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Baudrillard vs. Foucault: Fight Night // 41 · PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy

• 0:09
  Welcome Patreons to Fight Night. You can tell by the new intro music this
• 0:16
  is something new. So we have referenced throughout this year many of the caddy
• 0:21
  spats between our favorite philosophers. Some of them are petty, some of them
• 0:26
  are personal, and some of them are actually theoretical, although that's probably the
• 0:30
  minority. But I'm thinking of Darryd versus fu Co Deluz versus Fuco Badiu versus
• 0:37
  delluzs dells dan Deli seems to get into these a lot, despite his reputation
• 0:44
  being as non confrontational and rather generous. But I don't know a lot of
• 0:48
  people write books about why he's wrong. But then we got Gatari versus lacan
• 0:52
  A Dono versus marcusa Boudriard versus everybody. There's versus Lacloud versus Judith Butler probably
• 1:02
  versus the early Jijiak Soon enough spevac grown against uh Darida is understanding of Mars.
• 1:08
  Anyway, there's an endless series that could be done here, and we're
• 1:11
  kicking it off today because it's also I think a good way of getting clear
• 1:15
  about what they're being spiteful about and where the actual confrontation lies, and it's
• 1:21
  a good way to learn some of the differences about their thinking. Any thoughts
• 1:26
  on that. Okay, so we're gonna do a series. We're gonna do
• 1:30
  a series. It might be interrupted by other stuff, but we thought we'd
• 1:34
  do something a little longer form, each dealing with one theorist criticizing another theorist.
• 1:41
  And if we don't get bored with it, we could go all the
• 1:42
  way back to Shelling versus Hegel. But today, as the title said,
• 1:47
  we're looking at Boudria versus Fuco. That one I actually find a bit sad,
• 1:52
  since they were like legit friends, not just like intellectual colleagues as it
• 1:57
  were, you know, their roommates for a little while, and then they
• 1:57
  broke apart. But I quick question, actually, and anyone can jump in
• 2:02
  here, Mike, get close to your face, look how far it is.
• 2:06
  But one of the weird things about academics is that academics are really very
• 2:10
  petty, spiteful, precious people for the most part. Like, I can't
• 2:15
  think of many academics who've handled being criticized in a serious way by someone else.
• 2:20
  Well. Usually the kind of visceral reaction is a combination of oh,
• 2:25
  you're not even good enough for me to respond to to and blocking you on
• 2:29
  Facebook and then that or or how dare you, you know, criticize my
• 2:34
  genius? Right? So I want to know, can anybody think of somebody
• 2:37
  who's handled legitimate criticism. Well, I'm not talking about like the petty insults,
• 2:43
  bad faith argumentation, but like somebody wrote a critique of their work and
• 2:46
  they responded with maybe not you know, I agree, but at least like
• 2:50
  this was interesting or I kind of can see where they're coming from. I
• 2:53
  take everything you just said as a personal attack on me, and I was
• 2:57
  intended refuse to respond. It is beneath me. Fuck you. One person
• 3:04
  criticized Darida it might have been Searle, and then Derreda responded by cutting up
• 3:10
  there the person's entire essay? Was it Searle? He cut up his entire
• 3:15
  essay and responded to him with only quotations from him woven together into an article.
• 3:24
  Yeah. No, it was the New York Review of Books. So
• 3:28
  I wrote a review of basically Derreta's whole uber and call them not quite a
• 3:31
  pseudo philosopher, but close to a pseudo philosopher. And this was shortly after
• 3:35
  the whole Cambridge controversy where a bunch of big analytic philosophers tried to keep dered
• 3:40
  Up from receiving an honorary degree from the institution. So to be fair,
• 3:45
  he was probably feeling a little bit attacked by that stream of though, I
• 3:51
  mean, you're already kind of setting yourself up for a little bit of a
• 3:53
  distorted perspective of these things by taking these sorts of very well publicized and like
• 4:00
  event like like encounters between big famous academics as anything like an indication of how
• 4:09
  they get along or how their ideas are actually formed. Like a lot of
• 4:12
  these communities of French writers like whatever you got, you got Boudriard, Darida,
• 4:16
  Bart's, Buco Deluz and Gottari. It's more like a it's like a
• 4:20
  community of philosophers that are developing all these ideas between each other. Like these
• 4:26
  moments are like exclamation points the like punctuate the development of French theory. But
• 4:32
  I don't I think they're very superficial in terms of like indicative of these people's
• 4:36
  like intellectual developments or I mean, of course you hear about things like they
• 4:42
  fall they have fallings out, they stop talking to each other. They quit
• 4:46
  the French Communist Party, which is a pretty radical gesture for a French intellectual.
• 4:49
  But I mean, I don't I don't think it has a whole lot
• 4:54
  of bearing. Did you know I only learned this from reading the introduction to
• 4:58
  the book today, which is Forget Fuco antagonistically titled. But Bodriard and Gautari
• 5:04
  were in the same Maoist group. Ply, Oh yeah, I did not
• 5:11
  know that. Yeah, there's always these interesting connections between them. Yeah,
• 5:15
  the introduction brings up a couple they work together here and there. I was
• 5:19
  just gonna say, there's only three examples of like an academic spat I know
• 5:25
  of where people handled it with grace, and maybe people can come up with
• 5:27
  another one. There was Malthus and Riccardo in the nineteenth century, since apparently,
• 5:31
  despite the fact that they criticized each other religiously, they were actually best
• 5:36
  friends. They were put that aside when they hung out with one another.
• 5:40
  Then there was Habermass actually with Dered and then later on with Rawls. Apparently
• 5:46
  Dered and Harbermass got along pretty well near the end despite like attacking each other
• 5:49
  for years. And then I guess the last one will probably be Ralls and
• 5:57
  Noasick. So Noasick was a big libertarian thingker and analytic circles. But yeah,
• 6:01
  he brought a lot of criticisms of Rawls. Rolls apparently liked the work,
• 6:05
  went back and forth and they're okay with it, Like if people think
• 6:09
  of anything else, well, Darry does known and Alas I guess are there
• 6:13
  known for being not too egoist. Yeah, I've heard compared to Fucot,
• 6:18
  who will read being criticized today. I heard. I heard that about dere
• 6:23
  To too, Like I I heard that he was like when people were being
• 6:26
  generous or engaging with his work, he tend to be pretty generous back with
• 6:30
  with people like I know he would like he would hang out with with I
• 6:33
  think a few different interpreters of him who disagreed with each other, but he
• 6:39
  would like still like so I'm thinking about the Christian one who's who's at Villanova
• 6:44
  what's his name? And then and then she and then I think he would
• 6:48
  also hang out with the other guy like Michael, like Nas or nas or
• 6:51
  something like that, and they both like hated each other, I think,
• 6:54
  but Dereda would like correspond with both of them. Anyway, Yeah, Jess,
• 6:59
  because they're theorists doesn't mean they are above petty rivalries. I think that
• 7:03
  they're enjoy petty rivalries precisely because of their theorists. It might be incorrect that
• 7:08
  they actually hated each other, but I just know that both of those interpreters
• 7:11
  disagreed about what they thought. Derek ha thought I think, and then but
• 7:14
  like, I think he would still give them both time to time of day.
• 7:15
  It's funny. I posted a meme today about Hegel. It's a guy
• 7:19
  trying to pick up a girl by quoting Hegel, And somebody said, like,
• 7:23
  isn't that a little really unrealistic? But people actually talk about Hegel during
• 7:26
  a date. And I was like, One, I've done it with my
• 7:29
  wife, so it is definitely possible. But number two, I'm like,
• 7:31
  I don't think you understand how seriously people will take the interpretation of Hegel.
• 7:35
  Like I was at a conference once where after a couple of years how to
• 7:40
  interpret the phenomenology of Spirit almost led to people to come to blows with one
• 7:44
  another, like they were fucking yelling and screaming and livid about how to read
• 7:48
  this book. So my people can actually get really fucking engaged by this shit,
• 7:53
  Yeah, for sure. And I guess we're bringing this all up obviously
• 7:55
  because I don't like, I think as a result of this book, right,
• 7:59
  forget Fuko was like quite a rift. I mean, I don't know
• 8:01
  the full background of the story, but I think like Baudriard was kind of
• 8:05
  shunned by the French intellectual circles. Is that right? Well, you can't
• 8:09
  come at fucout in the seventies. He's at College de France, the premier
• 8:16
  school. He's kine shit, still friends with the Liz at this point,
• 8:20
  and he's enjoying also celebrity. So Bodriard Younger, the iconoclast, extraordinary.
