The Body and Camille Paglia
https://www.salon.com/2000/03/04/inteltrad/
I agree with most of this. I do disagree with Paglia’s assertion that ALL French thought does not apply to North American Thinking. The French Quantitatively Oriented Philosophy which incorporates Canguilheim, Deleuze, Rene Thom, Benoit Mandelbrot, OULIPO and the Situationists, Dumezil, Braudel, the Annals School of historiography, and others is an extremely fertile field of inquiry. It meshes very well with American Pragmatism, McLuhan, et al.
A much better point that Paglia could have brought up was that the post-War French were dealing with their Vichy vs Maquis split. For those of you who don’t know about the Dubya Dubya Two, the French basically split into those who collaborated with the Nazis — the Vichy, and those who resisted the Nazis — the Maquis. A huge amount of Post War French thought was a consequence of dealing with the multiple traumas that the Second World War inflicted upon that country. Additionally, one can never forget that the French world was engulfed in Colonial Wars immediately upon the cessation of hostilities in WWII. The Vietnamese and Algerians were rather tired of being colonized by the French.The intellectual milleu of Post War France does not transfer to America in the 1970s. Deconstruction and Post- Structuralism especially does not transfer to 1970s America. But that’s beyond the scope of this little piece. Additionally, It’s funny that a bunch of monolinguals would say that everything is a language game, that all is socially constructed words. They’ve never had to point to unknown food and say “這個”， “哪個” and pray the lady understands in order to eat.
Two other asides:
- McLuhan was really the acolyte of the Jesuit philosopher, Walter Ong. The preoccupation with Weltanschauung/Cosmovision/世界觀 is deeply Jesuit, a result of the long Jesuit history of converting the non-European heathens to Pumpkin Spice-ism. I kid, but our Philosophy program at Loyola was split between the older school Phenomenologists/Pragmatists and the newer Bomb chucking Pomos. The P/Ps had developed a framework to teach philosophy which focused on Worldviews and we basically spent a good amount of time picking up a philosopher and deciding what shape he fit into — if he was a cup, he went into Classical world view. If he was a star, he went into Modern European. If he was a photon, he went into Contemporary. And if you could think any deeper than this, you weren’t going to Law School and Sandra Rosenthal would give you a B on your Epistemology papers. I was studying Philosophy because Loyola had phased out their Jim Morrison degree plan the year previous. (To my great frustration.) As such, I took the B and then looked at my Chinese textbooks and thought “I’ll fucking show you about Epistemology and Worldviews, you intellectual 10%er.”
- Barry Lord. Barry Lord was a bad motherfucker. I had a chance to catch a lecture of his at the Dallas Museum of Art about Art and Energy. He showed how Energy sources transform human culture. At first we were a wood and slavery culture, then came coal which gave us the work ethic, then came oil which gave us leisure, then came nuclear power which gave us anxiety, then came the carbon crisis which gave us deep existential dread yet also a sense of divinity. We have become as gods, we must get good at it.
