Friday, August 27, 2004

Fun with intellectuals.
--
"Foucault, theocracy, fascism", by Bertram

Checking back years later, I'm reposting the comments here for my own records. I'd forgotten how quickly I lost patience, how stupid they were.
“I’m closer to the Golden Dawn
Immersed in Crowley’s uniform
Of imagery
I’m living in a silent film
Portraying
Himmler’s sacred realm
Of dream reality
I’m frightened by the total goal
Drawing to the ragged hole
And I ain’t got the power anymore
No I ain’t got the power anymore

I’m the twisted name
on Garbo’s eyes
Living proof of
Churchill’s lies
I’m destiny
I’m torn between the light and dark
Where others see their targets
Divine symmetry
Should I kiss the viper’s fang
Or herald loud
the death of Man
I’m sinking in the quicksand
of my thought
And I ain’t got the power anymore”
David Bowie: Quicksand
(From his national front days)

Foucault, like many European intellectuals, self-created homosexual dreamers, and "life as art” types from any country, was an anti-bourgeois bourgeois.

Marcel Duchamp (Pere Ubu with a sense of humor) called himself a monarchist. It’s Americans in their moralism who pretend you have to make a choice between left and right, when really it’s the middle classes that destroy everything. The Cambridge spies voted for Stalin because only a king could protect the innocent peasantry and all they represented, simple nobility etc. etc. etc. from all this modern crap.

When you play with these people, you’ve got to be aware of where they stand, which is “in between”. You can’t clean up Nietzsche, but you can learn from him. There are nihilists who grow up around power and who search for ways to destroy it and build nothing; and there are those who grow up around little, with no power, who learn from nihilists that things can be destroyed, and things made to replace them. And again, there are those who can’t make up their mind.
People learn in strange ways, and it’s easy to be right about things of no consequence.
--- 
All joking aside I find it odd that the choices offered here are between those who like Foucault and who therefore try to find ways to make him sound logically consistent, and those who do not like him, and feel the need to do the same.
I find that odd, and worse, I find it silly. The modern world brings with it a number of conflicts. Foucault responds to these and tries to face them.
By the logic put forth here, Shakespeare would be deemed a failure because he did not offer a logically consistent vision.
But oh yes, Foucault was an ‘intellectual’ and Shakespeare merely a playwright.

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