• 8:28
  He's relatively unknown or not nearly as popular anyway, but he comes at the
• 8:33
  King with an article entitled, as I said, forget Fuco. And the
• 8:39
  easiest way to draw ire from Bodriard in the first place is to be a
• 8:43
  celebrity all at all. Sure, let alone one that talks about power.
• 8:48
  So what's is that, Wright, Pills, I'm hoping the matrix and stuff,
• 8:52
  right, So, Pills, I'm hoping you can kind of explain the
• 8:54
  argument to me from this, because I mean, I got I think I
• 8:58
  got the basic outline from bringing the entry reduction and the and the and the
• 9:01
  text, but you know, I did, I did. I was reminded
• 9:03
  because I guess I haven't been reading French philosophy lately. I was very much
• 9:07
  viscerally reminded of the obtuseness of sometimes the way there's a lot of you know,
• 9:11
  there's the typical thing where there's like meanderings and like like kind of like
• 9:16
  mentioning different views of different things, and like you can't really tell if it's
• 9:20
  his view or if he's like presenting someone else's view. And he's clearly talking
• 9:22
  about ideas of other philosophers without naming them a few times, like I think
• 9:28
  a lot of Delusian concepts come up. I think, if I'm not mistaken,
• 9:31
  which I don't read Delas, never read Dela's, so like that stuff
• 9:33
  was it was unclear whether he was presenting Foucaut's views, Deluz's views, or
• 9:37
  his views. I don't help me out here. I was shocked how clear
• 9:41
  this was, at least compared to his later work. But he's much more
• 9:48
  direct about what his arguments are than something like the go forward never took place.
• 9:54
  I also want to say that this is most French essay I've ever fucking
• 9:56
  read, like far and away, since it literally included a phrase like the
• 10:01
  political economy of the phallis and I'm like, only a French philosopher you could
• 10:05
  buy and revolution and sex together into a phrase like that, like the twin
• 10:09
  obsessions. Oh yeah, about a third of it is about pornography, so
• 10:13
  yeah. Right. It also opens saying Fuco's writing is perfect. Oh yeah,
• 10:18
  that's true. That was interesting, which is a very interesting Only he
• 10:22
  could use perfect as an insult. Well, that's what I was just going
• 10:26
  to say, without I didn't. I read the introduction after reading the main
• 10:28
  text, and I noticed, and to me, without knowing, obviously,
• 10:31
  it did immediately come across as sarcastic to me at the beginning. I don't
• 10:35
  know if that was correct or not. No, I think he means it's
• 10:39
  literally too perfect, which is too perfect, which is why doesn't because it
• 10:41
  seduces you with its perfection. It's a perfect it's a perfect reflection of the
• 10:46
  phenomenon that he's trying to explain, which for Bogiard is a sign that what
• 10:52
  he's actually trying to explain is probably something like dead and irrelevant. Now,
• 10:56
  well, you can definitely tell that when reading Puko's books, right, Like
• 11:00
  my understanding of him as a kind of theorist, all right, like his
• 11:03
  meth is approach, right, was that he was a bit of per perfectionist.
• 11:05
  Right. We would apparently spend hours and hours in various libraries researching his
• 11:09
  topics and write and rewrite his text and you can really see that, right.
• 11:13
  Uh, Victor was making fun of French philosophy earlier, and I one
• 11:16
  hundred percent sympathized with. But you read for Cooe's books and there's actually a
• 11:20
  lot of literary virtues to them, right. Well, Co's way clearer than
• 11:24
  this. Yeah. Coe's writing is generally pretty clear, I think, I
• 11:26
  mean when it comes to it, when you on balance, like thinking about
• 11:30
  French philosophy, generally, it's pretty easy, I think. Yeah. And
• 11:33
  it has like vivid phrases, right, Like everybody remembers the intro to discipline
• 11:37
  and punish, everybody remembers, you know, the History of Sexuality Volume one,
• 11:41
  where he's like we must cut off the head of the king. People
• 11:45
  really remember, you know, the panopticon and stuff about knowledge power, Like
• 11:48
  he was very precise and pretty in the way that he constructed his books and
• 11:52
  his articles. I find it all pretty difficult. Yeah, so pills like
• 11:58
  help helped me out here. You know, what's what do you what do
• 12:01
  you take to be the main argument? And then and then I'm going to
• 12:03
  see if what you say is what I took away from it or not.
• 12:07
  Well, I thought, I we haven't really talked on this podcast about May
• 12:11
  sixty eight yet, so I was seeing this in the context of May sixty
• 12:15
  eight, So should I just explain the thesis or talk about May sixty eight
• 12:20
  first? Whatever? Yeah, maybe whatever you think makes the most sense.
• 12:24
  Okay. So after May sixty eight there was a big general strike in mainly
• 12:31
  Paris, and it was looking like there could be a communist overthrow of the
• 12:35
  de Gal government. And it was crucial for the French left because all the
• 12:39
  guys that we talk about, they were young, a lot younger than we
• 12:43
  know them from the heights of their careers. But they're all in like various
• 12:46
  communist parties, some more Maoists, some more Marxist Leninists, and there was
• 12:52
  a quite powerful French Communist party. It wasn't winning elections, but it was
• 12:58
  like it was relevant. So there's a general general strike largely of students and
• 13:05
  the trade unions, and we don't need to go into too much detail here,
• 13:09
  but the radicals wanted to overthrow the government or call an election and the
• 13:15
  Communist Party. This or the way that the French left academic left felt was
• 13:22
  that the Communist Party betrayed the students because it settled for wage increases for workers
• 13:30
  rather than like revolution. So they radicals felt betrayed because they had all this
• 13:35
  energy. People were in the streets, barricading buildings and all that, and
• 13:39
  the Communist Party sold them out. So to them this was symbolically the left
• 13:46
  dying in France or the radical left dying in France. So then the response
• 13:52
  in theory to this, you can kind of tell is people don't really know
• 13:56
  whether they're Marxists anymore unless you're like, sorry, but everyone else is trying
• 14:00
  to figure out, Okay, what do we do to be Marxists now that
• 14:05
  the Marxist Party in France is a LIB party basically, and obviously Fucot has
• 14:13
  one sort of answer to that. Delusive Guitari and anti Oedipus have one sort
• 14:18
  of answer to that. Boudriard attacks both of them. So this is against
• 14:24
  both delusing Gatari and Fucat, mainly Fucot because his previous book was more against
• 14:30
  de losing Guitari. But you have to read this entire paper through desire.
• 14:35
  What is desire is the is it the psychoanaly psychoanalysis desire of lack or is
• 14:41
  it the Delu's desire of production? And this is what his main criticism of
• 14:46
  Fucout is here is Fuco doesn't have any desire, He has no location for
• 14:50
  desire in this subject because all there is is power. And this is why
• 14:56
  he criticizes this text for being two or it's basically Fuco's history of sexuality is
• 15:03
  the main reference. But he says it's too perfect because Fuko has this wide
• 15:07
  ranging analysis. Bodyard calls it a spiral that starts at the widest possible social
• 15:15
  layer, like actual institutions, institutions, the church, psychiatric institutions that define
• 15:22
  or they proliferate power, and this goes all the way down to the individual
• 15:28
  where you internalize power. And that's just what happens from top to bottom in
• 15:35
  a system of power. And that's what's too perfect, right, there's no
• 15:39
  cracks. Reality is complete it's power from the macrocosmic to the microcosmic. You
• 15:46
  can't make any actions in the world because it's all just power anyway. So
• 15:50
  if power is everything, then it's not really anything. And Bodyard's quite incisive
• 15:58
  remark here is that he's just just decribing capital, except he's mirroring capital,
• 16:03
  and describing capital is no longer revolutionary activity. It's just mirroring the status quo.
• 16:10
  And he says, actually, the same thing about Dilla is that Dellas
• 16:11
  wants to turn everything into flows, movement, productivity. Well, that's the
• 16:15
  same thing that capitalism does. So Boldyard's out radicalizing them, I think is
• 16:22
  his goal, and saying you're just copying the world around you and admitting defeat.
