Do french write obscurely on purpose, so as to hide their cluelessness?

For me it's the general impression they give. The feeling i get whenever i hear a french "intellectual" is that he does a word dance around a subject he doesn't have a concrete idea about. Anglosphere and Germans seem more exact

Do other anons get the same impression?

their idiot retards liberal. Real men speak with logic and rationality

So you're saying you have no idea and just going by memes.
Hmm ok

yes, here is a smart Analytic Philosopher BTFOing french obscurantism

youtube.com/watch?v=yvwhEIhv3N0

yes, the only exception is bourdieu

>I had a short conversation with a dude so this is what I think of their whole tradition now

>I need to extensively study their whole corpus before forming an opinion

try the redpill, cuck

He's a professor of philosophy, yeah why not

more like
>I read and taught a bunch of continental philosophers, and since their obscurantism was so obvious i asked some them why they write like that

Yeah but they were just being polite to the dumb American. I bet if he pressed them on specific examples of their obscurantism they wouldn't have been so ready so say some their work was unnecessary

...

Form>Function when it comes to lit and poetry

T.bh i wouldnt have any problem if their psychobabble ramblings were presented as literature

And what the fuck is philosophy, science?
Anglos need to get over themselves

You can always approach your subject with scientific method

Doesn't work with non-empirical objects.

John Searle is a cool dude. I really liked his Rediscovery of the Mind where BFTOs reductive and eliminative materialists who claim consciousness and mental phenomena aren't real.`

Kant's notion of Science was very different from the common understanding of it as the hypothetico-experimental model

Foucalt and Bourdieu have a much better analysis of this style than Searle. It's the style of the French academy which was very elitist and relied on references to Hippolyte's History of Philosophy lectures.

Anyway, I unironically like Deleuze obscurantism and all. If you want to see a defence of Deleuze's project from himself, I recommend you read "Letter to a Severe Critic"

French intellectual here. The issue is quite complicated actually. No thinker or writer ever decides to intentionnally produce obscure bullshit. However, some are stupid and end up producing pointlessly obscure bullshit.
Good examples of guys whose obscurity is rationally justified and understandable : Merleau-Ponty, Bourdieu. They're not even as obscure as Heidegger, actually.
Example of a stupid prick unable to explain and justify his statements : Foucault.

You had me until you said Foucault, I think he's perfectly clear. Whats an example of him being obscure?
also >French intellectual here

all of french philosophy since 1950 is basically just a rationalisation for the philosopher's degenerate pomo lifestyle/ a means to bang gullible undergrads of all genders

yes

Foucault was one shady motherfucker. Whatever he might have said about the societies of control, he was also an advocate for Hayek and Thatcher's neoliberalism which is the society of control incarnate.

I don't know if he was an advocate so much as he enjoyed baiting Leftists

>You had me until you said Foucault, I think he's perfectly clear.
He literally admits to being needlessly obscuritan because it's part of the french academic culture

citation needed

>Nevertheless, because need has already passed through the filter of demand to the plane and the stage of unconditionality, it is in the guise, as one might say, of a second negation that we are going to find beyond, what it is precisely a question of finding, which is the margin of what is lost in this demand, and the beyond is precisely the character of absolute condition which is in desire, what presents itself in desire as such is this something which is of course borrowed from need. How could we construct our desires, if not by borrowing the raw material from our needs? But this passes over to a state of being unconditioned, not because it is a question of something borrowed from a particular need, but of an absolute condition out of all proportion to the need for any object whatsoever, and in so far as this condition is perhaps called for precisely in this, that it abolishes here the dimension of the other, that it is a requirement in which the other does not have to reply yes or no. It is this which is the fundamental dimension, character of human desire as such

That's Lacan. I honestly don't know if he was insane or not.

We

>I don't know if he was an advocate so much as he enjoyed baiting Leftists

Foucault = French Milo.

the similarities are truly uncanny

I don't see your problem, do you need something explained in that passage?

>French
>Obscure
I think you meant Germans OP

explain the entire passage

>In France, you gotta have ten percent incomprehensible, otherwise people won’t think it’s deep–they won’t think you’re a profound thinker.

The fact that you don't know this makes me think you have never read Foucault in your life.

