(np) so, where are the new French theorists?

[John Bailey]

Damn, that is one good read. Thank you brother Bailey.

On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 9:29 PM, Michael Bailey <mikebailey at gmx.us> wrote:
> http://libcom.org/library/give-it-away-david-graeber
>
> Quotha:
>
> ...theory and the 'Maussian Left'.
>
> Have you noticed how there aren't any new French intellectuals any more?
> There was a veritable flood in the late '70s and early '80s: Derrida,
> Foucault, Baudrillard, Kristeva, Lyotard, de Certeau ... but there has been
> almost no one since. Trendy academics and intellectual hipsters have been
> forced to endlessly recycle theories now 20 or 30 years old, or turn to
> countries like Italy or even Slovenia for dazzling meta-theory.
>
> There are a lot of reasons for this. One has to do with politics in France
> itself, where there has been a concerted effort on the part of media elites
> to replace real intellectuals with American-style empty-headed pundits.
> Still, they have not been completely successful. More important, French
> intellectual life has become much more politically engaged. In the U.S.
> press, there has been a near blackout on cultural news from France since the
> great strike movement of 1995, when France was the first nation to
> definitively reject the "American model" for the economy, and refused to
> begin dismantling its welfare state. In the American press, France
> immediately became the silly country, vainly trying to duck the tide of
> history.
>
> Of course this in itself is hardly going to faze the sort of Americans who
> read Deleuze and Guattari. What American academics expect from France is an
> intellectual high, the ability to feel one is participating in wild, radical
> ideas - demonstrating the inherent violence within Western conceptions of
> truth or humanity, that sort of thing - but in ways that do not imply any
> program of political action; or, usually, any responsibility to act at all.
> It's easy to see how a class of people who are considered almost entirely
> irrelevant both by political elites and by 99 percent of the general
> population might feel this way. In other words, while the U.S. media
> represent France as silly, U.S. academics seek out those French thinkers who
> seem to fit the bill.
>
> As a result, some of the most interesting scholars in France today you never
> hear about at all. One such is a group of intellectuals who go by the rather
> unwieldy name of Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste dans les Sciences Sociales, or
> MAUSS, and who have dedicated themselves to a systematic attack on the
> philosophical underpinnings of economic theory. The group take their
> inspiration from the great early-20th century French sociologist Marcel
> Mauss, whose most famous work, The Gift (1925), was perhaps the most
> magnificent refutation of the assumptions behind economic theory ever
> written. At a time when "the free market" is being rammed down everyone's
> throat as both a natural and inevitable product of human nature, Mauss' work
> - which demonstrated not only that most non-Western societies did not work
> on anything resembling market principles, but that neither do most modern
> Westerners - is more relevant than ever. While Francophile American scholars
> seem unable to come up with much of anything to say about the rise of global
> neoliberalism, the MAUSS group is attacking its very foundations....
> - Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l