project as well. So John here is going to start us off trying to convince me that I shouldn't throw France into the dustbin of theory, into the elephantbin of theory, into the elephant graveyard of well.
Speaker 1:I've always associated French critical theory with where all the other philosophy, science and everything else that failed went to die as an elephant graveyard and get picked up by English majors for paper writing.
Speaker 1:That's like the way I interpreted it. That also tells you when I was exposed to it, though, in grad school, and what I was exposed to it for the writing of papers, as opposed to what it was originally for, which was, in a lot of cases of the 60s and 70s work dealing with the developments and seeming failures of the various left movements in France, of the various left movements in France, which I have found, learning the context of French theory, that I hate it less. But we're going to start today with Lacan versus Althusser, and if you notice that I'm over-pronouncing French names, it's because I butchered all the French names in the last time I talked about French stuff so bad that, like, french speakers actively complained and my only response to them is like, well, I could be worse. You have no idea what I used to pronounce French names Like did you get shit over Kojave?
Speaker 2:Was it Kojave?
Speaker 1:Kojave, all thejave, all the like, all the names of, uh, french socialist groups that I didn't know how to immediately translate, because I know enough latin languages to normally, like spot see what French means but have no idea how to say it. So, like you know, it's one of those things where there was this way. Back in grad school, when I was in a poetry translation class, one of the challenges we were told was to pick a language related to a language that we knew and translate the poem which I don't know why they did that to us, but I picked French and Romanian because which I don't know why they did that to us, but I picked French and Romanian because, you know, I know enough Spanish and Italian. I don't pronounce Italian correctly either. Spanish I can do. So all that stuff about names and team France, so people might just want to go. I'm hostile to team France. My favorite French philosophers are like Close Guard maybe.
Speaker 1:People who aren't commonly read in English actually Baudrillard's okay, sometimes before 1985, and Altist what's his stairs?
Speaker 2:okay so what shifted for you about altis air? I mean, was it the? Was it sort of recognizing him as the crypto malice he always was and then sort of taking him on as more of a weirdo than the Anglophone Academy is willing to let him be?
Speaker 1:Right? Well, he's a crypto Maoist who's really a left Maoist because he had a critique of Stalin, but he hid it because reasons I became fascinated with the fact that basically he is obsessed with Spinozian physics, which I don't think is scientific, but nonetheless I get why someone would get obsessed with it and which means you're also obsessed with like ancient physics. Basically you're into like pre-Socratic and Socratic physics and I have a soft spot for that shit, um.
Speaker 1:But I also think the relationality of structuralism actually is something interesting, like there is a there, there, um, even if I think he, for example, one critique I have about tusser is like he's a borderline anarchist, but he also constructs the state in a French absolutist mode. That I don't think is justifiable but is pretty common from French political thinkers.
Speaker 2:And a function of his Catholicism right and a function of the big-ass subject of the ISA essay is really. You can read the Catholic schoolboy there who was made to kneel and to confess.
Speaker 1:Well, first question then. So Althusser is barely a crypto-Catholic, more just straight-up a Catholic Marxist. His Catholicism is often not explored enough. But is Lacan a secret Catholic reactionary?
Speaker 2:yes, no that's pretty good. Is Lacan? I don't. If it's secret, I don't think they kept it secret for me.
Speaker 2:I've always kind of recognized in Lacan a certain like a kind of medieval've always kind of recognized in lakhan a certain like a kind of medievalism, a kind of like you know, I think his big other has a lot to do with sort of the you know, aquinas and like aquinas's substance, like a medieval view of god more than almost any other figure, like even though the medievals don't really show up a lot in his actual writing. You know, I'm sort of in your camp about French absolutism and this question of the state, like that's sort of what ultimately turned me off of Deleuze, and turned me off especially of Deleuzians who talk about the state as if it is this totalizing entity that we know that it isn't, that every ounce of actual lived experience shows us that it isn't. Nonetheless, I would say that it how do I start here? It, how do I start here? I would say that for Lacan especially, catholicism is as critiqued through Pascal as he is what's really important. It's that classic line from Pascal. You know, kneel down and you will believe this idea that, like the truth of your, that, the truth of your belief is in your actions. Even if you don't hold it internally, it's the action that speaks and that constitutes belief and that, whatever you think, that you think differently, it is what you are performing. That is your truth. You know that's incredibly abstract, but I think it's a really important political insight and Jijek does like a bunch with this.
Speaker 2:You know, and it's one of the few things about Jijek that I've kind of kept with me throughout my political life and throughout my you know, with me throughout my political life and throughout my you know, maturity, like intellectual maturity, is that, like what to say, that you believe is to, to do is to believe, I think. And that is the essence of Lacanian analysis, because Lacanian analysis is all about interpreting, even more so than the signifier of the voice. It's about the stutter, the action, the word, the fiddling. You know, the analyst sort of watches the analysis and all of their little more than verbal tics, physical tics, you know, like what, which finger do, which knuckle do you crack when you say what words, when you bring what memories up, like how do you fiddle, where do your fingers go? And that, to me, is an, is a micro insight from the clinic that has larger implications that a lot of people try to do too much with.
Speaker 1:That, say, the lubiana people try to do far too much with, too quickly, without intervening mediations, but which is useful to us so when I first dallied in my recovery from my right wing period, the, the hip theory on the left was Slavic in school, interpretations of French theory and Badiou and that sort of like crypto neomalism. And then Laurel and that, whatever the fuck Laurel is doing, I don't know crack and I actually fuck Laurel is doing. I don't know crack and I actually take Laurel more seriously than that, even though he's an anti-Marxist in some ways or a post-Marxist, although post-Marxist in a lot of cases may as well be anti in a lot of them.
Speaker 1:At least in someone like Baudrillard. Yeah, so I, you know I. Interestingly, the more I learned about what I like to jokingly refer to as Team France, the more I became interested in French thinkers who are not commonly respected in America, thinkers who are not commonly respected in america um la ponte, um a lot of the french ultra left, although a lot of them go very weird, very weird. Um uh, leotard is like the least weird of them. You start getting to like, uh, the people around the old, the old malt bookstore and all that.
Speaker 1:You get into some very like bizarre left right hybrid stuff um but to get back on to the topic of structuralism, I've I've always kind of tried to wrestle with what is meant. You know, um, by well we're. You know my butchering of Kojeve. But there's a weird Heideggerian reading of Hegel that runs through all this stuff. That is foreign to me, sartre being literally a critic of Hegel but at least I recognize him talking about the Hegel that I read in college, whereas when I was getting into a lot of the assumptions about Hegel that come through Lacan and also through the Slavik school, that it's read through this psychologicalization, psychoanalytic interpretation, and it's read through Kojeve. And how do I actually say that?
Speaker 2:Kojeve.
Speaker 1:Kojeve. The French tendency to push vowels in and just not say them, as if silent letters are somehow sexy. But anyway, Team France could be real mad at me for this interview man.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, so Sartre. So I'm glad you brought up Sartre, because Sartre is, I think, for me the figure that brings both Althusser and Lacan kind of into some kind of into some kind of clarity. Um, and for me the Sartre that matters is the late Sartre, like the Sartre of the critique of dialectical reason and the Sartre of the search for a method, which is sort of the last major book before he starts writing the existential biographies like um the family idiot, which is about flaubert, and saint-genet, which is about jean genet, and um, that became these kind of long attempts to fully integrate a writer into their place in history. And what preceded those late projects was this unfinished two-volume sort of monolith. It was supposed to really be his attempt not to synthesize Marxism and existentialism but to sort of put existentialism in the service of a post-Stalinist Marxism that would not be a merely humanist Marxism, that would not be a kind of cushy feely, you know.
Speaker 1:It wouldn't be French Communist Party a la Khrushchev, Marxism right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it would not be that and it wouldn't be a Maoism la Khrushchev, marxism. Right, try to overly humanize the discourse and what comes out of this is this 300 page book that still does not have like a great um, that does not have any scarlet edition in english. Really, it has translations but there's not. But they're not, you know, like academic editions. Um called the search for method, which is where he says that Marxism is what we have to think of as the only philosophy of our time. It is the science of history, it is the only discourse capable of absorbing all the other discourses and we have to put existentialism, psychoanalysis and the various historicisms and sociologisms of the time sort of in service to Marxism, not in the Lukács sense of like kind of developing them according to the Marxian method, like sort of just rendering each of these things pseudo-dialectical, things pseudo dialectical, but thinking about them in terms of this sort of larger structure, overdetermined structural causality. It's very much aligned with the project that's going on with the Reading Capital Group.
Speaker 2:That's always been my feeling about it, and that when Althusser critiques Sartre in Marxism and humanism, he's really talking about a Sartre that's not theoretically mature or a Sartre that only will emerge with the critique of dialectical reason and with the search for a method, and that that, and my point that I've brought up many times, is that it is through the search for a method that we can get a better account of what altissima means by overdetermination, because it's a way of thinking through the various levels of historical experience, um, like existentialism being the sort of phenomenological singular man, how you know how the world is experienced in a sort of immediate or as close to an immediate manner as we can account for it its first integration into a historical milieu, and the sociological, which is a pre-philosophical account of the fundamental social structure of a given period.
Speaker 2:And then it's only through Marxism that we can account for how all three of those levels are interconnected are interconnected might be the wrong word are sort of are overdetermined by each other, are absorbed into each other, produce one another and are produced in turn, and sort of link up to something like history considered as a process. And this is hyper abstract, isn't it it? Well, I mean it is.
Speaker 1:But it's also. I've read the two books you're talking about and they are actually that abstract. But it does give me a key To what. Why would Althusser forego Go into such a project in the first place? You get the frustration With the Khrushchev eyes and the Stalinized actually French Communist Party of the 50s and 60s. That's clear. Then you have his early quasi-religious Hegelianism, which is bizarre to me. Frankly, as a person who has spent a whole lot of time with Hegel, I often feel like when I read um about altas airs hegel, I don't totally recognize either when he was pro him or when he was anti him.
Speaker 2:Like it's, it's his hegel in either period, is always a version of stalin, is always like a kind of like the hegel of what a start will call the external dialectic, like history, as a kind of like transcendental super subject that is moving the little act sorry, my wedding ring just fell off um, that will move the? Um, the sort of little actors of history along the chess board. Um, it's not, it's an ex, what he'll call in what? Um, in what in reading capital, like the expressive dialectic. And it's an incredibly limited and underbaked theory of hegel, um on altas air's part. That I just think is not helpful. To like that I I think it was necessary for him to posit that hegel. But in order to develop what becomes a fairly you know what the Lubyana people say is actually a fairly Hegelian account of the totality, which is the sort of which is the account of overdetermination.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so this you know.
Speaker 1:One of the things that I will say now, to sound like a total rube um, is that I come from the 1990s, and in the 1990s, if you're in high school, the philosophy you found was camus, niches, art, right, but it Sartre of the biographies, it's the Sartre of nausea.
Speaker 1:It's not this more philosophically interesting stuff, which is why, until I was in my 30s, I never looked to Sartre as a connector piece to what was going on in France. I saw the French left, communist tradition and the situationist and all that. And then I saw theory and the only bridge that you had was Baudrillard's relationship to the Communist Party and him being pissed off about what happened during the Mithra period and whatever the fuck Bataille was doing, which, having read a ton of Bataille I have a whole shelf of Bataille back there I still don't know, and me going oh okay, maybe I need to look into Sartre, beyond the debates between him and Camus and all the stuff that you would learn and like basic, like high school level introduction to existentialism, because when you first encounter existentialism you go how did these guys ended up being Marxist?