Lacan was pretty fucking awful, both as a thinker and as a person

Haven't read that part but I've heard about it. I wish you would have given me a source, though.

I could write all year expanding on this but to keep it short, he's describing the relationship between needs (things we absolutely must demand off others) and desires (things we are granted and can live without).

Essentially he's saying desires always involve other people, that a certain act of consent is always implied, while things thought about as needs have no relationship. It becomes a pure material problem of acquisition

I once heard a French CS player say
>the enemy can't know what you're doing if you don't either

Such is the condition of people who eat snails

Searle claims he said it to him. That's the source, I think.

That's how I play CS though, and I win a lot. If you're intelligent and skilled, and just do what feels right each time without making plans, its impossible for the opponent to predict and to react in successful way. I don't know if it would work in a war (doubtful) but it works in games.

>I don't know if it would work in a war (doubtful)

It probably would actually, but the problem with real life is that you have to actually worry about dying

There's nothing confusing about that. I can even see the scene play out in my head.
>I need water or else I will die. If I don't get water I will need it but if I do then I won't need it any more.
>I want money because I want it. If I don't get money I will want it and if I do then I will still want it. I could never get enough money so that I would no longer want it.

I'm suddenly interested in Foucault

surely you can see how the language you used is much less obscure than the language he used. I mean come on, "filter of demand to the plane and the stage of unconditionality", "if not by borrowing the raw material from our needs".

Yeah but the language I'm using is only explaining one small portion of the propositional content in that paragraph. If I was to fully explain all he said there it would require a few pages.

The big problem in trying to read this is he assumes you have a familiarity with his work and terminology already.

...

time cube

hmm

That is exactly what Lacan reminds me of. Especially with his diagrams that explain nothing and try to introduce unnecessary geometry

Yeah. This is explained in a far more concise way in Plato's Gorgias. Lacan is a hack.

I unironically agree. The frog intelligentsia is a circlejerking cult of petty narcissists

they try to be like the Germans w/ their philosophical language but are bad at it

really all you need to know

There are millions of people taking this shit seriously
They spend time and money dissecting this
There are million of impressionable french qts that STILL fall for this

Where did we go wrong?

Git gud faggit

> For over a decade before his death, he was obsessed by the notion that certain topological figures might cast light on psychiatric illness and the human mind. He believed, for example, that the torus was `exactly the structure of the neurotic'. (The ludicrous `exactly' beautifully exemplifies the way intensifiers are used whenever counter-intuitive notions of huge scope and nearly zero comprehensibility are being asserted without argument, fact or illustration.) His disciples too, therefore, believed in the torus -- in the ever-deferred hope, perhaps, that belief might bring understanding. (Credo ut intelligam). At any rate, they listened in awe to his day-long seminars on such things as the Borromean knot and continued to do so even in his pathetic last years, when, as a result of multiple strokes, his speech was mangled by dysphasia and his cognitive functions were somewhat intermittent. By then even his silences, as dysphasia gave way to aphasia and his mind emptied, were attended to and subjected to lavish reverential interpretation.
> Now S&B have shown, what no one has hitherto been knowledgeable enough to demonstrate: precisely what was wrong with Lacan's use of mathematics. It is not only empty glitter but also internally flawed. Lacan's writings, in addition to being bad or lunatic psychiatry, are also bad mathematics. Lacan, S&B show, makes advanced errors -- muddling the very specific technical meanings of certain terms from topology (such as `compactness') and so on. But he also makes elementary ones, as when he confuses irrational and imaginary numbers or the universal and the existential quantifier -- the latter the kind of mistake a first week student in mathematical logic would not perpetrate.

With the help of his pseudo-mathematics, Lacan could gibber for hours, while his disciples listened in silence:

I will posit here the term `compactness'. Nothing is more compact than a fault, assuming that the intersection of everything that is closed therein is accepted as existing over an infinite number of sets, the result being that the intersection implies this infinite number. That is the very definition of compactness ... (quoted p. 21)

The confusion here -- pointed out by S&B -- of the topological notion of compactness with other notions within and without topology would have entirely escaped the attention of his un-mathematically schooled audience. One wonders what they thought as they listened to this stuff for hours. Perhaps they were simply awestruck, like the villagers in Goldsmith's poem: `And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew, / That one small head could carry all he knew.' A wonder that would have been greater had anyone among the psychoanalysts and other quasi-medical hangers on at his seminars noted the all-too-obvious and tragic fact that that head was afflicted for its last years with a progressive dementia.

