[Marxism] The playboy philosopher

["Charles Brown" <charlesb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ruthless Critic of All that Exists 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 2:12 PM, Charles Brown
<charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> wrote:
>
> Louis Proyect quoted:
>
>
> "You and your fellow Americans," he wrote, "should realize that BHL
is
> not a philosopher but a clown and a buffoon. You want real French
> philosophy, read Derrida, Foucault, Badiou, Baudrillard, if you are
a
> right winger, read Aron,
>
> ^^^
> CB: They are a bunch of clowns and harlequins , too.

This is just anti-intellectualism -- no better than Palin.

Badiou is a serious philosopher who was trained as a mathematician and
has done important work on the philosophical basis of set theory.

^^^
CB: I never really think of my self as anti-Intellectual. :>) But if
you say so.

 In the case of this group, I object to the distraction from Marxism
they seem to create in French intellectual life under the general rubric
of post-modernism and post-structuralism starting n the late 1960's and
early 70's.  So, it's anti- petit bourgeois revolutionist_
intellectuelle_.  Some of their stuff is very anit-intellectual,
anti-science intellectualism. There is some intelletual wrecking the
denial of the existence of objective reality. In a word, there is much
philosophical idealism in post-modernism and post-structuralism,
philosophical idealism in the sense that Engels and Lenin criticized it.
Post-modernism is a neo-Kantianism.

Why didn't they ( the French postologists) continue the tradition of
Sartre, if you want something with sources outside of Marxism. Sartre
had very good political views , and French ?




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