Speaker 1:Because it is not obvious in the way you were commonly taught back then. So, realizing in my 30s that I really needed to understand the existentialist critique of humanism, particularly of like italian marxist humanism, of you know and of the, and then having enough context of what was going on in the soviet union, about soviet humanist rhetoric in the 1950s and how that actually corresponded with the, the formerly common turn, the line of Western European parties moving even further to the right, you know, sometimes actually even to the right of the Social Democrats, social democrats, and that clarified a ton to me. But it still has not made sense to me how, for example, lecon as I somewhat flippantly asked you in the very beginning is he a catholic reactionary? Not um became this key figure for the left, because we're not. The other thing I was going to mention is the major.
Speaker 1:The other major school of leftist theory was the Deleuze Lacan, like Foucault, maybe Althusser, but Althusser is not particularly sexy and we're not going to go into the other members of that capital reading group, like Balabar Rossier, unless you got advanced. And I was very confused as to one why were all these quasi-marxists being being discussed so much in the academy, other than derrida and him being annoying for those of you who are listening? I'm not even pretending to be unbiased here. Um and and two, like this attempt at this reconciliation between Marx, nietzsche and Heidegger. That seemed particularly not German but French. And when I was reading some of the stuff you've written and watching some of your posts and I was like, oh, maybe you can give me a clarity, because I'm always told to understand Althusser, I don't need to understand Sartre, I need to understand I don't know Lacan right. And reading Lacan and reading Althusser, I'm like that relationship seems more anxious than I'm commonly taught it anxious is exactly the word.
Speaker 2:I mean. Althusser was Lacan's analisand. I mean this is an incredibly, it is an incredibly close relationship. Sartre is also analyzed by Lacan once and Lacan, at the end of the session, says, like you have no unconscious, you know, which is basically saying um, which is short for um. You are a, um, you suffer from psychosis, um, the psychotic. For lakhan has no unconscious, which is you know. It's a sort of. So I'm sorry, I actually took it as a compliment and yeah, he seemed to be out the hold theory around it.
Speaker 1:frankly, yeah.
Speaker 2:So the question okay, there's a few questions here Sartre to me is and not just to me but also to my advisors, to some, you know, like I think, to a growing body of literature about this, sartre is a hinge point. He is a figure not unlike Heidegger, not unlike even Kant, like against which that entire generation of Althusser, lacan, badiou, et cetera need to position themselves in and within, and against I would sorry what I thought. You said, something sorry. So Deleuze will say in a late essay he was my teacher that, like Sartre and the theory of groups that has developed, that he developed in the critique of groups that is developed, that he developed in the critical, dialectical reason, is really at the heart of what him and Guattari are trying to do in Anti-Oedipus. Lacan will bring up Sartre and the idea of the gaze like, over and over again, as a kind of like essential text for him, like almost as essential as what Freud develops. Like there are these Sartrean concepts that seem to disconnect themselves from the bigger edifice of Sartre's thought and make their way and form their own mini edifices within thought of other thinkers, who then develop them into entire systems on their own. There's this incredible productivity to Sartre's work, especially to the work of being and Nothingness and to the early literature. But as for why Lacan was taken by the left A because a lot of his students were Maoists, the simple answer a lot of his students were either Maoists. There was a, there was a Maoist Lacan group, like a sect, within the seminar that you know, met separately and you know would talk about the seminar and read the little red book and like, have these sort of try to form some kind of um synthesis between them. This is part of where Badiou comes from. I'm not sure if he was actually in that group, but he was sort of aligned with their project.
Speaker 2:There's also Kristeva and the feminists, who have their own complicated relation to the Soviet Union, to sort of official communism, to the official French Academy et cetera, who are important figures. So historically there are just these coteries. I mean it really. I hate to be so vulgar as to say that it's about, like individual and immediate relationships, even within the École Normale Supérieure and within, you know, french academia writ large, but it is in some ways as simple as these people knew each other, they cited each other, they talked to each other and they worked together and they thought on the left that Lacan needed to be responded to, as did Althusser. There's that famous graffiti from the 68 riots. What is Althusser for? You know, structures don't march in the streets, this sort of rejection of structuralism as another kind of determinism that is holding back the practical side of popular, eventual French communism. But at the same time they looked to both Althusser and Lacan as figures who could help explain why 68 did not work.
Speaker 2:You know Lacan held the seminar during the riots. You know it was famously interrupted. You know, like there would be demonstrations out in the street and he would be, you various, four discourses on the board and essentially unbothered and saying, while everybody else is in this moment of rapture, saying this is a passing fad, this will be over in three weeks. You want another father, you will have one. Like this will be over in three weeks. Like you want another father, you will have one.
Speaker 2:And I think that there was a generation of serious people on the left in France who said, well, shit, like he was right, like we did. Like you know that we asked, we begged, to go to come back and save us daddy. Like there was like that, they sort of. And I think that they felt that after that they had to not just contend with Lacan Like the Lacanian edifice, but like what? Why was he able to see that? That's my speculative answer. And they, but you will come up with his own answer and he'll actually, and he'll give a series of seminars on Lacan. You know, deleuze and Guattari will write Antietapus is basically a polemic against Lacan and for a different kind of analysis that is not of the signifier but is of the machine. But all of it sort of happens that they find the adversary to be extremely productive. Each individual group does. Is that sensible?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so what happens in translation into American theory is Lacan goes from being an adversarial anxiety, but it's still a primary influence, because you have to respond to his form of psychoanalysis in a different way than, say, the other French psychoanalysis. One of the things that I can tell you is I recently, last year, wrote a long paper for the Society of Intellectual History which will one day be a chapter of a book that I'm writing with Sheldon Bentine on Christopher Lash, and I didn't include this in the essay. But I became fascinated by the French Freudians that Lash used, of which Lacan was explicitly bracketed out, and the other names are not as well known to American, even American psychoanalytics, unless they're very, very versed in psychoanalysis, because they are of schools that oppose Lacan, lacan even considered maybe too authoritarian. But it never made sense to me how Lacan became a darling for the left, because I'm like one, he's really hard to read.
Speaker 1:Two, his relationship to Maoism was in no way organic, but I knew that French Maoism was important as kind of an alternative to Stalinism, in kind of a similar way that Trotskyism in the Anglophone world became a kind of Marxist-Leninism. That was not Stalin, you know, for good and ill, and Mao, despite his you know anti-revisionism in France, particularly around the Mao-Spondexy realm of. That seemed to be a similar kind of figure there that he't in the in the united states really, um but, and I could tell there was a direct relationship through that badu from lakhanism to maoism.
Speaker 1:But knowing what I know about chinese maoism, that made no sense to me like it was just like what happened in france that this psychoanalytic theory would pair up with in the case of, you know, getting into altas air's deeper writings, it's very clear that, like what he's engaging in is trying to like you know, uh, I've I used to accuse him of mystifying mal and I used to accuse badu of being a Maoist, platonist, which actually I still think is true.
Speaker 2:I agree with that. Actually that's pretty good. I think that the math I mean in a very simple way, I think that Lacanian mathemes, that the Maoists see something of themselves there, like in this sort of embracive, like high formalism, like really really abstract statements that have a sort of semi, like pseudo trans historical validity in in the like it is the platonism itself. That is malice, right which is which go ahead no that, that that's where I was going. Yeah, go on the platonism itself is now.
Speaker 1:So let you pick back on that. I've always accused malice or mao actually not maoist, mao in specific and other chinese communists are actually much better than this but because he was writing for largely peasants, that he would make Hegelian statements and Marxist statements after he read them which, by the way, mao read Marx very late. He actually read Stalin, lenin, marx in that order, kind of the opposite order. You normally read them, but since he was trying to distill it down to some essence you could communicate to, to Chinese peasants. And I don't mean this in an oral interest way, but it sounded to me like Dallas folk magic and and one of the things I've always said is, it also reminds me of Platonism, because Platonism is in some ways a mystery school of Greek religion, is in some ways a mystery school of ancient Greek religion. So there is this rhyming statement.
Speaker 1:Now, I don't think Mao is that vulgar of a thinker, but Maoist slogans are, and that's something that I found interesting in Badiou. But the other French Maoists I mean they're all over the place Like what they actually do with. That doesn't look like. I mean, the one thing you can say is that you know, even if you're reading something like Carlos Garrido's Western Marxism that basically implies this whole thing as a conspiracy by the caa, which is kind of ludicrous. Um, uh, one thing you can say is that there is a way in which french maoism is really divorced. Uh, until post facto. Honestly, about the divisions that emerge in maoism in latin america, america, in China itself, like Mao's spondex, is not that related to Mao's? A dung thought, a Mao third world ism or Marxist-Leninist Maoism, etc. It feels very different.
Speaker 1:And yet understanding that seemed crucial to understanding how Lacan got in all this mess and thus how Heidegger and Kojev, how Lacan got in all this mess and thus how Heidegger and Kojev all get incorporated into this worldview. Because Kojev is a statist thinker, he's kind of a Stalin mildly sympathetic liberal, and Heidegger is Heidegger don't. I've been like, you know, I don't want to ad hominem him, but you know it is sort of like the philosophy of fascism and post-fascism. So how does that? Even more than nietzsche I mean, I know we're on an anti-nietzsche kick on the left right now after being on a pro Nietzsche kick for like decades but even more than Nietzsche. The incorporation of Heidegger into French theory always, and particularly from the Maoist variant, always baffles me, like what happened there and your recounting gives me a link for why it would have happened. Because if you have these Maoist students of Lacan and it's a specific milieu it's a little bit of like structural mathemes appeal to Maoist thinking and also a little greater and lesser contradictions and all that fun stuff.
Speaker 2:It's important to. I think the central thing here is to remember that these are rationalists in search of axioms, right, like a lot of, like this generation of French thinkers. Many of them are sort of petty bourgeois provincials who've come to Paris they are, who have received, like this, post-war or immediately pre-war education. They are thinkers in search of an axiom, is really how I, how I imagine these figures. And they use Mao as a jumping off point, as a place to begin, use Mao as a jumping off point, as a place to begin. And they take as evidence, you know, the Chinese miracle, you know, or what they?
Speaker 2:It was seen in France as the Chinese miracle, like they, the cult, just the fact of the cultural revolution. I think, like you know, why did, why did Maoism take off in France and not in America? Just the proliferation of information and of propaganda about the Cultural Revolution and the excitement that it produced came, went directly to France and then it came to America, sort of via France, if that makes sense, like you know. But it is a very 68 is, I think, in France, and if you read accounts by some of the 68 intellectuals, they will say that we were directly inspired by what was happening in China. We saw what the students were doing there and we wanted it here. It's as simple as that, in a way that it was this sort of moment of historical inspiration, like we can spread this of historical inspiration.
Speaker 1:Like you know, we can spread this how much. Well, I mean, I know there is a historical relationship, way predating this period in in these schools, uh, between asian communism in france, I mean, crucially, kochi bed and um various various of the more educated members of the of the chinese communist party, although not mao himself, um had relationships to early french marxism, um the. The question that I have, though, is like did they actually know that much about what was really going on in china? Did they have access, like, like?
Speaker 2:I don't. I mean they had mao's newspapers there, you know, like like they they had, they had the spectacle like they had like I. This is a question that I think there's probably some really good scholarship.
Speaker 2:Like leftist and naxalites in the nineties basically it's yeah, no, it is a yeah. It is, you know, to use bad jews language in a way he would hate. It is a sort of pseudo event, like the cultural revolution has experienced in france is like a sort of an event that is a failed event, that is sort of not, um, not realized in the like in the way that it is.
Speaker 1:Yeah well, that makes that. That makes a lot of sense to me, though, because then you you have a. You have a critique of Stalin that can also get away from being called either left communism, which was also popular in France. I mean, we got to like although you know, as I mentioned earlier, all these ideas go weirder in France, and I don't mean to offend any my five French people, who still listen to anything I say after I butchered everything they've ever said about themselves and completely destroyed their language, but it does seem to me that, like there is something about the French milieu that is eclectic in a way that can be very productive, but also very dangerous.