• 16:26
  Basically, yeah, I think. In setting the context, the introductory
• 16:33
  essays says that in reference to the sixty eight rebellion, it says the introducer
• 16:41
  says, here, the student rebellion has proved at least one thing the French
• 16:45
  Communist Party, trade unions, in the working class, the entire institutional left
• 16:51
  had ceased to be revolutionary. The communist bureaucracy had not thrown its might on
• 16:56
  the side of the student revolt. Instead, it pressed the siege government for
• 17:00
  salary increases. Then it goes on to say, no wonder French Post sixty
• 17:06
  eight thinkers like Boudriard looked elsewhere for revolutionary alternatives. Failing to enlist their allies,
• 17:14
  they resolved to sleep with the enemy. And I think a little bit
• 17:17
  of this perfection that he's talking about the way it just sort of mirrors the
• 17:22
  functioning of power in actual societies. That's this idea of sleeping with the enemy.
• 17:29
  It's almost like a new move Instead of starting a movement where we take
• 17:33
  it down, we almost like penetrate inside and try to sort of mimic the
• 17:38
  flow of Like I guess this is more Boudriard's argument, but what they're doing
• 17:42
  is mimicking the flow of power and the flow of desire as a kind of
• 17:48
  flow of capital. Yeah, I want to say, I thought this was
• 17:52
  a really well done essay. Actually I have issues with it, and I
• 17:56
  don't think it's true Difficolt's thought, but it does land some hits, and
• 18:00
  we can get into why later on. But what I want to say is
• 18:03
  I usually, for my own interpretation of a co draw on Thomas Lemke's book
• 18:07
  The Theory of governmentality in Michellfuco's writing where he tends to periodize for Co and
• 18:12
  says, look, Pico had this early archaeological period where he's talking about how
• 18:17
  knowledge forms itself into discourses and language. Then later on he has a genealogical
• 18:22
  period that becomes more overtally Nietzschean, where he talks about how it is that
• 18:26
  discourse instantiates itself in very material kinds of power, you know, disciplinary power,
• 18:32
  biopolitics, et cetera, et cetera. And then there's a final phase
• 18:34
  into his work, which is an ethical turn and formulations on the subject,
• 18:41
  right, how it is that power now creates certain kind of subjects who might
• 18:45
  be able to internalize various forms of subjugation, or they might be able to
• 18:51
  be transformed into subjects who have the right ethos to engage in projects of self
• 18:56
  creation. Right. And I think lem case periodization is really helped. But
• 19:00
  one of the things that comes across it is that from reading fut Code this
• 19:03
  way is that Bojiar's kind of right. For Co almost had a perfect career,
• 19:07
  right, everything fits together. You can see the clear developments in his
• 19:11
  work, and he really comes across looking a little bit like a hedge or
• 19:15
  sorry, a hedgehog in the classy in Berlinian typology, right, somebody who's
• 19:18
  able to fit every aspect of reality into this ever encompassing system. And I
• 19:23
  think it's not a coincidence that he was good friends for a little while with
• 19:26
  the Loz, who of the major post structuralist thinkers, is the only other
• 19:30
  one I can think of who really comes close to building something like a classical
• 19:33
  philosophical system, right, which Coke often comes close as well, And Bodyard
• 19:38
  in this essay comes across very differently, right, He's much more of a
• 19:42
  foxy character. It's much harder to pin down his work in any way.
• 19:47
  He wrote many, many different books, plenty of which are quite imperfect,
• 19:52
  but you can always kind of see his ideas on the run and developing.
• 19:55
  And he seems to almost be reacting viscerally against the systematic aspiry uh and the
• 20:00
  architectonic mode of thought that he stile the text as being present in Fukuo's thinking.
• 20:07
  So I think it might not even not necessarily just be a philosophical issue,
• 20:11
  but even an aesthetic kin a personal one. Right. He just doesn't
• 20:14
  like this way of looking at things and Interestingly, Fukuo said when because Bodria
• 20:22
  kind of ran this by him before he published it, and Fukuo said he
• 20:26
  would respond. He didn't apparently got pitsy about it and didn't respond to it.
• 20:30
  The other criticism that he never responded to is Darry does and Darida just
• 20:36
  said that Fuco's reinstantiating metaphysics with this power thing, because what is If it's
• 20:41
  everything, then it's not anything and you can't deconstruct it. So those are
• 20:45
  the two critiques. I think, Victor you said, these are the two
• 20:48
  critiques that he never responded to, and they are saying much the same thing.
• 20:53
  I wanted to give one quote that I think sums it up. He
• 20:57
  says say is actually you can tell in here it's a critique of both Deluz
• 21:03
  and Fucot at the same time. So we actually had a quick question before
• 21:06
  you give the quote. I was just wondering, pills because I, as
• 21:08
  a non Deluzian like I was wondering when I was reading this, is it
• 21:11
  a coincidence that both Delus and Fucot call themselves Nietzscheans that like that like,
• 21:17
  But Beaudriard's critique is both at targeting them or is that just kind of incidental.
• 21:22
  H Well, I think Bauderard is very Nietzschean also, I would say,
• 21:27
  but I guess, I guess it depends on what part of Nietzsche you're
• 21:30
  talking about, because you can also talk about a Nietzschean metaphysics two or a
• 21:37
  his or the historiography of Nietzsche and Baudyard is much more like we need to
• 21:44
  have to disenchant our theory, I would think. So that's one Nietzschean impulse
• 21:51
  as opposed to let's, uh, let's trace the history of morality, which
• 21:56
  is kind of Fucao's approach, right, okay, okay, weeah the uh
• 22:00
  the uh. One who wrote the introduction to this silver Lotringer suggests that Boudriard
• 22:07
  was trying to get out Nietzsche Fuco in some ways. Here. Let me
• 22:12
  give this one quote because it's It shows his attack on both Deluz and Fucaut
• 22:18
  at the same time. This compulsion, oh, this is bodyard. By
• 22:21
  the way, this compulsion towards liquidity flow and an accelerated circulation of what is
• 22:26
  psychic sexual or pertaining to the body is the exact replica of the force which
• 22:33
  rules market value. Capital must circulate gravity, and any fixed point must disappear.
• 22:38
  The chain of investments and reinvestments must never stop. Value must radiate endlessly
• 22:45
  and in every direction. So in saying that, Bodiard is saying both Deluz's
• 22:55
  desire delusion, Guitari's desire excuse me, and Fucaut's power is this kind of
• 23:00
  endless, unbounded reproduction of itself. And that means that there's no way inside
• 23:07
  or no way outside of it. So they're really just writing about the thing
• 23:11
  that they should be trying to do violence against. So Boyard, as an
• 23:15
  iconoclast, he thinks the goal of theory is violence against the status quo,
• 23:21
  whereas he's saying that these two are just reproducing the status quo. That's interesting
• 23:26
  to me. And the reason there's no desire in Fucou is because power plays
• 23:32
  that role. That's kind of what he says. He says, they're the
• 23:33
  same thing. You can you can interchange them, the and the there's a
• 23:38
  nice metaphor in the introduction that the exchange value between the two is almost nothing.
• 23:45
  Yeah, just didn't like that at all. He didn't like hearing that.
