Today, the self is the battlefield of politics. Blame The Beatles.

"Today, the self is the battlefield of politics. Blame Michel Foucault"

Intellectual history is fucking perverse.

Foucault’s last decade was marked by an increasing hostility to the post-war left and its ideas. Marxism, and what it represented in intellectual life (a strong state, universal social rights, control of the economy, the idea of revolution, etc.), became a target...

For the past few months I've been reading again and again that neoliberalism is opposed to government. 

Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, Lecture 11, 28 March 1979. 

What I think is fundamental in English empiricist philosophy—which I am treating completely superficially—is that it reveals something which absolutely did not exist before. This is the idea of a subject of interest, by which I mean a subject as the source of interest, the starting point of an interest, or the site of a mechanism of interests. For sure, there is a series of discussions on the mechanism of interest itself and what may activate it: is it self-preservation, is it the body or the soul, or is it sympathy? But this is not what is important. What is important is the appearance of interest for the first time as a form of both immediately and absolutely subjective will.

Shakespeare was dead before Locke was born. Philosophers have everything so fucking backwards.

Habermas, "Modernity: An Unfinished Project" 

The Young Conservatives essentially appropriate the fundamental experience of aesthetic modernity, namely the revelation of a decentred subjectivity liberated from all the constraints of cognition and purposive action, from all the imperatives of labour and use value, and with this they break out of the modern world altogether. They establish an implacable opposition to modernism precisely through a modernist attitude. They locate the spontaneous forces of imagination and self-experience, of affective life in general, in what is most distant and archaic, and in Manichaean fashion oppose instru­mental reason with a principle accessible solely to evocation, whether this is the will to power or sovereignty, Being itself or the Dionysian power for the poetic. In France this tradition leads from Georges Bataille through Foucault to Derrida. Over all these figures hovers, of course, the spirit of Nietzsche, newly resurrected in the 1970s.

The Old Conservatives do not allow themselves to be contaminated by cultural modernity in the first place.

That last line is absurd. Desire is not reality. 1600 is not 1830 is not 1960.

repeats: "pour Jean-Luc" 

A repeat from 2010. Capisce?