Hey guys let me make massive sweeping historical statements with no knowledge of classical antiquity!

Hey guys let me make massive sweeping historical statements with no knowledge of classical antiquity!

Hey guys let me posture as a leftist populist while also hiding behind academic jargon!

What a fucking fraud.

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journal.telospress.com/content/1970/6/354.full.pdf
thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-cia-reads-french-theory-on-the-intellectual-labor-of-dismantling-the-cultural-left/
globalresearch.ca/articles/PET209A.html
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

Agreed.

>Hey guys let me posture as a leftist populist while also hiding behind academic jargon!
Others (mostly Derrida) were worse than him in this regard.At least Foucault was coherent.

He wasn't really left wing. He grew from criticizing power systems to admiring them. He went full neoliberal capitalist just before his death.

his marxist peers were right to ridicule him for being a gayboi, fags enjoy being fucked in the ass so they knew he'd become a power worshiper in due time.

>it's another "some user thinks he's more erudite than one of the most widely read 20th century philosophers" episode

>He went full neoliberal capitalist just before his death.

Sitting in a sex swing getting pozzed in his loose as a goose butt by a line of daddies in a san fran bathhouse in order to understand power dynamics in sexuality would be a better place to put his curtain call.

Don't equate how widely read he is with his intelligence or quality. There's plenty of widely read literature that's absolute garbage

>le appeal to authority
Oddly fitting wouldn't you say?

JK Rowling of philosophy

Whenever anyone makes the claim that he was ignorant of antiquity they reveal themselves to be a brainlet who takes cues from podcasts. Neither Paul Veyne or Peter Brown took issue with his scholarship.

I'm mostly convinced his success was part of the broader, ongoing, and very successful program of expunging Marxist elements from academia.

In 1968, French universities were basically communist organizations. In 1980, French students would tell you that class struggle doesn't exist and Marxism is racist because it suggests pre industrial economies are inferior.

Go to bed, Bucko. You’re drunk.

This. The big three (Foucault, Lacan, Derrida) were a reaction against the Marxist populist thought that was beginning to take a hold of western schools.

DESU I would have rather Marxist thinkers because at least they are genuine.

who is the rupi kaur of philosophy?

>retard who doens't know what they're talking and plaigarizes
lena dunham

You just described every French philosopher from the 1970s onward to today

Real criticism was too dangerous - the goverments would much prefer 'the left' to be babbling about how reality is made of words and the history of non binary gender queers than to be actually delineating history on Marxist lines, which is utterly revolutionary. Conservatives should be cheering the 'SJW's' - they kill the left more efficiently than any fascist.

In this vein, there is an essay byChristopher Lasch and a more-recent one by Gabriel Rockhill on the Cultural Warfare wing of the CIA's relationship to the American Left.
That being said, I don't think this invalidates the usefulness of those thinkers -especially Lacan.

This. Spend enough time on Marxist twitter and you'll see the conspirarcy theories about how Foucault was CIA trying to bring down us orthodox Marxists!

Foucault had a few interesting ideas but OP is right to point out the complete dearth of archival research and how his critiques of the state run close to paleoconservative and anarcho-libertarian strains. Although it's not quite sure what it is Foucault wants.

>one of the most widely read 20th century philosophers
he's the most cited person ever

...

audibly kekd

Yes they did have some good insights - the connection between perceived reality and words (though not a wholly new idea) was something worthwhile - it became rambling insane drivel when they applied these ideas that could be summarised in a couple of sentences to the entire totality of world history and culture. That part is probably due to the celebrity of Parisian philosophers (ie being asked/paid to write articles twice a week and 'theorising' on topics upon which they were wholly unqualified) and the weird tendency in French culture for obscurantism; try to read a movie review in a French newspaper - 10,000 words long and you're struggling to discern whether the writer liked the film or not.

Cited in what sense?
If undergrad liberal arts dissertaions count then, LMAO

because academic cancer from the last few decades was his fault

of course they cite their god(faggot)

Well, he was Jewish what do you expect?

you can't seriously believe that mention by an undergraduate counts as a 'citation'...? You know how I know you dropped out of school at 16...