Speaker 2:So why do they? Yeah, like. The question for me is always why do you think that hide here can just be imported into your thought, like sort of ad hoc, like, why do you think that this can like, that this synthesis is even possible in the first place? That is, I think, a fundamentally French culture, like a what would even be the word, a kind of arrogance that, like you know, we, we can take this sort of this broken disaster system and produce something that is you know, we can take the rational core of it, the functional core of it, and produce a leftist philosophy out of it, which is under debate and which is was under debate even then. I mean, deleuze is sort of an anti-Heideggerian, even though Foucault lived his life as a quasi-Heideggerian, and they had a close relationship and their thoughts are very, are almost undisentanglable, and and that's the word yeah, so, but but why do they? I think it's part of it is just, it's an, it's part of their intellectual tradition.
Speaker 2:These are, for the most part, professional philosophers. It's the power of the French Academy. Sartre is the only major figure this period who actually remains outside of the Academy. He graduates from the École Normale, but he never becomes a professor, he never becomes a you know, he never takes an official position within you know, at any university. I think he teaches Lysée for a few years after his graduation, but then the war happens and he sort of never returns after he makes his career by his pen, to believe that all these, that these great thinkers, are not fundamentally reactionary or otherwise. And people are going to yell at me for that. I'm sure that I'm going to get yelled at for saying that, but it is. It feels to me like accurate, god, accurate, no, I'm just gonna like chime in on this.
Speaker 2:I am a deep respecter of nietzsche who also really believes that nietzsche is an utter reactionary like, yeah, it's hard yeah yeah, and I think, like heidegger's, an evil genius like you know, like, but this is again like Heidegger his formulations are so effective, like you know, to hand, like to hand and at hand. You know, like some of the basic Heideggerian principles, like the ontic and the ontological, like you know, there's being and there's beings like these are such pure, distilled concepts that it's hard to imagine where they will lead you one day, like I mean, but which is why you need hegel to sort of show you that, like you know, there is no, there is no such thing as an un um. You know, an unembedded a um and any political and unhistorical concept, blah, blah, blah. But yeah, so I'm with you, go on no, no, no, I mean I'm there.
Speaker 1:So we have Althusser and Badiou and in some ways there's just anxiety, to use a Harold Bloom term there's an anxiety of influence around Lacan and Lacanian psychoanalysis. There's also two other influences that are not uniquely French but seem to be manifest in uniquely French ways, which is French phenomenology, which of course has a relationship to Hegel, because you know, duh, for those of you who don't know I mean literally the book's. You know, hale's most famous book is titled the Phenomenology of Spirit. And there's also French structural linguistics, which I get in trouble for just insisting because people often will. One of my favorite corrections is when people want to talk about cognitivism.
Speaker 1:When I talk about cognitivism, people will confuse it with cognitive behavioral therapy, right, but that French structural linguistics has largely been not abandoned but kind of treated as a, actually the way that many psychiatrists will treat psychoanalysis as a proto-science, not as wrong per se, but based on assumptions that could not be overcome in the time period because of technological limitations, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so there's this feeling of structural linguistics. And then, smack dab in the middle of that and this is something that you've written about, actually was reading your piece on Roland Barthes today you have French semiotics, which is kind of an interesting hybrid of structural linguistics with initially, like Charles Sanders, peirce, and American pragmatics and semiotics, so which does explicitly get referenced in someone like to lose. I think people are surprised that the lose was pretty well-versed in American pragmatism, but yeah, this is a whole like a whole.
Speaker 2:Secondary thing is that one of the letters teacher, John Val, who is a he was the other guy who wrote on Hagel in the twenties. There's Kozhev, there's Hippolyte, and then there was this other dude, jean Vall, and each of them read a different part of the of Hegel's of as the center, and Vall said that the unhappy consciousness is really the important part of Hegel. And what and he, what he did is that he said, like, if we take this feature of it, plug it into william james. Um, you know, he and he and vol brought whole cloth james into the french academy as a serious thinker and not just as a kind of like cowboy bergson, which is how he was read before, as a kind of like cowboy Bergson, which is how he was read before, as this kind of like just American Bergson who didn't really know his philosophy but had some, you know, sick lines and good bits.
Speaker 2:But yeah, that's another kind of weird little bit of history. So that's where DeLuz gotleuze got all of his pragmatism from. I mean, his first book, empiricism and subjectivity, is basically an attempt to turn Hume into William James, and his second book, bergsonism, is his attempt to turn Bergson into Nietzsche and then Nietzsche, like it's this sort of constant, it's like there's always a silent partner with Deleuze, I'm sorry, where. How the fuck do we get on this topic?
Speaker 1:I'm sorry, no no, I was mentioning the other. The other anxious influences that make themselves in, like French Marxism and French structuralism, particularly of the high theoretical camp as opposed to like the, the theoretical as opposed to like the, the the formal communist party are the various sectarian groups that emerged post 68, right, um, so you have this. I have a. I have a question that that maybe it has been looming this entire time. It's a very direct question, so you must forgive it, but how the fuck did they become so important in america? Because because one of the things about this is a lot of the stuff you need to contextualize this did not become important in america or like sark, it is important, but not the part.
Speaker 1:You need to put it all together right, right, right, film theory I mean.
Speaker 2:The simple answer is that it becomes popular because film theory, and especially feminist, psychoanal. There's a few short essays the mirror stage essay, jacqueline Miller's essay on the suture, um, which is another sort of weird little proto-Maoist mathematizing gesture, um, alcicero, on the ISAs, all of that stuff, and Foucault and all of that Um, these sources get kind of mashed together into this amorphous gunk that becomes the late seventies, early eighties version of film theory that we're still living with today. That gave us concepts like the male gaze, that gave us sort of like you know, know, not wrong, but sort of underbaked and vulgar versions of um, the french theory of ideology right, so like short answer is that that, like that, is their way into the academy.
Speaker 2:Um, derrida, like I mean, like there are, you know, there's the hopkins conference in um in the 60s, where it's not just derrida, that's. The famous bit is that derrida was there but lakhan was also there. Um, you know, a lot of other major structuralists were there, like um le Levi Strauss is again in a in vulgarized form, really important at the university of Chicago. And um, because they have Eliade, um, there's, these are, you know, jungianism, like structuralism, is in some ways seen as a corrective and a scientific corrective. Unionism, like it's a respectable version of this thing that has kind of lived in the american academy for too long. That is actually not respectable and, like you know, and has serious right wing connections Like so there are these. None of that. Actually it's sort of death by a thousand cuts. It seeps in through all of those openings, I think. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1:Makes total sense. I mean one of the things that I learned when I started actually learning about like both, like modern French Marxism. I mentioned Close Guard and my friend Daniel Todd is obsessed with right now.
Speaker 1:But also, you know what was coming out of the CP and and I've also mentioned, like French Bordigas and all that weird shit it it seems to me that there is a lot of that milieu that doesn't get brought to america and particularly after, like you know, after, uh, bolivars, you know, do we really need the, the dictatorship of proletariat and and leotard going full post-modern and you know all that stuff. What you, what you start to see emerging out of france is a kind of not in the figures that I mentioned, not even in.
Speaker 1:I wouldn't even call baudrillard a right-wing figure um although I haven't passed, but I don't, I do think that the French Academy is not like these rock stars of the 70s that we in America brought over. And I know the Hopkins Conference and Stanford and all that stuff. I am actually where the American Institute of History, the University of Minnesota Press oh my God, oh yeah.
Speaker 2:Actually where the american institute of history, the, the university of minnesota press oh my god, um oh, yeah, you know, and that stuff at you, minnesota, it was all one guy, it was like one editor who just more or less single-handedly brought the like, brought all of this material in it's kind of I mean, it's when you get down to like the individual. You know, for structuralists I'm really into the individual, like vulgar causal explanation, but sometimes they're the simplest ones. But yeah, no, I mean like there was money that was going to University of Minnesota and there are people willing to buy this stuff and yeah, yeah, but go on Sorry.
Speaker 1:No, no, I definitely proliferated. I mean, and I don't think that's bad, no, no, I definitely prefer it. And I don't think that's bad. I mean, like some of my favorite texts have been released by Semiotics, which is related to MIT and has a similar project.
Speaker 1:It's like a few dudes bringing over weird French shit. But you know, it's interesting because even when, like say, a lot of modern French academics encounter this stuff, it's kind of alien to them too. Encounter this stuff, it's kind of alien to them too. Um, I mean, I mean the whole irony is like um uh, what was it? Macron encountering crt and being like this is weird american perversion. And then being like, but you know, they learned it from fukui.
Speaker 2:Dude like like fukui is. Like in the college de France for 10 years. I mean he was giving lectures from 70 to 80, like this was like he was the in some ways I mean he would hate this term, but like he was sort of the court philosopher of France of the 70s. I mean like to be lecturing, giving public lectures at the College de France is there's no American equivalent to something like that. It is the center of French intellectual life.
Speaker 1:In a way that Go ahead your metaphor.
Speaker 1:First I think about it, the only person I could think of that could even. This is not the equivalent of speaking at the College de France metaphor first. No, I mean I think about it like the only person I could think it even even does. And this is not the equivalent of, you know, speaking of the college of france. Um, uh, but like michael sandell at harvard getting on the bbc and and npr and all that is like like a 20th of what we're talking about. But that's the only thing I can think about. That's really even kind of close, and partly because we inherited the British system and we're so stodgy about sharing this out, and these lectures were for the public and they were kind of I mean, it is always weird when I'm trying to explain to students. When I was teaching university and talking about French theory, I'm like these guys were kind of rock stars, which is hard for us. We don't really have academic rock stars in the humanities.
Speaker 2:I mean Lacan walked around with bodyguards Lacan had a former black panther like guarding him with an uzi, like driving him around, like these are. Like yeah, like they were, they would get mobbed. Like they couldn't go to dumag go without getting fucking bothered. Like it is, it's a and that is. It is a good if it was good for them, if it was good for French intellectual life, if it was good for Foucault to sit at the Collège de France for 10 years. I don't know if that served him well as a thinker. Necessarily served him well as a thinker, necessarily, I mean. But like, um, the order of things, like his book from what 55 was a bestseller in france sold like hundreds of thousands of copies like the order not even discipline and punish.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right, and I mean not history of madness, not the sexy ones, not the history of sexuality.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the order of things. The order of things. And he was sitting and, and you know he was part of the prison group, um, while he was, while he was giving the colors of france lectures, he was participating in um, in these demonstrations, while he was also in this quasi-governmental, like this quasi official not governmental but official position within like the French Academy, which has a complex relationship to the government. It is I don't get it. I mean, it's really simple, like, and I think it's hard for me to wrap my head around how, yeah, like, like just what this did to the thought of these people, like, not in the sense of like, oh, I made them all into just bourgeois apologists. Like it didn't do that at all, like it made some of them weirder and it made some of them, like you know, they all had these complicated, individual, psychological, overdetermined reactions to that, to that scene.
Speaker 2:But like Kristeva, if you, if you go back in the in the like archives of Lamond, her dissertation defense was covered in Lamond. It was like was like the cover of the cultural section, like the weekend cultural pages in 1970, whatever that like Kristeva defends dissertation like and her board was BART God, it was like the four names. You would know Like it was, but it was the French cultural event of that like month was Chris Davis public dissertation defense. It's strange yeah.
Speaker 1:So I mean that does seem to be one of the paradoxes of French Marxist theory. Is that it is at the height of cultural power? Is that it is at the height of cultural power? It is incorporating elements from both internal and outside of France. They're trying to incorporate science, although if Elaine Sokol has anything to say about that they tend to not understand the metaphors they use or not realize they were metaphors, um, but nonetheless, um, you know, to defend the French uh, post structuralist for a second Um. That's also true of a lot of people, including physicists, who don't understand what they're using, metaphors, um.
