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https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/the...-the-cure/
EXCERPTS: In 2005, Alain Badiou argued that in the second half of the 20th century, there was a “French philosophical moment” comparable to the peaks of classical Greece and Enlightenment Germany. Badiou was not an impartial observer—he described himself as perhaps the era’s “last representative”—yet no one would seriously dispute that les trente glorieuses produced a blaze of intellectual activity that radiated around the world, transforming not only academic study but the wider cultural atmosphere. There, however, consensus stops.
[...] The writing of Jacques Derrida, meanwhile—for a time “the sexiest philosopher on the planet,” in the words of the literary critic Terry Eagleton—amounted less to a conventional contribution to philosophy than a thoroughgoing critique of its founding assumptions. “I never thought I had something to say philosophically,” Derrida reflected in 1991—and his example was chiefly followed by literary critics.
[...] One of the things that has always distinguished French theory is the extremity of its reception. Having achieved international prominence in the mid-1960s, theory underwent what the historian François Cusset describes as an “anarchic expansion” in the ’70s. Converts found it exhilaratingly radical and innovative, uncovering new techniques and areas of study, but Marxists, such as Jameson and Eagleton, were more skeptical. Others charged it with meretricious obscurity and dismissed its italicized neologisms and occasional quasi-mathematical formulae as a travesty of scientific inquiry.
Theory was a favored target of conservative philosophers in polemical mode. Roger Scruton wrote of “a boiling tide of nonsense” that would “eliminate the possibility of rational argument” and “annihilate meaning.” Alan Bloom, in his bestselling broadside The Closing of the American Mind (1987), accused the French theorists of abetting “the suppression of reason and the denial of the possibility of truth.”
The rehabilitative slant of Eakin’s and Erdur’s accounts indicates theory’s reputation has not recovered. To this day, Erdur writes, French theorists are accused of being “the intellectual originators of destructive social phenomena such as ‘fake news,’ ‘cancel culture,’ wokeness’ and ‘identity politics,’” suggesting that the record, more than two decades after the first postmortems began to appear, is still in need of straightening.
[...] In Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (1993), John Guillory argued that the embrace of French theory was the product of a larger crisis. The social value of a literary education was being eroded by the rise of a “professional-managerial class,” which was usurping the old bourgeoisie.
Theory appeared to present solutions: the technical fastidiousness of deconstruction mimicked “the technobureaucratic labor” of the ascendant PMC. It not only added a philosophical luster to the measly scrutiny of poems, it licensed the study of any “text,” to use the vogueish term, enlarging the embattled category of literature to colonize other fields, to the degree that literary study could seem not the fusty means to an obsolete sentimental education but the Ur-discipline underlying all the others.
[...] The origins of French theory are typically traced to Lévi-Strauss’s discovery in 1942 of Course in General Linguistics, a series of lectures delivered by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and published by his students in 1916 a few years after his death. Saussure studied language “synchronically”—not as it had evolved over time, or as it manifested in individual speech, but as a hermetic, structured system whose principal unit was the sign, composed of the “signifier” (sound-image) and the “signified” (denoted concept). The connection between these, he argued, was contingent and based in convention. Words do not have intrinsic meaning; sense is relational, an artifact of a word’s position in a system of differences: “cat” being distinct from “bat” and “mat” and so on.
Beginning with his technical tome The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949),Lévi-Strauss turned this conception of language into a way of interpreting non-linguistic phenomena, such as marriage customs. Structuralism was akin to a kind of Copernican revolution. Language preceded, determined, and all but displaced the “subject”—the autonomous human being, the Cartesian cogito, the political actor, the intending author—in what amounted to a repudiation of Sartre’s stress on the idea of individual freedom.
The goal of the human sciences, Lévi-Strauss declared in The Savage Mind (1962), was to “dissolve” Man––or as Althusser suggested in For Marx (1965), reduce the myth of man “to ashes.” Others transposed Saussure’s insights to their own specialisms, notably Barthes who, in a series of newspaper columns collected under the title Mythologies (1957), illustrated that everything from royal cruises to laundry detergent could be decoded as a sign-system.
But the authority of structuralism was soon thrown into question, when in 1966, Derrida, then a relatively unknown 36-year-old, derailed its launch party in the US—a splashy conference backed by the Ford Foundation and held at Johns Hopkins in 1966 to which he had been belatedly invited. His lecture “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” which closed the conference, was a “demolition job,” in Eakin’s words, of the paradigm pioneered by Lévi-Strauss (who was apparently invited but couldn’t make it), later mythologized as the dawn of post-structuralism..... (MORE - details)
EXCERPTS: In 2005, Alain Badiou argued that in the second half of the 20th century, there was a “French philosophical moment” comparable to the peaks of classical Greece and Enlightenment Germany. Badiou was not an impartial observer—he described himself as perhaps the era’s “last representative”—yet no one would seriously dispute that les trente glorieuses produced a blaze of intellectual activity that radiated around the world, transforming not only academic study but the wider cultural atmosphere. There, however, consensus stops.
