2004-02-23 - 4:33 p.m.
may i just say that i love camille paglia ". she is one of the funniest, most lucid, and intriguing personalities i've come across in a couple of years. in some strange way, she reminds me of madalyn. that fabulous, feverish pitch of insight that see the idiocy in the world and cannot keep its mouth closed. i love it.
one of my favourite aspects of her is that she does not feel the need to cowtow to contemporary intellectual fads. and i love that she especially scorns the french. she writes: "foucault's biggest fans are not among the majority of philosophers, historians, and sociologist, who usually perceive his glaring inadequacies of knowledge and argument, but among well-meaning but foggy humanists, who virtually never have the intellectual and scholarly preparation to critique foucault compentently. the more you know, the less you are impressed with foucault"
or
"the followers of lacan, derrida, and foucault, far from being politcal and intellectual sophisticates, are the real fossilized reactionaries of our time. they seized on and dogged to death ideas that were totally passe in america well before 1970. foucault spoke of beckett's waiting for godot as the pivotal liberating experience of his generation of parisians, emerging from existentialism. when i saw the play in 1966 in college, i recognixed it as a repressive anxiety-formation of defunct modernites, which the sixties revolution, energized by rock, had swept completely away..."
or
"by what retrograde lace-curtain shrinking from reality did our acadeimics look to spinsterish french notions of the "decentered self"? of course the french felt decentered: they'd just been crushed by germany. american g.i.'s (including my uncles) got shot up rescuing france when she was lying flat on her face under the nazi boot. hence it is revolting to see pampered american academics down on their knees kissing french bums.
lacan, derrida, and foucault are the perfect prophets for the weak, anxious academic personality, trapped in verbal forulas and perennially defeated by circumsance. they offer a self-exculpating cosmic explanation for the normal professorial state of resentment, alienatation, dithery passivity, and inaction. their popularity illustrates the psychological gap between professors and students that has damaged so much undergraduate education. the disciples of lacan, derrida, and foucault are ignorant: ignorant of nineteenth-century intelectual history, which originated and developed their argumentss, and ignorant of america, which lept far beyond european thought from the moment we invented hollywood..."
or
"the followers of derrida are pathetic, snuffling in french pockets for bits and pieces of a deconstructive method already massively and coherently presented - and with a mature sense of the sacred - in buddhism and hinduism."
or
"the french, frolicking in their miniature stone garden, haven't had a cosmic thought since pascal."
or
"as a writer, foucault was an arrogant bastard. he did not believe in truth and so never sought it. his books, clumsily researched but overconfidently argued, show language-obessesd parisian parochialism become paranoia, delusional and obsessive-compulsive."
or
"you cannot trust a single fact in foucault. his books should be called foucault's diaries. they have no relationship to historical reality... they attract gameplaying minds with unresolved malice toward soceity, people who give lip service to rebellion but who lack the guts to actually rebel and pay the price. derrida is smack for the spirit, but foucault is the academic cocaine, the yuppie drug of choice of the seventies and eighties."
or
"foucault sees power everywhere except where it is greatest: the female principle. it is no suprise he attracts mostly men, who are always ready to believe that the verbal and rational explain everything."
or
"those who hurled themselves at derrida were not the most sophisticated but the most pedestrian, most pretentious, and the least creative members of my generation of academics..."
(sigh... i love this woman. though i have no doubt she's crazy...)