Speaker 1:But I, I find this so fascinating because it ends up with, in America, like we get Foucault, we get Deleuze, who are still darlings in the academy, and then Deleuze is the one that kind of rolls over into contemporary theory. There's been a turn against Derrida, I feel like there's been kind of a turn against Foucault, at least in social democratic circles, and Althusser and Lacan, however, seem to still loom, and Sartre does too, but as like a distant figure. Probably you learned about in high school and don't understand, right. Probably you learned about in high school and don't understand Right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I find that kind of strange. One of the things I wanted to ask you about. I'm sure you're familiar with Gabriel Rockhill. I'm familiar with Gabriel Rockhill. What do you make of his explanation of the importation of French theory as almost a way?
Speaker 2:to suppress Marxism. I think that I haven't thought, I haven't thought directly about this idea in such a long time, because I just think it's so besides the point, because who cares what they meant to do with it? If it was intentionally imported as a way to suppress marxism, you know didn't. Great job, guys. Like congratulations. Like I don't really. I don't think that anybody sitting at the cia was like you know, it was like we got to get, get me, get me this derrida guy on the line.
Speaker 1:Like I just don't, no, there's no smoking guns the way there there is with some of the frankfurt school, although it was like we got to get me this Derrida guy on the line, like I just don't. No, there's no smoking guns the way there is with some of the Frankfurt School, although, again, even with the Frankfurt School, the ones that are the most connected to the CIA are the ones that were the most orthodox. Marxists, so are more orthodoxodox, like Marcuse and God, who's the others?
Speaker 1:it's not, but Horkheimer and Adorno have like they did and they definitely had a relationship to the Congress of Cultural Freedom. But who didn't? Like yeah, I know.
Speaker 2:I mean it feels almost. This is what I mean. Like this is why I think that those sort of like you know the same thing can be said about the abstract expressionists like, okay, like pollock got some government money. Like fucking yeah, like, what would you like me to do with that? Like, like you know it's not. Like like it verges on conspiracy theory of history, which I think we're all like a little too old for you know. Like the like I, I'm willing to.
Speaker 1:Yeah go ahead. When I studied this stuff, like the program years, like I remember learning, oh, the cia started the mfa programs and it's true that they did provide some seed funding money for it and it's also true that they did that to break up political, artistic communities. But the CIA was also funding people who were protesting the MFAs. They were funding people who were denouncing them. They were kind of throwing money at everybody in academic institutions period, like that's. You know? Um, yeah, they, they weren't supporting soviet marxism, absolutely true.
Speaker 1:Well, as long as we're talking about after 1947, um, and know, and we're, and of course, to say it's later than that anyway, so you got to be dealing with the OSS and the home guard and all that stuff, um, but it's, it's a weird reading to me that and it's also one that that I'm always like. But what, why aren't you looking at, like you know, what someone like Baudrillard or even Althusser set out right about what was going on in the French Communist Party? They weren't actually all that coy about it, like about what they were responding to.
Speaker 2:And Althusser is sort of operating within the party but in a kind of you know Like internal opposition mode kind of.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like, I mean he's internal opposition, and also he thinks that the ISASA is basically an argument against the idea of primary and secondary contradictions, like the ISA essay is basically an argument against the idea of primary and secondary contradictions, right, like, like, reading capital is what you, if you get anything out of reading capital at all, it's that you know this, this whole primary, secondary contradiction thing is garbage and that you, you cannot, you can't declare from on high which is which, um, you know, by the dialect, by the you know cunning of the dialectic, the secondary will become the primary at any given moment, et cetera.
Speaker 2:Like nothing, no individual phenomena is so is an is an expression of the essence of the class struggle any given time, blah, blah, blah. You know this is like. And the question then comes like, okay, what do we do? What? What else do we do? Like what, if we don't, you know, because from a theoretical perspective that's perfectly fine, but like, how do you organize a praxis without at least some sense of primary and secondary? Like what, how, what does it look like and why doesn't it? Does it not just become a kind of like trotskyist, you know, like eternal revolution, like endless cultural revolution thing?
Speaker 2:which it does for badu, like let's be quite actually, yeah, it becomes, yeah, the terror capital t in a kind of yeah but, like you know, but badu goes on french state television like twice a week, you know like, gives interviews to, like you know, like, with the little tagline like Alain Badiou, like you know, like it's, it's a sort of it's almost, I mean, I love him. He's a kind of a cuddly, like sort of wonderful old man now and he's a great thinker and all that you know. But he's a great thinker and all that.
Speaker 1:He's a very idiosyncratic thinker. Of the French writers that we've talked about, my favorite to read other than Bataille because he's crazy have you ever read.
Speaker 2:Bajou. Have you ever read, bajou I?
Speaker 1:actually have read some of his plays. I've read a lot of his literary criticism, which I find weirdly idiosyncratic but like, um, kind of good, I mean, it's it, just it was interesting to me. It's also interesting to me that badu took so much longer to become important in the us, like of the of the figures that you know, because he's roughly he's younger but he's contemporaneous to a lot of the people he's younger but he's contemporaneous to a lot of the people we're mentioning. But it wasn't until the slobbing school got popular that people were really talking about Badu in the United States.
Speaker 2:It was because of Zizek. Really, it was because of Zizek's engagement with him in one of those books from the 90s, the title of which I'm forgetting. Yeah, and it was also Badiou's own critique of Deleuze, which, which is the first thing, I read by Badiou actually yeah, which is probably one of the worst things he ever wrote. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Because you know, but yeah, and that delusional, that sort of delusions encountered and then endlessly straw manned, um, you know, and responded. One thing a delusional always do is respond to like a bad critique with an even worse like response. It's almost you know, but yeah, why? I mean why didn't but you become popular more soon? I mean the easy answer is that like it's really fucking hard, man, it's really like, oh yeah, like it is, it is, it is austere, it is like the neologisms are accumulate around one another. So much of the important work. I mean I prefer theory of the subject. Theory of the subject, especially the work that he does on Mallarmé in that book, is just absolutely extraordinary.
Speaker 1:I was about to say that's. That's the book by a bet Do I like the most? And I don't mind the logic of worlds and all that series, but like I love the early theory of the subject subject, even though I had to figure out what the fuck he meant by scission.
Speaker 2:Um, like, yeah, um, let's place, yeah, yeah, no, but like, so much of that stuff. I mean, but those were given as lectures. I mean, those were seminars, public seminars that he gave right, like, and it's the form in which they were given. I mean, like there are many, you know, um, I don't know when the last of foucault's colors, the france lectures, came out, but it was recent in english. Um, there's, there are le con seminars that are not yet even available in french. That, like miller is just I don't know like what he's doing it instead, other than editing these lacan seminars. But I know that there are, like, I think at this point, three or four that are still just not available in any language.
Speaker 1:Um, like it's the fact we still get new for co actually baffles me really yeah it's yeah, huh, but no.
Speaker 2:I I think yeah, really yeah, yeah, huh, but no I think yeah, god, I have no good answer for why Badger has become popular, and I don't I think it had something to do also with Hart and Negri and that moment and what the Italian autonomists did with the event as a concept, which is to say like completely emptied of, like of any rigorous theoretical content, but like that's fine, like I mean like the autonomists are cool and fun and like hart and negri were important for that eight-year period between 9-11 and the financial crash, and I mean you know it was an important sort of little adventure for the american left to take that some, that some people are still on and you know we're just waiting for them to come back around a lot of people who are still on are like don't even know they're on it too, because I'm like, once you get all the, all the autonomous verbiage in there, it's basically populism.
Speaker 2:Like yeah, no, it's really no. I mean because like it's, and I think that the reason that the autonomous took off in this country is because the is because we never had, like the British, a serious sort of again I'm going to get yelled at but like we never had a sort of highly embedded Trotskyism like a great tradition in the way that they do have, that they have in england.
Speaker 1:I I I would slightly disagree, but I would say that the issue is, by 1980 that tradition is dead in america and that from the 1990s forward we have, like we just claim the british tradition as our Trotskyism, like that's what we Do it. And but I would also say, like the issue that you have is American Trotskyism either gets Very, very, very Suspiciously Pro-Cold War Around, like, say, shackman and co, or it gets, it becomes in some ways almost indistinguishable from Marxist-Leninism, but just like maybe Stalin bad, sometimes Like, and by that I mean you can see that in the Marciites that became the WWP and the PSL, you can see that sometimes in the Sparts and their critical support for like pretty much everybody you know. You can see that in the Kamehoites, who are Trotskyists who try to reconcile themselves with malice, like it's, you know, and so it's tradition had hollowed out, whereas the British traditions like been staunch and has tied to both its own historical parties and the Labour Party in a way that, like we just don't have anything like that, Like right.
Speaker 1:You know, in some ways I'm going to get in trouble for saying this, but, like you know, the American Trotskyist legacy is the Teamsters. And then the Teamsters, instead of staying with the 27th Forth International, end up like flirting with the mob and Nixon.
Speaker 2:So I don't know, you know, what you do with that know, you know, uh, what you do with that like yeah, no, I mean like the, the yeah, like like the I, the iww and the sort of like I mean like the autonomous, to actually take the international workers of the world and like big bill haywood and a lot of these figures as kind of like, you know, one big union general strike, like these are all kind of revitalized figures and I credit like Hart and Negri produced a lot of historical interest in these figures, got these books back into print, indirectly got people interested in that the, that american, you know, marxist, like marxist, slashed anarchist tradition, um, I people are, you know all that like that hart and negri stuff is kind of on the way down, like you know, and I think people are too hard on it.
Speaker 1:I think we've gone too far in the other direction because no, yeah, shitting on empire and and all that's become like a regular thing for marxists to do so boring man, I mean like I get it.
Speaker 2:like you know, the like the the iraq war protest didn't worky failed. But it's not because, like Hart and Negri didn't write a good enough book, it's because, like you know Well.
Speaker 1:I mean also like it's not like American Marxist-Lenin of, like, say, American Comintern, and like communism is during the third period, because we can't work with the Democrats. But that's not the high point of recruitment. The high point of recruitment is immediately after World War II. So it's it's uh and then it collapses. I mean like these groups collapse so fast it's hard to see straight.
Speaker 1:And for reasons of both Cold War politicking and also, um, their effect on American life, the Trotskyists in America were more studied.
Speaker 1:I mean frankly, and you know, after the thawing of the 60s you can probably get away with being I mean, you get away with being a Marxist-Leninist in America if you were quiet about it, but you could definitely get away with being an atrocist, even if you were obnoxious about it.
Speaker 1:So these things are interesting. But I do admit part of the reason why I brought up the Rodkoff thing is, I agree with you, I think it's a little bit too close to a pat conspiracy theory of history and also it makes the CIA way more effective than my studies of the CIA seem to indicate that they are. But I do think it is at least inconvenient that this stuff spreads like wildfire after the new communist movement stalls out, and it kind of makes sense, wildfire after the new communist movement stalls out and it's and it, and it kind of makes sense why? Because the new communist movement in America was also highly Maoist. I mean like, but it was a a more, I mean it was a more, I want to say vulgar, but it was a less intellectualized form of Maoism. Like the Panthers are, you know, know, not writing, like, uh, anything like you're seeing out of the reading capital group, like that's you know and it's not to say that there weren't intellectuals there.
Speaker 1:there definitely were, but they weren't. They weren't aiming at that kind of milieu at all, and so it's. It's interesting to think about how that all went and why it might seem like this was a way of de-radicalization, particularly when you add to it the effect of post-Marxism. And you know people like Foucault and Baudrillard, and these people who had critiques of Marxism, some of which, frankly, I mean some of some of Baudrillard's critiques of Marxism, some of which, frankly, I mean some of Baudrillard's critiques of Marxism have always struck me as just bad, like they're not, like they're very superficial readings of what's going on, and I was not sympathetic to him at all until I read a lot of the texts that have come out more recently about his like personal response, like the divine left and all that stuff, about his personal responses to the Mithran government and the communist party around that time, in which case a lot of the theoretical stuff all of a sudden were contextualized in a way.
