The Hazards of being a Radical Academic

So I'm reading The Passion of Michel Foucault, by James Miller -- a biography about a philosopher I really didn't get the opportunity to study back in college. Miller portrays Foucault as perpetually obsessed with getting the upper hand on Sartre, desperately vying for academic recognition and lashing out in vehement opposition to the French existentialist's humanistic philosophy of free will and responsibility.

I'm very much amused by Foucault's love-hate relationship with the political radicals he courted -- embracing them in the thick of conflict with the establishment, 'sticking it to the man', so to speak, as when he joins his pupils in a uprising against his fellow colleagues at the university of Vincennes:

[January 23, 1969] That afternoon at Vincennes, Foucault joined a handful of other professors and some five hundred students and militants in occupying the administration building and amphitheater of the new campus, which had opened for classes just days before. The seizure was ostensibly a show of solidarity with students who had occupied the rector's office at the Sorbonne earlier that day . . . but to paraphrase a good slogan from the American student movement in those days, the issue was not the issue. The main point, one suspects, was to explore again, the creative potential of disorder. . . .

The occupation lasted less than a day. The police began their assault on the administration building in the predawn hours of January 24. Those still inside, including Foucault, fought back fureiously. . . . Some surrendered. Others, including Foucult, fled to the roof. There, they set about hurling bricks at the police gathered below. Witnesses recall that Foucault exulted in the moment, gleefully lobbing stones -- although he was careful not to dirty his beautiful black velour suit.

Foucault himself was in a position of authority at the university, having personally been charged with assembling the faculty of the department of philosophy. Of course, hiring the most revolutionary among them wasn't the brightest idea:

. . . Foucault, like Dr. Frankenstein, had to cope with the monster he had created in the form of Vincennes philosophy department. Offering countless coures with titles like "Cultural Revolutions" and "Ideological Struggle," Foucault's department naturally attracted dissidents of every conceivable type. Many of his militant colleagues were swept up in the enthusiasm of the moment: in 1970, Judith Miller, a professed Maoist (and Jacques Lacan's daughter), handed out certifications of course credit in philosophy to total strangers on a bus, explaining afterward in the pages of L'Express that "the university is a figment of capitalist society."

The president of the Republic was not amused. The minister of education fired Miller, and moved quickly to decertify the department as a whole . . . in public, Foucault staunchly defended the program, and also the continuing rebellion in the universities: "We have tried to produce the experience of freedom . . ."

In the end, however, Foucault finds his fraternization with the oppressed student minority counterproductive:

. . . the campus was constantly in an uproar, roiled by strikes, marches, and classroom demonstrations. Following the time-honored radical precept that "my closest friend is my own dangerous enemy," militant students targeted Foucault's lectures for disruption.

His patience wore thin. It was one thing to express solidarity with the left in interviews, or by pitching stones from rooftops -- that was fun! But it was quite another thing to have to put up with, day in and day out, with the insane harangues of the various ultra-left sects that stormed through his classroom.

Foucault had begun to feel, as he once suggested, like Sade at Charenton: staging subversive plays in the asylum, and then having the inmates rise in rebellion against the master himself.

Foucault's solution was simple: He spent as little time as possible on campus . . .

Trying to read (much less understand) Foucault can be daunting, but James Miller provides a decent introduction to the philosopher, flavored with his wry sense of humor. (From what I've heard David Macey's The Lives of Michael Foucault is the better of the two biographies, so I might tackle that somewhere down the line).

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Excerpted from: The Passion of Michael Foucault, by James Miller. Harvard Univ Pr; (April 7, 2000). pp. 176-181.

With the disappearance of the idea of Original Sin, with the disappearance of the idea of intense moral struggle, the human beings presented to us both in poetry and prose fiction today, and more patently among the serious writers than in the underworld of letters, tend to become less and less real...If you do away with this struggle, and maintain that by tolerance, benevolence, inoffensiveness, and a redistribution or increase of purchasing power, combined with a devotion, on the part of the elite, to Art, the world will be as good as anyone could require, then you must expect human beings to become more and more vacuous.

-- TS Eliot

Sweet . . .