>Irigaray has famously argued that science is sexist; for example E=Mc2 is `a sexed equation'. The reasons she gives for believing this are extraordinary.
>The sexism of science, Irigaray argues, explains why fluid mechanics is not as well developed as solid mechanics. The inability of (masculinist) science to deal with turbulent flow is explained by the association of fluidity with femininity: whereas men have sex organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids. Hence male science cannot cope with fluid dynamics.

its funny because this could easily be flipped by saying women have nipples that become hard when aroused and men ejaculate fluid

based

Men also have nipples retard

so how will post ww2 french philo age in a hundred or two years?

A lot better than autistic analytic diatribes

...wow. I wonder which gender quantum fields relate to.

why are you pointing that out to me?

o i am laffin

kek i only got it now

>No thinker or writer ever decides to intentionnally produce obscure bullshit.
I see no reason to believe this.

>surely you can see how the language you used is much less obscure than the language he used
You're really dumb. He was describing the content in that passage; the passage itself describes a phenomenon. A description of the passage does not in any way need to resemble the passage itself.

This, the only reason French intellectuals have so much authority is the failure of analytic philosophy to be anything other than a literally autistic intellectual front for imperial neoliberalism. Your favorite analytic philosopher is probably a warmonger--the one exception is Bertrand Russell, who is basically well-known for being wrong about math and for writing a terrible history of Western philosophy. His logical work is insightful, however, and necessary for an understanding of what happened after him in logic.

Not in the least.

this has to be the worst post I've ever seen on Veeky Forums. of course the description doesn't need to resemble the original but I never said it needed to. I was just making the point that the passage could be said in simpler language

and you're any better?

Why does that matter? Don't tell me you still by into the Occam's Razor meme.

>Reading in translation

They basically are literature if you read Derrida

and continental philosophy wasn't a front for Soviet propaganda?

Doesn't this quote give you an explanation as to why French are 'obscurantists'? It's not because they are clueless but that they won't appear deep.

Well, Kant and Hegel were pre-Soviet, so it's not possible that all of it is.

Yeah...... if your dumb. Literally no point in Western thought is femininity associated with the rigid

bah I meant to put it in quotes, probably should be double quotes too because a chunk of the French intellectuals aren't mouth pieces at all.
For example Lacan has this great essay about Sadeian socialism, which is mind-blowing.

this thread is about french writers writing in obscure ways you autist

are you really trying to argue against a joke post

The only joke post here is you.

The fuck user, analytical philosophy uses AP level mathematics.

Merleau-Ponty is actually the shit. People rag on Heidegger for being obscurantist, but Husserl is a fucking chore to slog through. Reading french phenomenology was a delight for me. Maybe this has to do with the difference of directness of translation between French and German to English. The French thought I've read has always been clearer and more well organized than the German (except in the case of Schopenhaeur and others).

Everyone will joke about them like they do now

We take our language and literary heritage extremely seriously. There's almost nothing more important to the French than being well-read and articulate.

Because of this, the more erudite the prose, the higher the status. People here think philosophy is about poring over impressive authors and hopefully, with enough diligence, begin to discern what they're actually talking about. The goal is not to join the conversation about some set of ideas, or to develop a sense for the arguments around a given position; it's literally just a lexical puzzle which you win by deciphering the obscurantist prose.

It results in a deranged intellectual scene where plain-speaking is considered useless at best and uncouth at worst.

That isn't to say we don't have any insightful authors, but if you're not the right type of person -- either a masochist or someone with an extraordinary aptitude for language who can thrive in such a demented environment -- you're going to have a hard time.

philosophy is aesthetics.

dude was a living meme. the organisers of the famous debate with chomsky allegedly paid Foucault in species with hash. Foucault's friends back in Paris referred to the hash in question as 'the chomsky stash'.

Well, he was wrong.

This. Once I read up on Sartre and Beuvior's little college student orgy's I came to realize this. Fucking pseud perverts