[...] The writing of Jacques Derrida, meanwhile—for a time “the sexiest philosopher on the planet,” in the words of the literary critic Terry Eagleton—amounted less to a conventional contribution to philosophy than a thoroughgoing critique of its founding assumptions. “I never thought I had something to say philosophically,” Derrida reflected in 1991—and his example was chiefly followed by literary critics.
[...] One of the things that has always distinguished French theory is the extremity of its reception. Having achieved international prominence in the mid-1960s, theory underwent what the historian François Cusset describes as an “anarchic expansion” in the ’70s. Converts found it exhilaratingly radical and innovative, uncovering new techniques and areas of study, but Marxists, such as Jameson and Eagleton, were more skeptical. Others charged it with meretricious obscurity and dismissed its italicized neologisms and occasional quasi-mathematical formulae as a travesty of scientific inquiry.
Theory was a favored target of conservative philosophers in polemical mode. Roger Scruton wrote of “a boiling tide of nonsense” that would “eliminate the possibility of rational argument” and “annihilate meaning.” Alan Bloom, in his bestselling broadside The Closing of the American Mind (1987), accused the French theorists of abetting “the suppression of reason and the denial of the possibility of truth.”
The rehabilitative slant of Eakin’s and Erdur’s accounts indicates theory’s reputation has not recovered. To this day, Erdur writes, French theorists are accused of being “the intellectual originators of destructive social phenomena such as ‘fake news,’ ‘cancel culture,’ wokeness’ and ‘identity politics,’” suggesting that the record, more than two decades after the first postmortems began to appear, is still in need of straightening.
[...] In Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (1993), John Guillory argued that the embrace of French theory was the product of a larger crisis. The social value of a literary education was being eroded by the rise of a “professional-managerial class,” which was usurping the old bourgeoisie.
Theory appeared to present solutions: the technical fastidiousness of deconstruction mimicked “the technobureaucratic labor” of the ascendant PMC. It not only added a philosophical luster to the measly scrutiny of poems, it licensed the study of any “text,” to use the vogueish term, enlarging the embattled category of literature to colonize other fields, to the degree that literary study could seem not the fusty means to an obsolete sentimental education but the Ur-discipline underlying all the others.
[...] The origins of French theory are typically traced to Lévi-Strauss’s discovery in 1942 of Course in General Linguistics, a series of lectures delivered by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and published by his students in 1916 a few years after his death. Saussure studied language “synchronically”—not as it had evolved over time, or as it manifested in individual speech, but as a hermetic, structured system whose principal unit was the sign, composed of the “signifier” (sound-image) and the “signified” (denoted concept). The connection between these, he argued, was contingent and based in convention. Words do not have intrinsic meaning; sense is relational, an artifact of a word’s position in a system of differences: “cat” being distinct from “bat” and “mat” and so on.
Beginning with his technical tome The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949),Lévi-Strauss turned this conception of language into a way of interpreting non-linguistic phenomena, such as marriage customs. Structuralism was akin to a kind of Copernican revolution. Language preceded, determined, and all but displaced the “subject”—the autonomous human being, the Cartesian cogito, the political actor, the intending author—in what amounted to a repudiation of Sartre’s stress on the idea of individual freedom.
The goal of the human sciences, Lévi-Strauss declared in The Savage Mind (1962), was to “dissolve” Man––or as Althusser suggested in For Marx (1965), reduce the myth of man “to ashes.” Others transposed Saussure’s insights to their own specialisms, notably Barthes who, in a series of newspaper columns collected under the title Mythologies (1957), illustrated that everything from royal cruises to laundry detergent could be decoded as a sign-system.
But the authority of structuralism was soon thrown into question, when in 1966, Derrida, then a relatively unknown 36-year-old, derailed its launch party in the US—a splashy conference backed by the Ford Foundation and held at Johns Hopkins in 1966 to which he had been belatedly invited. His lecture “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” which closed the conference, was a “demolition job,” in Eakin’s words, of the paradigm pioneered by Lévi-Strauss (who was apparently invited but couldn’t make it), later mythologized as the dawn of post-structuralism..... (MORE - details)