Speaker 1:It's like, oh, I would I get why he's mad now, like, um, and that's one of the things with a lot of these French thinkers is that with rare, with a few rare exceptions, they seem to be presented. I mean, badu is one of them because he's still alive but they seem to be presented to students totally decontextualized. Like you know, when I was taught Foucault, I would have thought at first the main thing he had to say was the death of the author. You know like, you know like, yeah, you're sitting in an undergraduate seminar and you're taught that.
Speaker 2:Like yeah, no, it's. I mean it's especially especially Foucault. I think he suffers the most from this sort of thing. You know, I mean like I didn't know I read Discipline and Punishment without knowing that he was actually engaged in actual prison struggles, Like you know, like nobody told me that he was. You know, like I mean I remember, but then that goes in a lot of different ways. I mean I remember reading Dialect of Enlightenment, not knowing that it was written in in exile, like right, you know, like it's just this, it's a problem translation of dialectic of enlightenment.
Speaker 1:Well, not no, it's a common translation of, uh, negative dialectics.
Speaker 2:It's real shit, but go ahead oh it's, that's a fucking cia op right there. It's like to make a door. No, fucking incomprehensible, like it's, it's.
Speaker 1:And to like there's Karl Kors in that Adorno book that aren't even attributed in the common translation. It's fucking infuriating. Anyway, go ahead.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I mean Until I actually know more about German than French.
Speaker 2:No, I mean, why are they? I think that there's finally now pushback against it. I mean I think that there's finally now pushback against it. I mean because so much of the French theory, the way that you are. It comes in through English departments and through comparative literature departments. You were taught it in a particular way, which is, you know you are going to deploy this theoretical framework on some text. You don't engage as an undergraduate with directly with the theory. Almost ever you are made you are told to use the concepts as tools to deal with jane austen, whatever the fuck you know right like and, and that's a pedagogical problem, that's a you know you barely learn.
Speaker 2:I mean how to read the philosophy itself, let alone how to read it in light of its sort of material conditions, because it's always seen in a functional relationship to something else. Um, in the classroom, I mean you experience that as a toolbox.
Speaker 1:So I was literally told that they would find like to lose quotes to justify it. But it was just like it's a toolbox and you just kind of pick from the tool set and then like you write a paper and you're done, and which to me is like the more I learned about this theory, even even you know you you probably heard me talk about this because I've talked about it now for like fucking 14 years but my um, my first experience with with altus air was coming out of a seminar on Faulkner and critical theory being given Lenin and philosophy told read it, explain it to the class and then go teach it to your undergrads about how to use ISAs and RSAs to interpret. I don't know ISAs and RSAs to interpret. I don't know. Fucking. Toni Morrison yeah, man, it's fucking brutal Because they don't.
Speaker 2:And it's taught by. It's taught by professors who got their Althusser through film theory to graduate students, who then go and read it the morning before they teach it to undergraduates, of course, and nobody has any philosophical context, let alone historical context, through which to work this stuff. Nobody said the word Kojev to me until I was in graduate school and let me tell you, I read a lot of fucking French theory in undergrad and like nobody told me that all these fuckers were together in the same room listening to this one weirdo give one incredibly heterodox reading of Hegel that they all borrowed and massacred. You know, like, like, like, none of that.
Speaker 2:The institutional context, and I think that a big part of it of why I think, of why I don't do it in my own classes, is often because I worry that if I explain the historical context too much, the cynical brain of a 19 year old will say like oh, so this is all like bullshit, never mind, like.
Speaker 2:You know what I mean. Like, like there's a productive pedagogical mystifying that is done to get buy-in from students that, oh, this is something that that is useful, that I can use. You know, because I find that when I try to historicize these and contextualize these theorists. What it often does is completely is the kids disengage, either because they're bored, which is totally possible, or because they say like, oh so this is just some guy who had some thoughts, I don't care, like you know, like this is. I mean, this is a problem the american education system really is that we do so much mystifying that any attempt to demystify then become, then turns us into cynics or then yeah, if know, and you end up in a kind of long dark night of the anti-intellectual soul. You know and that's you know that means it's a pedagogical problem.
Speaker 2:Sorry, what?
Speaker 1:Which I might call media theory today. Anyway, I'm just sniping at my ideational enemies. It's, I think you're right, though I mean to talk about this in terms of, of, of teaching. I also find that, like we tend to teach fuck, the way I was taught critical theory almost was like it was a toolbox to look at papers. Then when you meet someone passionate about it number two it becomes like I don know a mystical religion that I can use to see through the bullshit of the bourgeois world, right, which it's not really that good at.
Speaker 1:And I can do it by really understanding one thinker, like if I double down on Baudrillard, I'll get it all. I'll understand the Simmerlachler and I'll get through it down on baudrillard, I'll get it all. I'll understand the, the similar lacquer, and I'll get through it. And you know, the funny thing about me is I had a philosophy and anthropology background too. I was doing that training, but I was trained by conservative hegelian straussians in analytics, in philosophy. So I had no like example to bring up um overdetermination. When I hit overdetermination and all to Sarah, I was like well, that just means multiple causes. Who the fuck cares?
Speaker 2:Right, because that's what it means in analytic philosophy, like it, has a meaning, um, and, to be fair, that is in some way that is in a very, you know, abstract sense, what it means in Althusser, but it's not totally wrong.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the only way that it becomes useful is if you understand it against the context of primary and secondary. You know, contradictions Like I mean, like this is if you understand it against the sort of damage wrought by that theoretical position. Yeah, like in the same way that say like you know, it's not just that the I was meaning to say this earlier it's not just that the French intellectuals of the sixties are anti-Stalinist, like it's that there are particular events that occur that disillusion them, like Hungary in 56 is. It is that that is starts falling out in many ways with. You know, certainly, like I know this was, I know, like 56 in hungary is when sart realized that he needs to remake marxism, is that he needs to remake Marxism, he needs to rebuild and produce a new kind of official Marxism, and that's when he undertakes the project. It's also when he starts doing a shitload of mescaline and starts hallucinating a bunch of crabs that are chasing him around. Have you heard this story?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's also a promise for him to go talk to Lacan. Is that, you know, is is the crab hallucination. So you know it's this endless but, but it's, and at some point when you're in a classroom you have to decide when do I? How specific do I have to get here? You know, like, can I just assign them like one Stalin essay and be like everybody's mad about this, like everybody is mad about, like you know, stalin short course, that is that against which they have to position themselves without naming it? You know, like I was told how many times in graduate school, whenever you see Hegel, think Stalin, like you know, whenever you see Hegel and Althusser, just just think Stalin. And that is true in a vague, vulgar sense, but in a more. But then you take another step and you say, well, no, think Kozhev. And then you have to think, think, how does that association get developed, etc. Is it yeah, does it make sense?
Speaker 1:no, it makes perfect sense.
Speaker 1:I kind of know this history what yeah, no, I just said I kind of know this history but so I can follow you. But like, yeah, I mean it's a huge pedagogical problem and I think the way we teach critical theory and I'm going to even throw the New Left Review under the bus a little bit here, because the Marxist attempt to use this stuff ended up invented a category that was first used as a slur against Soviet and Marxism. Unfairly Western Marxism was superior to Eastern Marxism right, that's Perry Anderson's basic gambit. Later on gets reverted by Lacerdo and later on even more of our people in America to be like aha, but you screwed up the true Chinese and Soviet Marxism, although we're not going to mention the Sino-Soviet split and just pretend none of that happened Very convenient, which is also something
Speaker 1:you have to understand, to understand what the fuck is going on in France or even in America, because that's what splits up the CPUSA beginning in the late 50s. The response to what's going on in China is what starts the fragmentation of Marxist Leninism in America. And so even when we tried to get away from this, like, like, okay, let's say, you encounter this in sectarian Marxist world, like you were in the ISO Right and the ISO is like, but we like all to stare sometimes, so you know we'll throw it at you, particularly because Alex Kalanikos and the British liked Althusser, for reasons that are beyond me, and not that someone liking Althusser is beyond me, but why Trotskyist would is a little bit beyond me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's really huh, Okay, yeah.
Speaker 1:And so you know, I mean that's why there's so many Altusarian texts in both Haymarket and Verso books.
Speaker 1:You come at it through sectarian, that is, positing a false, like a false break between Western and Eastern Marxism, as this Eastern Marxism is just Stalin or just, you know, stalinist or whatever, and it and it's something.
Speaker 1:Yes, it's all Marxist, leninist, but there's actually interesting thinking going on in Hungary and and in the, in the DDR and, you know, in the Soviet Union, even like Vygotsky and Bakhtin and Medvedev and all those people. Medvedev is dead by that point, but all those people are actually quite interesting. You don't get any of that right If you posit this binary where there's just official Soviet Marxism, which we're also bracketing all these other interesting thinkers out because they're not easily reconcilable with official Soviet Marxism, even though they're totally in that system, and Western Marxism, of which the French in the Frankfurt School are made to represent it and also in a way that even distorts the history of like what the sectarian left was like in France and Germany, because that's kind of bracketed out and the only people you get kind of a better idea of what's actually going on, reflected in the theory, is the Italians, because they come over late, that's really good yeah.
Speaker 1:And so it's that. And even then, the reason why we get Hart and Negri is because Hart and Negri are hanging out I mean not Hart so much, but Negri's hanging out in France in the 70s because he's in exile, so like or the 80s excuse me, you know, contributed to assassinating a prime minister.
Speaker 2:Yes, I mean, we really forget about that too. Man, nobody told me about that. For like a year after I read Empire for the first time, like it's just, it's just unbelievable Nobody told me that Guitari was in the Red Brigades. It's just baffling.
Speaker 1:Yeah, guitari's in the Red Brigades and then he was a Trotskyist for a little while. I learned that way later. I was like what? This guy doesn't read like any former Red Brigade-turned-Trotskyist I've ever fucking read Also, that's not normal. I mean, people make hay out of like the end of all two-stairs life, like the philosophy of the encounter, which is some of his most interesting work.
Speaker 1:but he's also clearly like it um, you know, uh, and you know, uh, you know when I would get mad at altissera. I would call him the parastrangler. But like um, it, it, it was it. It's funny how little this context you get, and when you do get it, oddly it often comes from like right-wing denunciations, like you know how many books have the right written about what Foucault was up to? And then and then later, social Democrats are like you know, foucault like kind of like neoliberalism for 35 seconds and so he's bad. I'll get you started on that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, bad um. Yeah, yeah, no, it's, you know, like all the like the sort of the slander of foucault in tunisia and you know well what was he really up to. It's it's just it doesn't even mention because it's like it's so. But you know, yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 1:But I mean like the fact that, yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 2:No, but this is what I mean. Is that like the question of how much context do you give? How much context do you give? I mean, like how can I? I'm deep, like Jesus Christ, I'm trying to teach this. I can't even get these kids to read, you know, a six page, six pages of a short story, like I'm not going to explain to them how Algeria affected French intellectual life, like it's just, you know, like the pedagogical problem, just never. And I don't think, maybe it's the beginning of the semester. I'm not teaching this semester, thank God, but I'm, you know, it's on my mind and maybe this is why I keep coming back to this, but it's, I don't think that we can underrate how you know important, that is capable of shouldering the burden of our own history, let alone that of a different, like that of continental Europe. It's just not, you know, you know it's.
Speaker 1:No, I'm not only with you on this, but as a person who thought that we could intervene in that with stuff like podcasts, what I've seen, and like the philosophy and bread tube world and then in like red tube and you know, uh and all that, it isn't very it it.