>the complete dearth of archival research
literally what the fuck are you talking about. every one of his historiographical texts (as opposed to, say, the theoretical ones like Archaeology of Knowledge and History of Sexuality vol. 1) are stupefyingly dense in quotation. i find him as noxious as the next guy but he did his homework and had sound theoretical reasons for representing it as he chose

as in he has the highest individual impact factor of any individual since we started keeping track

good posts. two points

1. lacan i think is far more ambiguous on this issue than people give him credit for. like deleuze and guattari he makes a pretty big effort later in his career to conjoin psychoanalysis with political economy. check out seminar xvii. it's sketchily developed but his critique of hegel includes something like a libidinal economics of the signifier. i cant elaborate because i havent really dug into it, but this is what my reading has suggested to me without serious critical effort.

2. the levi-strauss conference at johns hopkins in the 60s that brought the french gang across the pond was a cia psyop managed by the ford foundation. this is documented; see Telos 1970, no. 6, pp. 354-359. you can get the report very easily through sci hub using this link: journal.telospress.com/content/1970/6/354.full.pdf

johns hopkins was then notable for its connections to the DoD. this conference was a remarkably effective state maneuver to control growing student unrest within the university by channeling it into semiotic idealism, aka structuralism and its offshoots.

This. You can hate Foucault as a person and a thinker but his practical knowledge of antiquity is unassailable. He knew his shit.

PUSHING THE SHIT IN, JUST ONE STEP FURTHER:

OF COURSE Foucault would like antiquity! It's a bunch of European Greek homos and pederasts arguing about society and the world! This is Foucault's stock-in-trade!

Antiquity really isn't as important as you think it is. In fact by providing antiquity you give power to the 19th century classicists whose vision of antiquity has been handed down to us. There have been so many discontinuities in the past 2500 years that I cannot do anything but pity people who think that a grounding in Greek and Roman literature is more than a mark of culture.
I'm not saying that archaeology is bad. I'm saying that obsessing over 'antiquity' is retarded.

thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-cia-reads-french-theory-on-the-intellectual-labor-of-dismantling-the-cultural-left/

woah woah woah, you got any more proof?

Check out Christopher Lasch essay mentioned earlier (I forget the title, but it is in "the agony of the American Left".) Its about the subversion of the American Left prior to the introduction of French thought. The Gabriel rockhill essay is linked in the post preceeding yours. There is also a famous New York Times interview (mentioned by Lasch and Rockhill) with the guy who pioneered the CIA's cultural warfare division.
There are other things written about the CIA and the American Left, the two aforementioned are notable for the amount of attention they got when published.
I think Dwight MacDonald may have a piece on CIA left relationship as well.

at the same moment the academy declines to the lowest point in its 2000 year history, great job

Good. French marxists destroyed Cambodia and all the other countries they spread their AIDS to. I hope they burn in hell

the hardest proof i have is the history of the New Left and the 2016 Clinton campaign that is its spawn. but everything the other guy mentioned is valuable as well, as is real consideration of the substantive content of the scientisms offered by structuralist linguistics and its philosophical cousins among the french. lets not forget that these guys were leading agitators against the french communist party, which, granted, did make the unforgivable sin of siding with de gaulle, but at the same time this nuance is missed by everyone who slings around the term "tankie" as an insult to MLMists

where does althusser or zizek fit into all of this?

I can't speak to Zizek (though I don't believe he's anything so vulgar as a deliberate shill) but I would just point out that despite his silliness, he is very comfortable with violence. Regarding althusser, he was translated into English for an English audience. That doesn't rule out an establishment interest in seeing him translated, but British communism was pretty well defanged by that point.

here's some more on the ideological maneuvers of the ford foundation in the back half of the 20th century. johns hopkins fits right into this constellation: globalresearch.ca/articles/PET209A.html

from the perspective of a historiography of french anti-marxism, althusser is like foucault-lite. he does away with base/superstructure pretty spectacularly, in order to make room for himself as a philosopher in the realm of concrete praxis. his model of society allows all its branches (including academia) to have "relative autonomy" in determining the development of capitalism. his theory of ideology is great, i think, but insofar as he thinks he can rebuild a theory of capitalism from the ground up in order somehow excuse himself from it, he's a great ideologue for every would-be lenin out there who lacks the spine to shoot his boss