As Lenin and Hitler recede into history, the idea that a civilized nation can descend so deep into a totalitarianism maintained by fear seems less and less plausible. Huxley’s dystopia, by contrast, is all too plausible. Indeed, the unsettling thing about Huxley’s imagined future is that it is not easy for a modern reader to say what, exactly, is so bad about it. To be sure, we maintain our democracy, religion is still alive, and our inclination to join up in pairs and raise our own children seems to be ineradicable. In many other respects, though, we have settled happily into the infantile hedonism of Brave New World. Re-reading that novel recently after many years, I suddenly realized why it is that I find the current hit TV show Friends so unwatchable. In the World State of the year 632 After Ford, would not Phoebe, Chandler & Co. be model citizens? In the terms of that great Dostoyevskian exchange between the Savage and the Controller at the end of Chapter 17 in Huxley’s masterpiece, we have come down pretty firmly on the side of the Controller, and trust to science to cope with whatever unpleasant consequences may attend our choice.

“What?” questioned the Savage, uncomprehending. “It’s one of the conditions of perfect health. That’s why we’ve made the V .S. treatments compulsory.”

“V.S.?”

“Violent Passion Surrogate. Regularly once a month. We flood the whole system with adrenalin. It’s the complete physiological equivalent of fear and rage. All the tonic effects of murdering Desdemona and being murdered by Othello, without any of the inconveniences.”

“But I like the inconveniences.”

“We don’t,” said the Controller. “We prefer to do things comfortably.”

So do we, so do we.

What Happened to Alduous Huxley, by John Derbyshire
The New Criterion Vol. 21, No. 6, February 2003.

Back in London, I was having dinner in the Groucho Club—this week’s in-spot for what’s left of Britain’s lit gritz and nouveau rock riche—when one person started in on the Stars And Stripes. Eventually he got, as the Europeans always do, to the part about “your country’s never been invaded.” (This fellow had been two during the Blitz, you see.) “You don’t know the horror, the suffering. You think war is...”

I snapped.

“A John Wayne movie,” I said. That’s what you were going to say, wasn’t it? We think war is a John Wayne movie. We think life is a John Wayne movie—with good guys and bad guys, as simple as that. Well, you know something, Mister Limey Poofter? You’re right. And let me tell you who those bad guys are. They’re us. WE BE BAD.

We’re the baddest-ass sons of bitches that ever jogged in Reeboks. We’re three-quarters grizzly bear and two-thirds car wreck and descended from a stock market crash on our mother’s side. You take your Germany, France and Spain, roll them all together and it wouldn’t give us room to park our cars. We’re the big boys, Jack, the original, giant, economy-sized, new and improved butt kickers of all time. When we snort coke in Houston, people lose their hats in Cap D’Antibes. And we’ve got an American Express card credit limit higher than your piss-ant metric numbers go.

“You say our country’s never been invaded? You’re right, little buddy. Because I’d like to see the needle-dicked foreigners who’d have the guts to try. We drink napalm to get our hearts started in the morning. A rape and a mugging is our way of saying ‘Cheerio.’ Hell can’t hold our sock-hops. We walk taller, talk louder, spit further, fuck longer and buy more things than you know the names of. I’d rather be a junkie in a New York City jail than king, queen, and jack of all you Europeans. We eat little countries like this for breakfast and shit them out before lunch.”

Of course, the guy should have punched me. But this was Europe. He just smiled his shabby, superior European smile. (God, don’t these people have dentists?)

P.J. O’Rourke - Holidays in Hell

Who says I despair? That is to say, I would reverse Kierkegaard's aphorism that the worst despair is that despair which is unconscious of itself as despair, and instead say that the best despair and the beginning of hope is to be conscious of despair in the very air we breathe, and to look around for something better. I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That's despair?"

Walker Percy
"Surviving His Own Bad Habits".
DoubleTake Magazine. Previously unpublished.

The Hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky

Keith Windschuttle critiques the moral hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky's role as a leading apologist for the Pol Pot regime during the Cambodian genocide, and his condescending stance towards American casualties in 9/11:

Chomsky has declared himself a libertarian and anarchist but has defended some of the most authoritarian and murderous regimes in human history. His political philosophy is purportedly based on empowering the oppressed and toiling masses but he has contempt for ordinary people who he regards as ignorant dupes of the privileged and the powerful. He has defined the responsibility of the intellectual as the pursuit of truth and the exposure of lies, but has supported the regimes he admires by suppressing the truth and perpetrating falsehoods. He has endorsed universal moral principles but has only applied them to Western liberal democracies, while continuing to rationalize the crimes of his own political favorites. He is a mandarin who denounces mandarins. When caught out making culpably irresponsible misjudgments, as he was over Cambodia and Sudan, he has never admitted he was wrong.

Today, Chomsky’s hypocrisy stands as the most revealing measure of the sorry depths to which the left-wing political activism he has done so much to propagate has now sunk."

The Hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky, by Keith Windschuttle The New Criterion Vol. 21, No. 9, May 2003

So this is my new blog . . . at least, a fresh start.