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02 Feb 2007 10:13 pm
Camille on Foucault
Inimitable:
Foucault-worship is an example of what I call the Big Daddy syndrome: Secular humanists, who have drifted from their religious and ethnic roots, have created a new Jehovah out of string and wax. Again and again -- in memoirs, for example, by trendy but pedestrian uber-academics like Harvard's Stephen Greenblatt and Brown's Robert Scholes -- one sees the scenario of Melancholy, Bookish, Passive, Insecure Young Nebbish suddenly electrified and transfigured by the Grand Epiphany of Blindingly Brilliant Foucault. This sappy psychodrama would be comic except for the fact that American students forced to read Foucault have been defrauded of a genuine education in intellectual history and political analysis (a disciplined genre that starts with Thucydides and flows directly to the best of today's journalism on current events).
American students, forget Foucault! Reverently study the massive primary evidence of world history, and forge your own ideas and systems. Poststructuralism is a corpse. Let it stink in the Parisian trash pit where it belongs!
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On Foucault Contra Paglia
Excerpt: Andrew Sullivan draws attention to this article by Camile Paglia in which she claims that American students should forget Foucault. I thing doing so is a mistake. We're just now starting to get over the simplistic readings of Foucault offered
Weblog: Dude, Where's My Enlightenment?
Tracked: Feb 3, 2007 1:21:56 AM