Speaker 1:It doesn't help much either, like you know. And even when it's people who kind of know what they're talking about, like you're listening to academics yeah, it's often still kind of muddled and you know. And today I'm just going to say, like I know that people are going to hear this and be like you guys are talking about everything and like yet I'm to have trouble following the thread here. Like I know that's going to be thrown at us and that's fine. The. The thing that I think that I want people to get when we talk about this is this does matter beyond of its effect on the American Academy, but it did also have a particular effect on our American Academy, but our view of it because of that is distorted. But I don't think the sectarian views of it help you either.
Speaker 1:Like yeah it's like, you know, if I go to Perry Anderson or I read, I don't know, kusama project 10 years ago, complaining about how to do is not a true Maoist enough, but which form of true Maoism we're not even going to talk about. It's not like there's like 70 forms of that. Or if I encountered today Midwestern Marx, before they got on the American Communist Party train, complaining about how all this was probably a conspiracy to not truly appreciate the Soviet Union, but without mentioning the Sino-Soviet split, are mentioning it only indirectly and only by glossing Dunga's talking points and not even going into the Chinese context, and then not mentioning the problems in the French Communist Party etc. And in many ways it actually ends up being a weird mirror world of the same problem that we had discussing this in academia, except now it's even more explicitly biased because we're dealing with people who have, you know, sectarian points of view, and I also have a sectarian point of view. I am a sectarian of one, but still I have it. It's it's something that I think really limits our ability to understand this.
Speaker 1:And ironically, john, my, my experience with Kojev was on the right and so I knew kojev because of his debates with strauss, and strauss's debates were called smith right. Right. I didn't know that was moving behind all this french shit in a very particular way until I think I was 32 years old and I got and it was actually doing research for a podcast. Like I was a fucking graduate student teaching a class trying to figure out where's all two stairs Hagel coming from, where's this in stat shit coming from?
Speaker 2:I don't remember any of that in.
Speaker 1:Hagel. Oh, I remember learning about the Kojev Hegel lectures and his debates with Karl Strauss. Holy shit, this is a missing link for me, right?
Speaker 2:holy shit, this is that was just luck yeah, no, I mean, and there's something to be said about that way of encountering the history. I mean, like what, what would an official kind of like thorough accounting of all this even look like? Like, like, how do we like not to be overly delusional about it, like you know, but like how, like what would an official discourse on this look like? That is sectarian in the right ways? Ie agrees exactly with everything that I think and like sets you up to agree with the thinkers. I we can't tell people the story from, you know, from point A to B to C, for the obvious reasons. But what you can do is prepare them to encounter this stuff, to know where to look and to know how to look at it.
Speaker 2:Um, in a, and that is what so much of like the this, like current, because, like you know, left ecosystem on like youtube and shit, like just does not prepare you to do like it's just like it is antithetical to a lot of that shit like to actually like preparing you to encounter something on your own terms, I mean, and not on your own terms, but on its own terms, which are, you know, enfolded inside like you know, like, but then again you become that becomes quickly very abstract, like and yeah, good, I, I think that's a lot like, as you know being, you know, formerly a teacher now in publishing, like what is your responsibility, you know like where what is a responsible pedagogy and a responsible kind of like presentation of this, of information? Look like, and I mean like it just it's really fucking hard.
Speaker 1:I mean, and and basically my way of of getting people through it is similar to yours in that you approach it in that old Buddhist parable of feeling the elephant brinely and figuring out each piece at a time, because I can think of books that I've been really proud to publish. Many of them are from sectarian standpoints that I probably oppose, like there's a lot of like.
Speaker 1:I was really big on publishing some orthodox Maoist stuff that I thought was really good on contextualizing what happened to Maoism in America and the Latin America in the 1980s and it actually made it clear that it was a different thing than what was going on in China and that they were both in dialogue with each other, but they were also in tension with each other and this created a bunch of ideological tendencies that do have effects because they affected the new left and the new communist movement later. Even like these people were picking this stuff up when they were in academic careers in the 80s and early 90s. Even some of them kept some of this stuff even when they quit being Marxist. So it's it's something that I try to prepare people for. But I'll be honest with you I didn't learn that Like I learned how to chunk and all this from teaching. I didn't learn that Like I learned how to chunk and all this from teaching.
Speaker 1:I will also say, pedagogically, my interview style is almost the opposite of what I would do if I was teaching just directly, which is like long, discursive, deliberately discursive, deliberately rambly, so that people feel comfortable and get more stuff out there and people can pick up the threats. So for those of you who wonder why I interview the way I do and often also front loads of things and talk so much, uh, part of that's just my personality, but part of that is also because I think you know you're not on the interview circuit, but I'm sure you've listened to the dig or some of these like yeah, more standard, almost npr-ish left to far left podcast, right it there. There's a way of presenting in them and also a kind of uh playing to the talking points of an academic or activist that makes him very samey after a while. And also, like often, I can predict exactly what's going to be said, and not just because I know the topics, it's because, like there's that people are not even realizing how much they're in a genre structure, right, but I'll tell you, you know and I'm going to sound like a fucking old man, cause I kind of am but I'll tell you one of the some of the most disheartening things to me when I present this stuff.
Speaker 1:So I had some some smart high school students who found my work, which I would normally have a heart attack about, cause you know about, because you know, but they they didn't really engage with it because they told me, well, it was really interesting. But I can't watch a video that's longer than five or six minutes most of the times, unless it's like watching a video game played through. And these were not.
Speaker 2:These were, these were honor students and I was like, oh my god oh, dude, I I have had man, oh god, I have had very intelligent college students ask me for here's a. This is this is maybe the one of the most disheartening moments of my academic life is I had an extremely smart, extremely engaged student and at the end of the semester was like, give me, give me some reading recommendations. You know, give me some, give me some stuff to you know for over the summer, like names, people who should I look at. I'm interested in these things and I've spent about an hour typing up, like you know here's, you know here's seven books with like summaries and names and additions and all this shit. And he sent me, sends me, an email back, basically being like, oh, I didn't mean books, can you give me, like you know, youtube interviews maybe? Or like YouTube lectures about stuff?
Speaker 2:And it was just fucking, it hurt my like. I mean because it's just like, not because I was upset with this kid, not because I felt, you know, rejected or negative, but just like Jesus, like we're fucked, if that's how. Like you know, you know, one of the smartest kids I've ever taught is and this is a college that is approaching like something that he actually cares about. Like something that he actually cares about. You know, like I'm like in, like this is like the 2020 moment and like you know, like involved in like getting his feet wet in activist groups and stuff, and if this somebody actually gives a shit and they're telling me I, you know, I can't read a book like over the summer when I don't have a job or anything else to do. I don't know what the fuck I'm going to. I sound like an old man too, but it's just.
Speaker 2:This is part of the point of that fucking sub stack, which I'm not plugging, but it is. There is a. I'm not comfortable with the idea that this should be easy. Like it's not easy. Like I mean, you know, like you know an unbelievable amount. You have like an incredible capacity for recall that I envy deeply of like the you know, global political situation. That is not a talent I have. I have read a lot. I have retained such a tiny, tiny amount of it and it's humiliating, and I think my students who have read maybe 2% of that and recall even less, and it makes me feel sick, like physically sick, like what are what you know?
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, I mean it makes me sympathetic to Plato of thinking maybe we shouldn't have ever written anything down and just made people memorize everything. But I'm kidding Kind of. So it is concerning and it makes dealing. Like I remember I was reading Russell's not Russell Jacoby, russell Jacoby or Richard Sennett the Fall of Public man and the Decline of Public Intellectuals both those books. So I think one's a Richard Sennett book and one's a Russell Jacoby book and I was reading them when I was teaching.
Speaker 1:I was teaching at a college and a high school simultaneously in South Korea and at the time I was pushing back on massive online learning because it was like bullshit.
Speaker 1:But also I was.
Speaker 1:I was excited for the fact that I started seeing theory in blogs, like you know, and seeing these people you know, like academics around you know your position in your career uh, my position at that time in mine who were not really able to fully get their stuff out there to the public, realizing that if they played the, the um citation game that no one was going to ever fucking read anything they wrote, because maybe five people read what you publish in an academic article, um, beyond the, the peer review board, and maybe sometimes it's just that and one guy.
Speaker 1:So they realized that and they were doing these blogs and they were presenting this theory. But what I saw immediately and my own work I feel like I contributed this in my early phase when I was working early on with Doug Lane was in trying to make this stuff the one-on-one level. No one ever got past the one-on-one level, like we were just doing that over and over and over again and it also was stunting my own growth, like I myself was not growing because I'm not teaching the next step Now.
Speaker 1:I'm a big believer, like you know, teach the basics till you know it, backwards, forwards and sideways, right, like. But for your own intellectual edification you also need to be pushing yourself to do more and more and more all the time. To do more and more and more all the time. And I know I come off as an academic elitist and I want people to like think about this. I'm not like I rejected getting my PhD actively. Sometimes I think about it. Then I like bash myself in the face because of no one I know with PhD is happy. Sorry, bro, and I particularly in the humanities, some of the scientists are happy, but we don't know, do scientists feel happiness? I'm fucking around people, I'm joking. So my, my response seriously was like well, we have a bunch of people who are really craving this stuff but they also don't have the skills to engage it. And then it's being pushed out to the general public like people encountered to lose in hegel and marx and shit, and I don't.
Speaker 2:I don't think this is bad, but like through memes, through memes, yeah, no, I mean, and they encounter it in a kind of I mean it's in a kind of like narcissistic fascination way of like know what that means, know what that means, I know what that means, like. And I mean like I think that this was and it's so easy to get arrested at that exact point like to know just enough to like understand, like you feel that if you understand what each of these individual little floating signifiers is gesturing towards, if you can follow the path of the gesture, then you understand the theory and then suddenly you can like weigh in on things. And I blame catholicism and 14 years of catholic school on my part for proving to me that that is not the case, like that is not like what it means to be educated. And there is a, you know, and I think that most people understand that on a kind of abstract level. But God damn it, it's hard man. But god damn it, it's hard man. It's like hard to sleep five hours a night because you spent, you know, because you've spent all your good time after dinner reading. Like it's just hard, like, like it doesn't mean it shouldn't be done, like I get why people don't do it, you know, but there it's. There's a lack of I've noticed this in my students and I notice it in pretty much anybody under the age of 25.
Speaker 2:That I encounter is a lack of capacity to deal with frustration, to deal with not understanding something, a kind of almost terror that accompanies any sort of like. I don't know what that means. I don't know how to respond to this. I don't know how to respond to this. I don't know how to feel about this. Like it's this intense anxiety that is also born in the classroom that the teacher wants is that makes the teacher uncomfortable. And then you want to rip the kid out of that by just explaining it simply and moving on with your life and letting them move on and getting them out of that bad Affective place. You know, I mean, you encounter this every like, and every day In the classroom is a battle to make them sit in that bad place a little bit longer and tolerate it a little bit better, and this is exactly like I mean.
Speaker 2:And then suddenly the classroom starts to look a lot like the clinic, like this is what one of the insights of analysis is like how do you allow the analysand to suffer in a safe way? To like bring themselves to the point of discomfort to express, um, like you know, to express thoughts that frighten them, um, without disintegrating um psychically and I think, for a host of media related reasons. And you know, um, you know pedagogical reasons and cultural reasons, like we are really at a point where we cannot tolerate frustration in this in even the way that I could, 10 years ago you know of just like sitting with the 1844 Marx manuscripts in my freshman seminar in college and just being like what the fuck? Like what is a dialectic? Like you know, like how do, like, what do you look? What is the?
