I do think that Foucault's theories are quite applicable and expandable, though it's true that he can be pretty obscurantist. As the Chomsky essay notes, the history of French intellectualism that these guys come from is a very particular situation, something that even most of their non-French acolytes fail to appreciate. Most specifically, this whole generation of French theorists came of age around 1968.[1]
A whole lot can be deduced when you understand that France's intelligentsia at the time were largely structuralists who believed that history moved along rationally, according to an underlying structure. Post-structuralism as such was an attempt to reappropriate the happenings of 1968 as a "rupture", something that was new, unprecedented, unforeseen -- a real event. As Deleuze writes about it, the concept of an event is unintelligible in a structuralist sense, since a structuralist views an event as a mere surface-level phenomenon of a static underlying structure. I imagine if you went to Woodstock and told the hippies that nothing new was going on, but that their generation was the inevitable result of everything that went before them, they would similarly protest in the name of personal freedom.
It is unsurprising, then, that Derrida's work is much like the brooding of an intelligent teenager. All across the world, the Teenager came into his own in the late 1960s. Any adult of reasonable humility knows that a teenager can bring to light simple truths that the adult has grown accustomed to ignoring. And that is the value of Derrida. I agree with Chomsky that much of it is banal -- but so are most bits of wisdom.[2]
[2] The real shame of French Theory is more about the way it contributes to the already benighted state of humanities education in a professionalized capitalist society, which rewards specialization and competition and opens the way for obscurantist occultism as the easiest way to maintain a level of job security. Sigh...
Both you guys might enjoy this essay on Derrida. I've read a couple volumes of his work, and this is a very balanced view of it: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/mar/25/derrida-exc...
I do think that Foucault's theories are quite applicable and expandable, though it's true that he can be pretty obscurantist. As the Chomsky essay notes, the history of French intellectualism that these guys come from is a very particular situation, something that even most of their non-French acolytes fail to appreciate. Most specifically, this whole generation of French theorists came of age around 1968.[1]
A whole lot can be deduced when you understand that France's intelligentsia at the time were largely structuralists who believed that history moved along rationally, according to an underlying structure. Post-structuralism as such was an attempt to reappropriate the happenings of 1968 as a "rupture", something that was new, unprecedented, unforeseen -- a real event. As Deleuze writes about it, the concept of an event is unintelligible in a structuralist sense, since a structuralist views an event as a mere surface-level phenomenon of a static underlying structure. I imagine if you went to Woodstock and told the hippies that nothing new was going on, but that their generation was the inevitable result of everything that went before them, they would similarly protest in the name of personal freedom.
It is unsurprising, then, that Derrida's work is much like the brooding of an intelligent teenager. All across the world, the Teenager came into his own in the late 1960s. Any adult of reasonable humility knows that a teenager can bring to light simple truths that the adult has grown accustomed to ignoring. And that is the value of Derrida. I agree with Chomsky that much of it is banal -- but so are most bits of wisdom.[2]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_1968_events_in_France
[2] The real shame of French Theory is more about the way it contributes to the already benighted state of humanities education in a professionalized capitalist society, which rewards specialization and competition and opens the way for obscurantist occultism as the easiest way to maintain a level of job security. Sigh...