• 23:48
  Yeah, like you can just take one out for the other and there's
• 23:51
  nothing gained or lost, which is a kind of interesting way to look at
• 23:55
  theories. If all these theories sort of become these detached loading signifiers that only
• 24:00
  just reference each other and there's no you know, exchange value between them,
• 24:07
  as we would think of exchange value as being between the Canadian dollar and the
• 24:11
  American dollar and the Australian and whatever. If there's no if there's no exchange
• 24:15
  value, then there's no kind of motivation to move between currencies because they're all
• 24:21
  just kind of the same thing. It's kind of it's a pretty it's a
• 24:23
  pretty bad uh diss I'd say, well, that's funny because like that is
• 24:27
  sometimes that is Like I thought that was one of the more interesting parts of
• 24:32
  the essay just because that's something that I think anyone who reads a lot of
• 24:36
  different theory like will come across thinking like, okay, like in this theory,
• 24:38
  like what role is this concept playing that is being played? You know,
• 24:42
  Like I even just think of a Mary Lea Pontian like the habit body,
• 24:45
  and it's like, you know, how is that It's like a different
• 24:48
  level of description for what like Fuco might be talking about with the way that
• 24:52
  power is like is like is whatever put onto bodies? You know? And
• 24:57
  it's like there's just different levels of describing the same thing. And I think
• 25:00
  that's like a worthwhile philosophical exercise in general to like figure out what the exchange
• 25:06
  value is and in that sense, like you know, what new is actually
• 25:08
  being provided by this different way of framing the phenomenon of like social interactions in
• 25:15
  the world, Like what's actually being added, if anything at all, or
• 25:18
  is it just a different word to describe something that's already being described in another
• 25:22
  theory. So yeah, I thought that was interesting. I'm not sure where
• 25:25
  I stand because, as I said, I haven't really read to Liz,
• 25:26
  so I don't know how much of a role or how similar the role is
• 25:30
  that desire is playing indulas as power is in FUCO. This is what I
• 25:36
  want to say, like just response actually did what Eric was saying and drawing
• 25:40
  upon a budget ozone work on you know, signs and the kind of way
• 25:45
  that signs speak to each other and starting with the simulacron simulacrom right, because
• 25:49
  Pill's mentioned at the beginning that all these different figures are going to respond to
• 25:52
  me sixty eight in a fundamental way. And it's worth noting that this is
• 25:56
  around the time when all of them released their first major world So Baugyard released,
• 26:02
  you know, towards the political economy of the Sign, you know,
• 26:04
  the system of Objects. In nineteen sixty eight, for Co released History of
• 26:08
  Madness, dreda release of Gymatology. I think it was in sixty eight,
• 26:14
  wasn't it or sixty six round that time. So you know, they all
• 26:17
  burst onto the scene, and they all start to adopt this very punk attitude
• 26:21
  towards the events of May nineteen sixty eight, whereas pil said, they become
• 26:23
  increasingly iconoclastic. Right. You know, you have for Co with his leather
• 26:27
  jacket talking constantly about power Deliuz, referencing things like the American beat poets and
• 26:33
  the potential they have to give you a kind of vision of an emancipated life.
• 26:37
  But I don't think anybody went as far in an almost nihilistic direction as
• 26:41
  somebody like Bauyard. And I mean that in a positive sense. You know,
• 26:45
  I'm not being pejorative here, because the sense that I got from reading
• 26:49
  this essay is that for Co, for all, he becomes a kind of
• 26:52
  punk criticizing conventional materialism is still attracted to this idea that we need to analyze
• 26:59
  society in terms of power dynamics and commit ourselves to one emanspiatory politics of self
• 27:04
  creation. That's still this kind of ethical project underpinning it, and a kind
• 27:08
  of residual belief that history can be changed by restructuring society. But of course,
• 27:15
  you know, you see somebody like Boudryard. He was always unafraid of
• 27:18
  saying things like, look, there's all these French philosophers talking about why we
• 27:19
  need to protest the golf war. The golf war never happened, right,
• 27:22
  it occurred on TV. He had this famous expression when he was asked to
• 27:26
  kind of give a report on the war. He said, well, I
• 27:29
  don't want to go to Saudi Arabia to report on the golf war. I
• 27:33
  want to watch it on CNN because that's where the war is actually going to
• 27:36
  be waged, you know, in the television sets of the American people.
• 27:40
  Right. And it's very easy to see why he would kind of take this
• 27:45
  hyper iconoclastic, almost cheerfully nihilistic standpoint if you read his work right, the
• 27:49
  kind of struggles for emanspetation that earlier materialists, including himself in system objects wanted
• 27:56
  to commit themselves to is predicated on the belief that we can actually change real
• 28:00
  social relations. But we've now gone away from that. We've entered into a
• 28:03
  hyper real realm, when we're never going to be able to get connection to
• 28:07
  reality again and be able to change it. All that we're left now with
• 28:11
  is the opportunity to manipulate different kinds of signs in different ways. Right.
• 28:15
  Some of them might be more creative, some of them might be less creative.
• 28:18
  But that's what we're left with in our kind of postmodern era. Right,
• 28:22
  Well, idea, but it's kind of it's very tantalizing. Right,
• 28:26
  you're forgetting about the whole idea of symbolic exchange, because one thing that capitalist
• 28:30
  societies do not know how to do is symbolize death. They only symbolize it
• 28:37
  as a nothing. Where he said we can if we can resuscitate death,
• 28:41
  it can't be exchanged for anything. Oh that's right, Yeah, yeah,
• 28:44
  that's a really interesting thing because he ta he takes some cues from the anthropologist
• 28:49
  Marcel mouse Right. I think that's how you pronounce his name. Who did
• 28:53
  a guess? I guess he did some ethnography of was it Northwestern American Aboriginal
• 29:02
  peoples and and the thing he called the potlash? Which was which which was
• 29:07
  the I'm going to terribly explain it, but it's this sort of this idea
• 29:12
  within their society and how symbolic exchange works, of somebody being ready to exchange
• 29:18
  everything to die in a sense within as as part of the conditions of the
• 29:26
  exchange, whereas that sort of thing is is unfamiliar to capitalist modes of exchange.
• 29:32
  I don't know if anyone can step in and do a way better job
• 29:36
  than I just did of talking about potlash. Well, it's the Yeah,
• 29:40
  it's a gift. It's a gift in which things are not equivalent, whereas
• 29:45
  capitalism makes everything equivalent to itself. Everything can be you know, bought,
• 29:51
  but also in a theoretical sense, everything can be represented. And then you
• 29:53
  get these theorists that are supposedly anti capitalism, and you can just exchange all
• 29:59
  there concepts between each other. Two. So if we had a true understanding
• 30:03
  of death back then we could actually do violence to the system. He writes
• 30:10
  about terrorism or like theoretical terrorism on his book of the Two Towers, and
• 30:15
  he wants to be a theoretical terrorist because you can't exchange it for anything.
• 30:21
  Yeah, it's action worth. Just sorry, I just be very quick juxtaposing
• 30:25
  his work against a Dorna on Horkimer. We all know how a dorna on
• 30:27
  Horkimer despised Disney. Right saw Disney is a very dangerous figure, the main
• 30:32
  proponent of the culture industry, who was peddling tripe that was convincing people not
• 30:37
  to emancipate themselves but instead to kind of liquidate their critical consciousness in various forms
• 30:44
  of one dimensional entertainment. Bogerard apparently went to Disney World and said that euro
• 30:48
  disney World, and he said that he loved it. Right, He's like,
• 30:52
  why would I want to go to Europe If I could go to euro
• 30:53
  Disneyland, you know, the food is better. I can go to Belgium,
• 30:56
  France, Italy all in the course of five minutes. It's cheaper than
• 31:00
  having to travel around. And again, you know, this might seem like
• 31:04
  a kind of trite observation, and it's definitely quirky and funny, but I
• 31:07
  think it really goes to show you how deeply skeptical he was of this idea.
• 31:11
  That anything like orthodox critical theory could now get us out of the trap
• 31:15
  that we're in. There's no point of being cynical about Disneyland any longer.
• 31:18
  The way that adorna On Harkheimer was because we are faced with the disney vocation,
• 31:23
  not just of our culture any longer, but the diminic disneyfication of all
• 31:27
  relations within our life according to the logic of exchange value. Well, you
• 31:33
  can see his posthuman bent in this. We don't know how to die anymore.
• 31:37
  We don't know how to die because our entire cities are cities of death.
• 31:42
  They're all necropolis's, he says. What is a necropolis exactly, just
• 31:48
  the cemetery district where you do burials and rituals related to death. Oh,
• 31:55
  those big Williams pills. Earlier you were saying about that, Like, you
• 31:59
  know, Fucout and Delus are supposedly kind of like reproducing a description that is
• 32:05
  like consistent I guess with the flows of capital. And I'm wondering, is
• 32:09
  this critique like because I guess, you know, as being someone who who
• 32:15
  is like early inspired to do continental philosophy from phenomenology and existentialism, and you
• 32:22
  know, I guess there's a there's a tension maybe in like what is philosophy
• 32:24
  is supposed to be doing? Is it supposed to be a descriptive endeavor or
• 32:28
  is it supposed to be like somehow a normative like inherently a normative endeavor?
• 32:30
  And maybe I'm maybe I'm I'm missing misunderstanding this, but you know, is
• 32:36
  it is it Bojiyard's viewer? It sounds from what you're saying that Bogiard's view
• 32:38
  is that philosophy must be trying to undermine the existing structures. Therefore, just
• 32:45
  like, just so, even if Fucau is describing that power is flowing in
• 32:47
  this way, that is an accurate description to some extent of the way the
• 32:52
  world is. It's like, is Fucaut is is Bojiyard's claim that by describing
• 32:55
  it you're somehow reinforcing it? And if that's the case, that seems range
• 33:00
  to me. But capitalism and Schizophrenia, I mean it's in the title,
• 33:02
  right of course it's about capitalism. But I think back to the sixty eight
• 33:09
  thing. His what he's upset about is that they all they're all pretending like
• 33:15
  they're radicals. They pretend like they're writing against the system. We're going to
• 33:20
  bring it down and that's their intention. And this is like Fucaut's personality.