Speaker 2:You know the tracing, the subjective and the objective, like I was just looking at my you know Marx and Engels angles reader from from college the other day, like kind of nostalgically, like all of like every single word underlined twice, like you know, and remembering just the state of confusion like that I was in that, like that felt almost just in that. Like that felt almost just that. That felt like thrilling but also terrifying. Like you know, there's so much I don't know, holy shit, there's an entire. You know, like there's so much I don't know, and I don't know how to make somebody want to put themselves in that position, because you never have to.
Speaker 1:No, but sorry. No, you're absolutely right. No-transcript. Like the hardest place is the two steps before you reach mastery, where you know that you can do it or you know you can't right, but you have to actively think about it and it's painful and it brings up cognitive dissonance and it brings up um discongrities with prior beliefs and and and and and.
Speaker 1:Now, some of this I blame on the education system. I blame it on the way we teach um. I, as a person who's been teaching for 17 years, watching standardized testing actually, though I will defend testing a little bit, because what replaces it is actually often worse, which is just holistic bias control. But I also think it's the media environment. It's the ridicule if you're wrong. And what it's the media environment? It's the ridicule if you're wrong.
Speaker 1:And what it's lead to on the left is superficial views of complicated theories, a refusal to take a risk with the theories, because some jackass graduate student no offense will point out where you missed something from the third book one day, because that's their specialization and I welcome that even so, sometimes I'll make fun of those people, but I do welcome it because, uh, that's how you grow.
Speaker 1:And lastly, um and I think this is a. One of the harder things to deal with, uh, is that this leads to guru formations, way more than cults of personality like the classical stuff, but just people who will just assert what's even sometimes like plainly contradicting the text they're asserting about in ways. If you just read it you would immediately know Right, yeah, this is endemic right now and that makes understanding something as frankly, somewhat deliberately arcane. Thank you, college of, for making neologisms a big part of French academia. That is not in any other society ever, because they'll just use other people's words, but I do think that it makes something like approaching French theory in a way that you don't treat it as a guru form Like Lacan is going to answer all my questions.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Like or you don't treat it as a total waste of time or like oh, these are just French obscurantists, it doesn't fucking matter.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Go learn from real science. I think both those responses are more likely, given the conditions we've been talking about for the last 15-20 minutes. That's really unfortunate, given also how prevalent this shit is in our society. It is hard for me to imagine, even though I'm completely aware, that half the people who read empire when it was one of the top selling books in the united states, which it was just wild to me, crazy dude, it's like that.
Speaker 2:and the dude who assassinated the Italian prime minister?
Speaker 1:man Fucking ugh, yeah, I mean like it is fucking wild to me that that book, in particular because it's not an easy read was New York Times bestseller up there with no Logo, by Naomi Klein, which is one of the better Naomi Klein books, I'm going to add, and Chomsky's Media theory.
Speaker 1:and chomsky like, like it's like almost impossible to imagine that now. But you do see that people still I mean maybe even more now still have a craving for this, but they don't have the capacity to to engage in it. And I'm going to use a literary term I try not to use literary terms on my show. I try to like not play up the fact that I'm actually pretty knowledgeable in literary theory but like they don't have the negative capacity for the incongruence that some of this stuff and the ambiguity that some of this stuff will bring up in you. Like, is Alta Sera all good or all bad? That's a stupid fucking question. Like, is Altus here all good or all bad? That's a stupid fucking question. Like it's just like, like what? And it's like, how do you understand it? Once you understand it and can contextualize it, then you can decontextualize it.
Speaker 1:Like then you can go through and figure out what is useful. Because if you don't do that, you haven't contextualized it, you don't know what you're bringing in and you don't know what downstream effects that may have. And then you know we all have to. The last bit of this I'll say is we all have to put this in a materialist context. What are people's incentives for doing this and why would they do it? And like there's a lot of incentives to be theoretically adroit in a superficial way right now and, as I've said a couple of times, sometimes I'd rather you not be theoretically adroit at all. Just, I don't know if you're joining a fucking union or something, then you be theoretically adroit. Badly right. It's one of those situations where, like, a little bit of knowledge may actually be worse than no knowledge. Why it's one of those situations where, like, a little bit of knowledge may actually be worse than no knowledge.
Speaker 1:Why it's um and I and again, I know that can sound elitist, but like I read Nietzsche in high school like a, like a good weirdo and um you know, uh, and I read Sartre in high school and Camus in high school and I, like I read Camus as a 14 year old and before you guys think, oh, you must be middle class motherfuckers. My dad was a mechanic. My mom hadn't even started college yet, she was a night waitress. It was just something that passed the time because books were cheap in the library, like you you know. And it would get, it would keep me from doing drugs, like that was sort of my, like my modus operandi, guys like. So I find this problematic. Another lefty thing is like, oh, the workers couldn't learn this bullshit. Now they don't have much of an answer.
Speaker 2:That is the single most offensive bit of it. Like you know, like, like this is not. You know, like. Like this is like. This is pretentious. This is above the worker. This is like it's like fucking. Brother marx wrote capital for the workers. Ankles called it the bible of the working class.
Speaker 1:For a fucking reason because it had untranslated greek in it, like you know it's absolutely no like, but this is like.
Speaker 2:Also like, this is, I think, the goods, the good part of the kind of the fascination, not guru syndrome necessarily, but the sort of like, the stages of like. So many people have this the encounter with like some initial encounter with a mysterious text that kind of gets them, gets the motor turning, gets them to think that there's something going on here. I mean, for me it was like, I mean, it was, it was freud actually, like I mean, was the first sort of, was the figure that got me totally fascinated. I read Freud when I was 14 for the first time, um, cause I was seeing, uh, you know, my father died and I was seeing a um like school psychiatrist and I was going three days a week and he was a kind of this old man named Dr Ralph and he, you know, like I w, I, I had this plan that I was going to, like you know, I was going to anticipate what he was going to say to me and I was going to prove that it was all bullshit and that, you know, like that I could, that I didn't need therapy action, I was fine and, like you know, fuck you dad. But so I read Freud in advance, I started making up dreams to tell him about and he would be like that's really interesting. It sounds like you're having some, you know like it was this like. But I got along the way of that, you know, I mean between thoughts that are not conscious, that you are led from one thought to another for reasons that you cannot explain, and that felt to me and I got more and more into this sort of and that led me to the Surrealist and that led me to like, you know, every text would involve some name somewhere that would put me somewhere else. Um, and that kind of like you know what the was would call it rhizomatic, like that kind of like hopping from point to point way of encountering ideas. And you know, go down to the library, check out.
Speaker 2:The next book, you know was an intellectual formation, like I mean that is, and, and it has to begin with some kind of fascination with some kind of like totally non-intellectual, passionate, boredom, driven, resentfulful even kind of encounter. Um, and you can't induce that, you can't act like as a, an educator. You know that every day you can't be like robin fucking williams in, like the dead poet society and like induce that in a student. But you can produce the conditions in which that that kind of encounter is possible, like you can make. You can, you know? I made a joke like earlier today, you know, like there's something about who's teaching a mark snitcher freud class. It's like, oh, you're gonna ruin somebody's fucking life tomorrow, aren't you you know? But it's true, like I mean you can if you teach it. Well, like what you are doing is producing the conditions for an encounter with a set of ideas that will suddenly explode outwards into a whole different network of thoughts, and that might be just because you caught somebody on the right day.
Speaker 2:Not often you can't go on what.
Speaker 1:No, I'm just agreeing with you.
Speaker 1:It's often I mean probably more often than not it's like the circumstances for good pedagogy that I teach teachers and I deal with pedagogy Like I don't teach teachers so much right now I mentor them right now, but like I've taught teachers before.
Speaker 1:And one of the things that I always say is like you're going to get a bunch of pedagogical theories thrown at you. That I always say is like you're going to get a bunch of pedagogical theories thrown at you. Some of them are going to be valid, some of them are not, but the key is those might all be good tools for your toolbox, they might help you break anything, but you don't actually know all the context that your students are coming in with or that a person's going to come to your fucking show on or with or whatever, and you're laying it down for them, for for them to it to address and deal with, and hopefully you know it sounds like you people might hear us and think, oh, you guys are making fun of the meme stuff. No, no, the meme stuff is fine, as long as you don't get stuck there.
Speaker 2:Like, as long as that's not where you're into and understanding stuff Like yeah, as long as it doesn't just become this kind of like look what we said. Like I know that song, you know. As long as it doesn't just become this sort of broken record that you play in your head over and over again and cycle through. I mean, this happens with a lot of like lacanians, like there's, like there are certain theory traditions that really produce this. Like lacanians and delusians who see deterritorialization, like who see obj, who just see like they, like you want to hear the slogans repeated over and over again. You know, like Sartre had a word for that, it's seriality, right. Like you want, you know you listen to the party broadcast and the slogans and you get genuine pleasure out of it.
Speaker 2:But it's sort of the pleasure of bad faith, of, not of just a pure. This sort of pure habitual experience of pleasurable familiarity as opposed to that does not actually increase your capacities for acting. You know, in the spinosa sense that does not actually make you more free in any kind of material. Like you know, even not even material, but like in any kind of way, um, like in any existential way that you know. I mean, like that's a maybe, that's like that sounds woo-woo, like in some ways, and but like I think it's worth saying, like when you are educating people, you're educating them to put a little bit of distance between themselves and all of the various, you know determinations that are acting upon them.
Speaker 2:You know, not like we're making critical thinkers, like not that shit, but like just I want you to be able to sort of exist in a state of frustration, in a state of minimal distance from what you are being told, because only then are you going to be able to engage with it being told, because only then are you going to be able to engage with it. Anything that's not merely reactionary. Yeah, I don't know how to. I don't know how to explain that to some fucking 18 year old who's hung over and, like you know, and is and is like can't you just read the syllabus and let us go now, like you know, like I don't know how to.
Speaker 1:I mean well of us and let us go now, like you know, like I don't know how to I mean well, to be fair to 18 year olds.
Speaker 2:That problem is eternal but, oh yeah, that's not now, that's, that's an. That is that. That's that's true for, yeah, that's true for 80 year olds, as much as 18 year olds, and it's been true since, you know, plato's academy. That's not.
Speaker 1:But right, yeah, you're just. I think I think the thing with it. I'm gonna sound as a person who actually really enjoys working with young people. I don't want people to think I'm like some bitter old man just constantly yelling get off my lawn.
Speaker 1:But um, I will say that, like, one of the ironies of high school is in both literature and in math and in a lot of things you're encountering things dumbed down and before you're ready for them, like, like I read the Great Gatsby. You know it's a book that's often underplayed. Now it's cliche in a lot of ways because it's like 150 pages you can teach in a month. It has obvious symbolism in it, blah, blah, blah. It's a remarkably rich book that is wasted on when you teach it and who you teach it on and with. Some people will see that and come back to it later in life. Some people, like me, will be poisoned by their encounter with it in high school and then only like it after they taught it five times and started seeing like maybe I gaslit myself into thinking it's a good book but nonetheless it is sort of wasted on the time and I can think of it all, all the back teen.
Speaker 1:I was taught back teen at the same class that I've mentioned. You know, got. Given I was taught back teen at the same class that I'm mentioning, got given the dialogic imagination, it didn't mean a shit to me. Now that book, rereading that book at 40, holy fucking shit. It's like truly eye-opening to all kinds of things that you can do with theory and education and theories of mine and development of life and like it even has implications for how I could do activism and stuff like like it really it really is is mind blowing. But it's because of when I approach it. And there's other books like no, I guess the obvious example is like catcher in the rye catcher in the rye in your ths and you didn't read it when you were 19? That book is stupid. So I fully get why if I had counted it as a 15-year-old to a 19-year-old and then read it again in my 30s, it would actually mean something to me because it's both sides.
Speaker 2:Ooh, my man.
Speaker 1:But, anyway, no, we're back. Can you hear me?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I got you.