• 33:25
  He's like, oh, he's the he's the ultimate punk, kind of like
• 33:29
  Matt said, but he's not. If that's the case, then he's just
• 33:32
  what Bojiared call. He says in this he's the mirror. The mirror of
• 33:37
  capitalism is just uh Fucau's theory. And because it's so perfect, that's pretending
• 33:44
  like capitalism is perfect, like it doesn't have cracks in it, like it
• 33:47
  can't be resisted, like it can exchange everything for everything. So if that's
• 33:52
  your if that's your attitude, then I think he would think that's counter revolutionary
• 33:55
  and not what theory is supposed to be doing. Right, Okay, so
• 33:59
  it is supposed to be somehow revolutionary. And I mean it's interesting because I
• 34:01
  do remember when I was reading Foucou you know that that there is a lot
• 34:06
  like I remember a lot of students in the seminar that I was in.
• 34:08
  You know, there is kind of an under like the tone that Fouqut uses
• 34:12
  right when he's describing power. It's very ominous and it's got it's like very
• 34:16
  scary. It's got a normative bent to it, but ultimately, like it
• 34:20
  really is a description. Oh, Driard says that, yeah, he describes
• 34:22
  it as truth. And you know, when you read the description at least
• 34:27
  in you know, discipline and punish and some of and some of his other
• 34:29
  stuff around the same time, right, it really does kind of sound like
• 34:32
  there's no way of getting out of it, right, even though he's talking
• 34:36
  about these these power and these dynamics in a way that makes it sound like
• 34:39
  it's bad. But he's and I guess you know, at the time,
• 34:43
  I was like, well, he's just offering a description. And you know,
• 34:45
  from my sort of outlook of being uh, you know, kind of
• 34:49
  coming from a phenomenologist at the time perspective, I was like, oh,
• 34:52
  well, that's fine doing a description of power structures. There's nothing and that
• 34:54
  it's someone else's job, you know, to come along with the description and
• 34:59
  be like, well, here's how we can undermine these power structures. Like
• 35:02
  so, yeah, but even aside from the revolutionary aspect of it, we
• 35:07
  have to remind our listeners and maybe even ourselves that this is after each of
• 35:12
  them had published like two or three books. This is halfway through. He's
• 35:15
  not talking about Dilizi's philosophical project that comes later. He's not talking about Fuca's
• 35:21
  biopolitics that comes later. It's basically the history of sexuality era and the capitalism
• 35:25
  at schizophrenia era. I mean, in a sense, just to go back
• 35:30
  over a couple of things, I think, yeah, in a way,
• 35:34
  the sort of perfect reflection of the flows of power or the flows of desire,
• 35:39
  this perfect reflection idea is. Yeah, he's commenting on it being a
• 35:45
  descriptive enterprize, and to that extent, like you know, all description is
• 35:50
  normative. There's no there's no two ways about it. All representation is normative
• 35:53
  because it says this is how you should see this, this phenomenon is.
• 35:58
  Thus, it is always normative. So they're very they're very very attuned to
• 36:01
  that sort of idea, and I wouldn't. I wouldn't. I don't know
• 36:07
  if he's using sort of Hegel's idea of philosophy here and reversing it in a
• 36:10
  way. But you know, like maybe I'm paraphrasing this wrong, but in
• 36:15
  Hegel's view, philosophy is meant to grasp the current historical moment, and as
• 36:21
  a result of that, it can only sort of come afterwards right in order
• 36:24
  to do this. But what Boudriard is saying here, and I'm just like
• 36:30
  peppering a quote in he's saying, the very perfection of this analytical chronicle of
• 36:34
  power is disturbing. And then skipping, he says, if it is possible
• 36:38
  at last to talk with such definitive understanding about power, sexuality, the body,
• 36:45
  and discipline, even down to their most delicate metamorphoses, it is because
• 36:50
  at some point all this is here and now over with. And that goes
• 36:53
  back again to the idea that, you know, if we can so perfec
• 37:00
  grasp the workings of some system, whether it's a system of power or flows
• 37:05
  of capital or desire, if we can grasp these all the way down to
• 37:08
  their molecular minutia, I think in a sense it's irrelevant to the current moment
• 37:15
  now, like it's been done with. And I think that links to the
• 37:17
  later idea of the Messiah is always going to come late. The Messiah always
• 37:22
  comes sort of a day after the revolution has been completed, you know.
• 37:28
  And really this is all to find another way of talking about revolution that isn't
• 37:31
  in itself kind of counter revolutionary, because you really only have two binaries here.
• 37:37
  You have the bourgeois, or you have revolution, or you have something
• 37:42
  that's just stuck in the middle and kind of just floundering within the system.
• 37:47
  Well, I'm gonna put it in somewhat different way because when I was reading
• 37:50
  his ruminations about Poko's theory of power, which I thought were really smart,
• 37:53
  a quote occurred to me. I think it was by Lacan, but might
• 37:57
  be from Jija, kind of paraphrase in La Car where he says, if
• 38:00
  you're looking at a parade with a king and his soldiers, there are two
• 38:06
  mistakes that people can make. The first one is the peditant can actually assume
• 38:09
  that the king is a king in himself. But the second mistake is that
• 38:14
  the king can assume that he's a king in himself without all the peasants believing
• 38:16
  him to be such. And what I think, for Boat you are saying
• 38:20
  here is, look, this idea that you've come across Infuco is that power
• 38:24
  is something real. In fact, it's so real that it's omnipresent. It
• 38:28
  kind of filters through everything. And what we need to recognize is that power
• 38:31
  is actually a kind of abstraction, right, It only exists to the extent
• 38:36
  that we allow it to exist, right emerging from our subjectivity and then filtering
• 38:40
  through our institutions and via political economy. And so the more radical gesture isn't
• 38:45
  to say something like fucod does, as Victor put it, this kind of
• 38:49
  dismal, gloomy claim that power is omnipresident everywhere. Is to say something like
• 38:54
  power doesn't exist anywhere unless we believe it to exist and allow it to exist
• 39:00
  in our kind of hyper real universe right now. And so he's almost standing
• 39:04
  aside outside of society and mocking it for the pretense of believing that we are
• 39:09
  actually living in this huge disciplinary evil system and that this is inexible and there's
• 39:15
  nothing we can do about it, when this is really just the product of
• 39:20
  discourses and human imaginations. Right yeah, And I will say too, you
• 39:23
  know that that when I remember also a big argument in seminar when I was
• 39:30
  reading Fuku was like, it doesn't seem like there's any way out of this.
• 39:34
  And I would be curious to hear from the people here who are more
• 39:37
  familiar with Deluz Pills or maybe Eric, you know, like do you get
• 39:43
  a similar sense from Deluz? Right that it's like there's no way out of
• 39:45
  this process or like is it or is it like do you find it like
• 39:49
  I would like to know if that's like a can if there really is a
• 39:52
  parallel between the way Deluz sets things up in the way Fuco sets things up,
• 39:55
  and in the sense that there's it's a mirror and it's not clear how
• 39:59
  you could get out of it. It's kind of like all encompassing. You
• 40:00
  just need to smoke more cigarettes in order to comprehend this victor. That's the
• 40:04
  key to every French philosopher. Yeah we're French cigarettes. I don't know.
• 40:07
  I mean I tried to kill that. I tried to kill that like reaction.
• 40:13
  In me, I always sent that natural idea of okay, okay,
• 40:15
  how do we get out of it? Or like what's the cash out here?
• 40:19
  I try to like kill that in me because I find it just gets
• 40:22
  in the way of reading the actual text and trying to understand the thinker from
• 40:28
  like top to bottom, instead of jumping to, okay, what are like
• 40:30
  the cliff notes here? Because like sure, yeah, I mean with people
• 40:35
  as sort of I don't say totalizing, but yeah, there's there's not a
• 40:38
  whole lot of room for human agency in Fuco or Beaudriard, and so that
• 40:45
  leads you to the conclusion that will then like what deals done Deluze is really
• 40:51
  all I mean, I wouldn't say that about Deluze because agency and desire play
• 40:54
  a huge role, at least the language of it does, but more so
• 40:59
  in Fuco Bodriard. You know, Fuko has the genealogical method, and I
• 41:04
  think what Boudriard is introducing here is more of talking about simulation as a sort
• 41:09
  of baseline methodological reference for his work now and saying that, you know,
• 41:15
  the genealogical method has only gotten us so far. But what they do build
• 41:19
  around those methods is like this very totalizing system that seems to have no agency
• 41:24
  in it. And that was a big debate, you know, like structure
• 41:28
  of agency, ad gidums and things like that. Texts like that, we're
• 41:32
  thinking about where can agency come into play, and that seems to say,
• 41:37
  well, there's nothing that can be done. But I think there are ways
• 41:40
  that these things play out that you do have to sort of pay attention to
• 41:45
  instead of instead of getting discouraged by the fact that, yeah, even like
• 41:51
  the Adorno Horkhimer vision of the culture industry, right, like, there's nothing
• 41:54
  you can do. I think, instead of getting discouraged by that too early,
• 41:58
  you have to kind of put yourself in a mode where you're going to
• 42:00
  you're going to persevere and try to get everything out of this text before then
• 42:06
  asking the okay, what now questions? Sure, sure, I can answer
• 42:10
  that question. So he's responding to again capitalism and schizophrenia, and the goal
• 42:16
  of that book or those books anti Oedipus is, let's free desire because desires
• 42:23
  are being managed, controlled by the psychoanalysts, by the education system, whatever,
• 42:30
  by capitalism. And like he says, or like Delaves and Guitari say,
• 42:36
  yeah, desire does mimic the form of capitalism, but you can also
• 42:42
  direct desire because it's productive. And then later on later Deliz says, we
• 42:47
  can actually create or produce in Bode regards terms, we can produce our way
• 42:52
  out of this by inventing concepts, by by mapping things together, by echoing
• 42:59
  the history of philosopher philosophy. If you're a philosopher, that's kind of your
• 43:02
  task. Now, if we can set up an imaginary debate about how Bouderrard
• 43:07
  would respond to that. If he's taking this line, I think Boudrard would
• 43:12
  ask Deliz again. He says, Okay, you're creating concepts, and you
• 43:15
  want these concepts to echo through the history of philosophy and create new ways of
• 43:22
  thinking. Now, how do you know that you're just not creating a new
• 43:24
  sign Yeah, so that would be the question, and I don't I'm not
• 43:29
  smart enough to have an answer to that. Maybe some grad student out there
• 43:31
  has written a paper on it, but I don't have an answer to that.
• 43:35
  I think this is another This is definitely another way Baudriard would question what
• 43:40
  you were saying. Is he would he would look at the way that you
• 43:45
  know, I guess he would remind Deluz and Gutari. So your concept of
• 43:49
  desire is born out of a You're not happy with Lecan's idea of desire as
• 43:55
  lack, as something negative. So what you've done is you've turned it around
• 44:00
  and taken this sort of what Baudriard calls a negative, reactive transcendental concept,
• 44:07
  and you've turned it into something positive, active and imminent in the system.
• 44:10
  So what he says here is that the new version of desire proposed by Deluz
• 44:16
  and by Leotard. Is Leotard's also talking about intensities intensers proposed by Deluz and
• 44:22
  Leotard. But there instead of a lack or interdiction that means you know,
• 44:29
  you're not allowed to do something, an interdiction. Instead of a lack or
• 44:32
  an interdiction, one finds the deployment of the positive dissemination of flows and intensities,
• 44:38
  such a coincidence as not accidental. It's simply that in Fuco power takes
• 44:44
  the place of desire. So he's he's attuned to that, that idea of
• 44:49
  positivity of production of desiring machines as productive machines, as it essentially being a
• 44:58
  positive rather than a negative. But he's still not happy with it because he
• 45:04
  thinks it's I think near the end he starts coming to say again, it's
• 45:07
  one sided because it only has that positive aspect. It doesn't have the negative
• 45:14
  side, where I guess that's another reversal here, because he's all about reversals
• 45:17
  instead of irreversible processes. It doesn't have that negative side where power comes back
• 45:23
  and acts upon itself in a certain way. It becomes sort of crystallized and
• 45:29
  frozen in the moment of your analysis, rather than being allowed to continue to
• 45:35
  sort of collapse in on itself. He says that delis in Guitari's Desire is
• 45:39
  a quote just a savage naturalism unquote, which is basically saying, you're just
• 45:45
  putting a new name onto human labor power and then calling it productive desire.
• 45:52
  So he's basically reinstating and here's good of you. ARDE's a big problem.
• 45:58
  He's basically just reinstated human nature but giving it a different name. Now,
• 46:01
  I don't think that's correct all the way down, because that desiring production is
• 46:08
  not at all a human function. Really, I don't think it's I don't
• 46:13
  think it's nearly as naturalist as Boudyard is claiming, and I would criticize them
• 46:17
  on that point, but again I don't know. I mean, this is
• 46:22
  a lot of it comes from later Della's, which I have the benefit of
• 46:24
  history. I can read back into the first book, which Baudyard did not
• 46:29
  have. Yeah, naturalization would be to say, I think they're following like
• 46:36
  the idea of mythology as a force which naturalizes something, it makes it seem
• 46:39
  universal and ahistorical and apolitical. That's what sort of naturalizing something does, so
• 46:46
  you kind of take it out of any kind of possible historical dialect. I
• 46:51
  can hold it up as like, ah, here is a fundamental principle on
• 46:54
  which to build other analyzes, which in a very very round way sort of
• 47:00
  goes back to Descartes idea of like, what's the first thing that we can
• 47:04
  be certain of? Like that, I think, and then from there you
• 47:07
  can build a whole. You can erect an entire foundation for knowledge to be
• 47:13
  built upon. I don't think it's the same critique obviously against Deluze as it
• 47:20
  would be when they're talking about Descartes, but I think it has a similar
• 47:22
  tenor in my mind. Well, I wanted to frame it a somewhat different
• 47:25
  way, which is that if you think back to the history of European philosophy,
• 47:30
  I prefer the term European philosophy to Western philosophy, which I think is
• 47:32
  a lot more problematic. But anyway, lost our short there's always been a
• 47:37
  series of ironists who have appeared that prick holes in any effort to engage in
• 47:44
  philosophical or political systematicity. You can think of somebody like Socrates, You can
• 47:49
  think of somebody like Sorren Kirkergard, who's responding to Hegel. And I think
• 47:52
  you could also include somebody like Jean Baudriard and for that matter, Jacques Derrida
• 47:55
  in this list of a kind of minor literature of figures, right, because
• 48:00
  again, what you really saw was somebody like Deliuze, and for that matter,
• 48:05
  also with for co is an attempt to engage in a kind of critical
• 48:08
  system building, even if it was opposed to previous systems that had been existent.
• 48:15
  Like you read difference in your repetition, there's still this very clear desire
• 48:19
  to go from ontological foundationalism of a certain kind the university of being, to
• 48:25
  an argument for the need to respect difference in and of itself, and then
• 48:29
  to an argument, as Pills put it later on in Antietopus, that different
• 48:34
  kinds of beings should be able to liberate their desires in a certain way,
• 48:37
  to engage in schizoid lives of a certain sort. For Coo isn't quite as
• 48:43
  normative as deluz Is, but again he still is has a very very clear
• 48:47
  systematic or at least architectonic account of society, and near the end of his
• 48:52
  life he was getting very close to starting to argue for a Nietzschean ethics of
• 48:54
  self creation with a little bit of can't thrown in, and Bojiar seems to
• 48:59
  me to be very much like somebody likes Socrates or cuker Guard or Daridap for
• 49:04
  that matter, who comes along, And anytime someone tries to do this is
• 49:07
  just going to mock it relentlessly, because the account of agency and liberation that's
• 49:10
  present with them is much more anti intellectualist in a certain sense, because what
• 49:15
  they're trying to say is that if you want to be free from the concepts
• 49:17
  of ideology, you also need to liberate yourself from the conseeats of theory,
• 49:22
  which means to take an ironic distance towards everything right. And in a certain
• 49:27
  sense, that's what he's doing in this piece by insisting that we take an
• 49:30
  ironic distance from this kind of architectonic thinking that you see Inendelas and Fuco,
• 49:36
  which can very easily set themselves up as new kinds of totalizing ideologies, but
• 49:42
  totalizing discourses even if they're critical discourses. So are you think Boujer is just
• 49:46
  a perpetual edge Lord, Yeah, that's basically what I'm saying, right,
• 49:51
  I mean, he is offering some other ideas. He's not just saying no,
• 49:54
  no, no, He's also saying like this is a better way to
• 49:59
  do it, offers some like positive ideas. I mean, obviously, this
• 50:02
  whole article that we're reading here is framed as a critique, so you're gonna
• 50:06
  get a lot of that, but he is he does suggest his own better
• 50:10
  quotes method And do you guys remember what's the book that Fuco? Because Derrida
• 50:16
  makes a lot of the same charges in different language, but a lot of
• 50:21
  the same charges against Fuco. And Fuko wrote a book back to him.