Speaker 1:Okay, so you see them from both sides of the book, but at the end of the day, like it's and people say, oh, that's easy with literature, it's like that. No, it's like that with math. I was a late learner with math. I the beauty and awesomeness of math, did not occur to me till I was 22 years old. Like and I do wish sometimes it occurred to me younger because I probably would have had a more lucrative career, but like, nonetheless. It's amazing once you start realizing all that it can do and all that it doesn't do too Like it's, it's, you know me and the math, it will not give you communism.
Speaker 2:You cannot derive communism from set theory. I'm sorry guys. You can derive eternal terror, evidently, but that does not equal communism.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, oh yeah, yeah me and set theory is a fun little thing, I mean. So I don't want people to just think it's like literature, books, it's movies, it's all kinds of stuff. It's. It's sometimes I'll be honest sometimes it's fucking video games. I'm not a video game person, but I have seen people whose mind gets set on fire beginning with a goddamn video game. So like I don't want people to think that we're just dodgy academics about this like no, no, no again, I do.
Speaker 2:Like it's no resent, like I do not resent the student who does not. Like I think people mistake this, like my, you know, like from the sub stack and from twitter, like that I like dislike my students, or something I don't like. I fucking like my students. I think that they're fun to talk to. Like I like to shoot the shit with them, I like to smoke cigarettes with them, I like to hang out with them. Like I like to teach them, you know, at the same, quietly, by themselves, and attend to something that, for a slew of reasons, they did not get Like.
Speaker 2:And there is a generation that's maybe 15 years wide that has simply not received that to the point like I have. Like you know, like these wealthy relatives by marriage who have this kid, they're sending them to a $70,000 a year private grammar school where there's no laptops. Like it's like technology free. You know, like third grade to write with a pen and paper, like if that's what the fucking bourgeois are doing. You know, maybe we should all consider that, instead of bringing an AI into the classroom Like it's a not you know, because what they, they, somebody, somewhere, is realizing that the capacity to attend is actually necessary. We are fucked if we have, you know, an entire workforce that can't sit still for two seconds like I. Like we're actually like, you know, I mean what? Like?
Speaker 1:a leader, revolution or even get reforms when they can't fucking.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like if you're from the liberal side, you're fucked. If, like you know, like I mean, you're not, there's so much for party discipline. Like you know, you thought it was bad. Now, motherfucker, Like it's going to get worse, you know, like the Swifties are not going to lead us into oh God, Now I really got to not say that.
Speaker 1:But yeah, I'm with you. People often mistake this as me having contempt for the young too, and it's more like no, you don't like what I'm saying, because it has some profound, almost symbolic violence to it. Um, but it's not that I blame you, I blame me. I blame the entire society around us. I blame, um, I blame technology. I blame people being lied to about the, about what technology does and does not do and when you should encounter it and I say this as a person who works at an online program at this point in my life.
Speaker 1:I know the problems and limitations of it, but I've seen it like you have. I've seen the elites go more and more back to traditional education and even the upper middle class being paddled a bunch of stuff that engenders utter dependency. I was sitting with a code teacher and we were talking to people who were dealing with AI and I'm like, if we don't teach people how to code, even if they don't know how. They're utterly dependent on the people who coded the fucking AI.
Speaker 1:So they're utterly dependent on Silicon Valley and they can't question it, and that dependency will not just be immediate to the, it'll be dead dependency on dead labor. And I see this in secondary sources in academia too. Like how many? It's hard to think like I'm going to say this with academics. I see academics saying they read primary sources, but when I check it, they've read the secondary source, found the primary source and the secondary source repeated that and then repeated the misreading. And so I don't just want people to think this is not just that like lower levels of society, this is endemic even at the highest fucking levels.
Speaker 2:This is endemic. I mean, this is like there are. Every week there's another like AI scandal in the sciences, especially in the fucking sciences, because it's even easier to track it Because, like you know that data analysis parts of scientific papers are being just fed into AI and they're forgetting to erase the part where the AI says thank you, like I am an AI. Here is your answer.
Speaker 1:Like? Are they forgetting the check for hallucinations?
Speaker 2:yeah, like, or both and it is. You know, like it is, it's dependency, like that's exactly what it is and I don't know how to explain. I mean, it's, it's, this is spinoza, right. Like how do you explain to somebody who is in a situation of total bondage but does not understand it to be bondage? How do you like open up? I mean, this is like actually, this is like what I think is the most useful concept out of the late Alcacer. Like you know, in the philosophy of the encounter, like pour faire la vie, in the philosophy of the encounter, like pour faire la vie, like how do you open the void? How do you make a gap? Like evacuate a little bit of space between yourself, and like that upon which you are dependent, and I mean like I don't think that, that you know, I'm not saying like move to the woods and grow your own beans, like this is not the row.
Speaker 1:You're not here at the row, this is not from right. Here at the row, yeah right, yeah like like.
Speaker 2:I think people are going to hear that, like or like, I mean because that and that is an answer that the right is providing is a sort of like self, self-sufficiency, self-dependency, whatever like that's a good way to starve, by the way, like, like, yeah, when we say, when I say, dependency, I mean utter dependency.
Speaker 1:What I'm not saying total self-sufficiency isn't fucking possible. Humans do not do that. That is actually our strength that we do not do that. We are weak, fucking monkeys. A chimpanzee can easily rip my face off. I've met some. They not do that. We are weak, fucking monkeys. A chimpanzee can easily rip my face off. I've met some. They can do it.
Speaker 1:Social learning is our advantage, but social learning does not mean being dependent on dead labor and as a Marxistist, we can understand that. But you know, like it was really thinking about the cost of being dependent on dead labor. That really made me, which which, under certain circumstances, isn't even a bad thing. But like, like, because we're all dependent on dead labor, like intellectual accumulation is dependency on dead intellectual labor. But when you're just dependent on it, like you no longer know how to do the things that were done in the past. And people, like, like a lot of people, even a lot of a lot of uh, leftists who should know better, have this idea of whiggish history where they forget you people all the time, forget how to create basic technologies.
Speaker 1:They may or may not need them, but it's a problem when they do, I always bring up a couple of examples Two saws after the fall of the Roman Empire in Britain, pillars in Egypt, because I saw it myself when I lived there. There was like a thousand years where they forgot how to make pillars but had buildings that were still fucking dependent on them, so they just had to steal them from other old buildings. So you go into early Moss and they're just full of random pillars of things and it's because the technology and the craft and the skill set was lost probably because of overproduction, frankly and they didn't need it for a little while, but then they forgot how to do it and then they needed it again.
Speaker 1:A modern example is military vehicles that don't have electronics in them. Like you know, those Jeeps that they used to just drop out of planes that a crew of five people could put together in 35 minutes. We can't do that now, like, like you know, and and and I think when it and to bring this back to theory cause, this is a it kind of seems off topic and we've gone for a while, and I think this is a good point enough of. But also we also are unable to recreate what this theory originally did.
Speaker 2:We are using it as like a dead machine.
Speaker 2:Yeah, where we're going with it. Yeah, it's because it's. If you just encounter, like altus, like the I at the concept of the isa, like, like the ideological state apparatus, and you do not have understand that altus, there is a crypto, malice catholic, the concept of the capital S subject is going to make no fucking sense and you are going to completely misread. Like what he's talking about there, like, if you don't you know, if you read his, like you know his work on, like that, that. That is like reading Machiavelli without knowing that it was that the Prince was addressed to Cesare Borgia.
Speaker 1:Like it is, just a lot of people do read it that way it is it is a you know and this is not like just being like pretentious academic.
Speaker 2:Like you know you. You got to get the history right or else you're not an expert. This is like like you are fucked if you don't realize this, like you will end up in bad, in a bad theoretical place and that will put you in a bad practical place, like and I like there are states yeah yeah theory matters I
Speaker 1:I do want to. I want to bring that up. Theory matters are. Scientists wouldn't care about theory. And you're like what do you mean scientists? Scientists definitely care about theory. That's you're like. What do you mean scientists? Scientists definitely care about theory. That's their frameworks and models for being able to talk about the physical world. Theory fucking matters. It is not just a way to like. I'm going to use it as a toolbox to explain, like, if that's all it is to you, fine for writing papers, man, I'm not going to judge you for that. You got to make a living. You got to make a living, how you got to make a living. You got to meet your, your, your academic paper count that no one's going to read anyway. But this is larger than that, and this was my. You know, my critique of pragmatism was all it has always been, except for for for uh purse, who I don't think is guilty of this, but I do think James and, to some degree, dewey are.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, dewey, for sure yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the assumption that what is good is obvious and not and justified. It's like that point that Zizek often makes about empiricism. The empiricists don't realize that their descriptors contain norms and thus they repeat unempirical data as empirical facts, because they're not realizing they're already in their descriptors and so you know, this is a problem in pragmatism too. It's like, oh, we've normalized what is good, what is the cash value? But often it's not clear what the cash value is, even monetarily. So it's like these are things that we have to really break down. They seem obvious, but once you have a real encounter and I want people to say, this real encounter could be fucking welding guys, I'm not even talking about just intellectual shit or obviously intellectual shit like but once you have a real encounter with something that you really have to break down and master, even if it's a physical thing or, like you know, or an athletic thing or something, yeah it's gonna change this attitude.
Speaker 1:If you treat it as a machine, as a lot of people treat a lot of this French theory, it's not. It's going to have a cost and I'm going to let you have the last word and then plug, and then we'll be done that's right.
Speaker 2:Oh fuck, now I don't know what to say. What the fuck? No, yeah, no, it is. It's a question. The histories of the theory. They need to be taught. We need to find a better way to teach them. We need to find a way to plug them in. We need people whose job it is to teach theory and the history of theory in academia and we need people who are engaged in praxis to understand the history of what they're talking about. This is not this should not be, a controversial point. This is not an elitist point and this is not like, somehow, a CIA op. This is just hard historical materialism. You need to know where the fuck you're coming from. So, yeah, I got nothing to plug.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I just finished nothing to plug. All right, well, I I'll say uh, go read your sub stack. It will be listed in the um show notes. I found it pretty good. Um, I've actually quite enjoyed it, which is how you're on the show. Otherwise, you're just a random person that I encountered on Twitter, which, by the way, peeps. I want you guys to know. The criterion for getting on a barn show is that I find you interesting. That's pretty much it.
Speaker 2:I have no idea, that's really sweet actually. Thank you.
Speaker 1:I don't even have to agree with you, I just have to find you interesting. I might think you're horribly wrong, but in incredibly productive ways.
Speaker 2:Are you interested by my like, incredible masochistic tendency to get yelled at by like all of American academia on a weekly basis? Is that what it gives to?
Speaker 1:you, I'm friends with Colin Drum, not a person I agree with, but a person I find fascinating, and he I think he deeply enjoys having all of academia yell at him on X. He's such a fucking favorite man.
Speaker 2:He is such a favorite.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I have refrained from saying stuff, but I will not push back on that assertion at all. So you know. But I mean I do think this is, you know, sometimes it's I've only been the main, I've only been ratioed or the main care. I've never been the main, main character, but I'm only the main character on Twitter for like weird shit. Like one time saying that the thing that got me ratioed the most on Twitter was me saying that pretending that JFK had secretly become a communist is just an inversion of the Birchers theory, that he had secretly become a Bircher to fight globalists and that's why he was assassinated. And oh my God, I didn't even say that the Warren Report was true or something. That was the thing that got me. I was like I didn't even get ratioed for anything cool.
Speaker 2:That was a fucking bad week, man. All I said was kids should read books, bro.
Speaker 1:I don't know what I did wrong. I'm sorry.
Speaker 2:Oh God.
Speaker 1:That was so fucking funny, oh God.
Speaker 2:Oh God, you're so fucking mad at me about that. Okay, all right, all right.
Speaker 1:We're going to end the show. Have a great day.