• 50:24
  Was it Cogito in Madness? I can't remember the name of the paper,
• 50:29
  but yeah, it was primarily about the interpretation of reason and the coguito in
• 50:34
  that first book, The History of Madness, And they had an exchange on
• 50:37
  the subject matter. I mean, if I remember correctly, it wasn't an
• 50:40
  explicit response to Derrida, but he tried to respond anyway. But it's interesting
• 50:45
  that della Is and Dereda and Boudriard have also the similar vein of critique against
• 50:53
  Fuco, but u Bodriard got the worst end of the stick on it seems
• 50:58
  like, yeah, he did it too early. What I want to say
• 51:01
  that I agree with Eric right, that I'm not saying that, you know,
• 51:04
  an ironist of this sort ever just sits there and says no, no,
• 51:07
  no, or trashes everybody like an ed Lord edge lord, you know,
• 51:10
  aupictor right. I mean, if you think about somebody like Kirkerguard or
• 51:14
  Socrates or dardav right, the act of deconstructing or engaging in Socratic questioning or
• 51:21
  revealing, you know, the instability of Hegel's system does have a productive dimension
• 51:24
  to it because it allows you to take a kind of cognitive distance between yourself
• 51:29
  and theories that are setting themselves up as alternatives of in some way, shape
• 51:32
  or form. Right. And I think there are limitations to this kind of
• 51:36
  philosophical approach, because I think some ways it can become a lot more nihilistic
• 51:39
  even than something like Flucodianism, for all its problems. Right, But it's
• 51:44
  also really refreshing sometimes to read somebody who is so completely iconoclastic to use Pill's
• 51:51
  terms, and so irreverent that he's not even going to truck any kind of
• 51:54
  systematic bullshit from other critical philosophers anytime they try to set this stuff up.
• 52:00
  You're just gonna be there to knock it down a couple of pigs by saying,
• 52:02
  stop trying to retotalize power as a substitute for classical political economy or sex
• 52:08
  or whatever it happens to be. Now, I'm just not gonna let that
• 52:12
  happen. This as a side note, I would say that European philosophy is
• 52:16
  a much worse choice. You couldn't do worse than choosing to replace the idea
• 52:22
  of Western philosophy with European philosophy. Western philosophy has its downfall, but I
• 52:29
  mean European philosophy, Oh my god, we're We're from Plato and Socrates,
• 52:34
  europeanside. That's that's debatable. And then that ignores the entire sphere of Eastern
• 52:39
  influence, not only that made its way into the Hellenic world, but also
• 52:44
  during the Islamic Middle Ages when they had their Renaissance, and you know,
• 52:49
  early modern philosophy got a massive kick in the ass from Eastern ideas and that
• 52:52
  sort. So it's very, very problematic to you. It's just that the
• 52:57
  reason I don't like Western philosophy is I think the whole concept of Western civilization
• 53:00
  is deeply offensive, reason being you have expensive time in Mexico that despite speaking
• 53:05
  European languages, worshiping the same god uh, and you know, having the
• 53:08
  same form of government. For some odd reason, people in Latin America and
• 53:12
  for that matter, elsewhere don't get to be part of the Western world for
• 53:15
  reasons. I think they have more to do with their skin color than anything
• 53:19
  else. So I think what European philosophy is also hugely problematic. I just
• 53:22
  find it somehow less noxious in this notion that there's something like Western civilization.
• 53:28
  And it's funny when you when you when you when you said that, when
• 53:30
  you said European philosophy. I actually always think about just like, well,
• 53:35
  what a lot of people call it continental philosophy, because I noticed that,
• 53:38
  like in a lot I notice on a lot of like PhD programs, a
• 53:42
  lot of departments, like university apartments, like they will sometimes say European philosophy
• 53:46
  as a euphemism for continental philosophy. They'll talk about like as opposed to yeah,
• 53:51
  angst journals too, like the European Legacy and stuff, which is basically
• 53:54
  just a continental philosophy journal. But I did I did want to pick up
• 53:58
  on something that that Eric said earlier to kind of bring it back to the
• 54:00
  way that Pills set this all up as in the context of sixty eight,
• 54:04
  right, and like because because I mean, I'm interested in this claim that
• 54:07
  Baudriard is making that supposedly, you know, the Fucodian or Delusian views are
• 54:13
  somehow counter revolutionary because they are mirroring, right, And you know, I
• 54:16
  think but then Eric, you were talking about how a lot of Boudriard's philosophy
• 54:22
  also leads to like how do we get out of this kind of thing?
• 54:25
  And I do want to also, by the way, agree with you.
• 54:28
  You know that that I don't think the right way to approach these texts or
• 54:30
  contental European philosophy whatever is to be like, Okay, how do we get
• 54:35
  out of this? Right? You have to take it up. You have
• 54:36
  to take the philosophy up. That's why I'm actually, you know, have
• 54:38
  no problem with descriptive philosophical accounts because they're incredibly valuable and you just want to
• 54:44
  take up the description and see where see where it takes you. But you
• 54:47
  know, it was interesting that you said Baudriard kind of also leads to this
• 54:52
  conclusion that you might have from Fucod that there's like no way to get out
• 54:55
  of these systems. But then like the way Pills set up this conver station
• 55:00
  was supposedly Boudriard's critique of these guys is that they're counter revolutionary because their systems
• 55:06
  are just mirroring capitalism as this kind of system that you can't do anything about.
• 55:09
  So I don't know if there's if there's a way to untangle those things
• 55:13
  or Yeah, I mean, I think they're all looking at the sixty eight
• 55:16
  revolution quote like quote unquote revolution it was kind of a failed revolution, right,
• 55:22
  and they're thinking about again, why has this revolution failed and what can
• 55:30
  we do differently? Yeah, I mean it's tough. You can sort of
• 55:34
  parse it out a little further and say it's maybe it's not that they're they're
• 55:38
  counter revolutionary, but that what they're describing, because it's become so clear and
• 55:45
  minutely describable that it is no longer a kind of revolution to even describe the
• 55:52
  workings of power and desire anymore? By when did this come out in nineteen
• 55:57
  seventy six or something like that, So that's like it's like less than a
• 56:00
  little less than ten years of reflection on sixty eight, which was one of
• 56:06
  those like nine to eleven events for those guys back in this time, and
• 56:10
  they're thinking, like, why what can we do differently now? I guess
• 56:15
  it is to say, I think we don't appreciate how huge influence this has
• 56:20
  had on French philosophers if they're not kind of mired in that field. Like
• 56:23
  Alamba Ju, who I don't like very much at least, a very nice
• 56:27
  little book called, you know, the Pantheon, which is just his account
• 56:30
  of the French philosophers. But one of the things that he opens with is
• 56:34
  that he's actually the last surviving member of the sixty eight generation. That's how
• 56:37
  he understands himself philosophically, Right, there were all these guys, they wrote
• 56:42
  their books. He was a bit of a late bloomer, you know,
• 56:44
  kind of emerging in the nineteen eighties. But he says, I remember this
• 56:46
  happening. We were all kind of inspired by it, you know, and
• 56:51
  then we all tried to look for the solutions for why it failed. Althu
• 56:52
  z Aia had his account, but co had his account, you know,
• 56:55
  Deluze and Katari had their account. And so here's my kind of history of
• 57:00
  these movements, right, I truly form. Baudriard has written a very quotable
• 57:07
  text here and one of them to this point. He says, in the
• 57:09
  end, the revolution signifies only this, that it has already taken place,
• 57:14
  and that it had a meaning just before one day before, but not anymore
• 57:17
  now when it comes, it is to hide the fact that it is no
• 57:22
  longer meaningful. And so again with this, the the idea of the reversal
• 57:27
  effect is that once you've sort of real once you've like noticed that the revolution
• 57:35
  is here, that it's happening, that we can talk about it now,
• 57:37
  it's it's already it's already lost its revolutionary potential. It's already it's already gone
• 57:45
  in a sense. And this goes back to the idea of the simulacrum.
• 57:47
  I guess how it sort of redoubles things like you have you have on the
• 57:52
  on the one side, you have I mean, I'm just grasping now,
• 57:57
  but you know, on the one side you have repression and on the other
• 57:59
  side you have liberation of desire, and those he says, kind of you
• 58:04
  can't really talk about those apart in the sense that they both rely on one
• 58:10
  another to function in the world. You can't talk about oppression without oppressed.
• 58:16
  You can't talk about these things separately because they function together as like almost as
• 58:22
  a single unit. And I think he's charging fucoh and Delus a little bit
• 58:28
  of doing this, of separating the liberation of desire or sexual liberation from the
• 58:35
  repression of desire and the repression of liberation of sexuality, right because Fuco's ideas
• 58:43
  are about I mean, it's so complex, because obviously we're already past all
• 58:49
  these major thinkers who've gone into great detail about this stuff. But the idea
• 58:53
  of that sort of William Reich, this second generation freudgen who had these ideas
• 59:00
  about sexuality and getting people to you know, like gyrate and express themselves and
• 59:07
  almost go into like catatonic states of self expression where they lose all control and
• 59:12
  just scream and shout and yell, and all of this is somehow has a
• 59:16
  kind of revolutionary or not maybe liberatory kind of effect on society if everyone would
• 59:22
  just allow themselves to be more open about their sexuality and talk about it more.
• 59:27
  Fucos already calling this the remnants of a confessional kind of culture, and
• 59:36
  so we've already got this amazing, Like you read FUCO and you look at
• 59:37
  that you're like, oh my god, Okay, yeah, that's great.
• 59:39
  How can you get any further than that? And then you have Boudriard coming
• 59:43
  along and saying, well, you've actually just separated liberation from repression and they're
• 59:49
  actually two sides of the same coin, and so okay, now there's a
• 59:53
  new statement in the philosophical field. How do we process Boudriard's contribution to this.
• 1:00:00
  I do want to say that I think, oh sorry, I just
• 1:00:01
  want to say I do think he misinterprets pretty badly here in the history of
• 1:00:06
  sexuality in particular, right because while reading volume one, which I imagine I
• 1:00:12
  think i'd just been released or probably wasn't even out yet, Fucot does sometimes
• 1:00:15
  write in terms of the repressive hypothesis and interrogating it. But certainly if you
• 1:00:20
  look at the whole ubra, he's very clear about the fact that this idea
• 1:00:23
  that there was a repressive time period that we're now liberating it ourselves from is
• 1:00:28
  kind of a fantasy, and he takes a much more productive well yeah,
• 1:00:31
  no, I wasn't saying Boudriard makes that mistake knows what fucout is all about
• 1:00:36
  here, and he's trying to now like offer a new statement into that sort
• 1:00:39
  of setup which already seemed to me almost complete, saying, yeah, it's
• 1:00:44
  confessional, you know, asking people to express themselves is a kind of confessional
• 1:00:49
  gesture. And I thought, Wow, it doesn't get any more like like
• 1:00:52
  deeply critical than that. And then you have here Boudriard coming along saying something
• 1:00:58
  new, finding room for critique of that, And it's very interesting. But
• 1:01:00
  this is what I'm saying. I think that the two of them coincide in
• 1:01:05
  their views on this a lot more than this article would suggest. No,
• 1:01:08
  no, they don't, they don't. Here's why what's happening here. Fucaou's
• 1:01:13
  thesis of sexuality is supposed to be contrary and or contrary to the Freudian when
• 1:01:17
  right that freud defines sexuality as repression primarily symptoms of repression. So for fu
• 1:01:24
  Co, it's not repression but compelled expression, like you just said, Matt,
• 1:01:30
  but that when it appears, it's controlled in minute detail. So who
• 1:01:35
  who can you fuck? When can you fuck them? Is like a moral
• 1:01:38
  act? President Clinton? Did you penetrate her face? Or her body,
• 1:01:45
  like what exactly did you do? Did you bust or did you not bust?
• 1:01:50
  Are you? Are you a homosexual? Are you a bisexual? And
• 1:01:53
  what percentage are you? Does your film have one breast in it or is
• 1:01:59
  there two, because then you're get a higher rating, So that sexuality is
• 1:02:02
  micromanaged. This is Fucus thesis, by the way. It's micromanaged in every
• 1:02:07
  appearance. But it's also compelled to express or to be expressed. So you
• 1:02:14
  have to have like a sexual identity, you have to define yourself by that,
• 1:02:17
  whereas in a repressive society it wasn't like that. So that's the food
• 1:02:21
  co thesis. But Bougyard here is suspicious about this thesis that says everything is
• 1:02:28
  micromanaged because he says no sexuality when pornography proves it. Sexuality is not being
• 1:02:34
  compelled. It's already disappeared. There is no reality to sexuality. This says
• 1:02:38
  just pure exchange at this point, and we still want to believe in it,
• 1:02:44
  so we can talk about whether the repressive hypothesis is true or the expressive
• 1:02:47
  hypothesis is true. But the fact is the thing's already gone. And then
• 1:02:52
  to turn it into a theoretical object. Then then you're like one further step
• 1:02:58
  removed, which is why he calls it a mirror. So at this point,
• 1:03:00
  when we're talking about sexuality in those terms, it's not just a mirror,
• 1:03:05
  but it's a mirror of a mirror, which is of course the definition
• 1:03:07
  of hyperreality. So it's exchanged at this level where none of those questions even
• 1:03:13
  make a difference anymore. So he says something like Fuko has a magisterial theory
• 1:03:16
  of sexuality. Two bad sexuality is already gone, it doesn't exist anymore.
• 1:03:22
  Yeah, I'm finding these sort of newer ways of latching onto at least like
• 1:03:28
  Deluz, But I don't think Bodiard would be against this is to think about
• 1:03:32
  why do we always like, what is this opposition between the molar and the
• 1:03:37
  molecular or the discursive and sort of micropower micro fascism. That sort of idea
• 1:03:44
  is because we're on the one hand, we're dealing with molar or discursive phenomena.
• 1:03:47
  Things you can see, things you can interact with, things that are
• 1:03:51
  on the plane of order, things that are in the world of the visible
• 1:03:55
  right, and then you have all these other ideas that work behind that invisible
• 1:04:00
  molecular intensities affects power, those sorts of things that work behind the scenes in
• 1:04:06
  a sort of subversive way. And you know, we all know the capitalism
• 1:04:11
  is in itself a subversive kind of thing, right. That's like one of
• 1:04:15
  Marx's basic statements about capitalism is like constant revolution. And so you know,
• 1:04:21
  Deluze and Gatari and Fucaout's extremely brilliant insight was to let's sort of appropriate that
• 1:04:29
  revolutionary force, and except they're going to talk about it in terms of the
• 1:04:31
  molecularization of desire and those sorts of ideas and Bodriard and what I'm seeing in
• 1:04:38
  these sorts of newer appropriations too, is to actually give the molar some room,
• 1:04:43
  give the discursive or the realm of appearance or simulac or some room to
• 1:04:47
  be revolutionary in a sense, because they, like I said, they are
• 1:04:51
  kind of two sides of the same coin. You don't have the molar without
• 1:04:55
  the molecular, and the other way around as well. And what I'm seeing
• 1:04:59
  here is a kind of of willingness to not always associate, you know,
• 1:05:04
  discourse with kind of discourse with these sorts of subversive levels of being power laid
• 1:05:12
  in, like, let it be what it is, and then we can
• 1:05:15
  sort of look at it and talk about what's invisible here. But first we
• 1:05:19
  have to go through the visible sort of thing. Okay, this is where
• 1:05:23
  I want to come in and just defend my argument that they're actually closer than
• 1:05:27
  Bojar is making it out to be. I think that certainly there are elements
• 1:05:30
  of A. Co's work that would make you think that he's centralizing an account
• 1:05:34
  of sexuality in this kind of magisterial fashion, and the fact that he wrote
• 1:05:39
  three now four volumes on the subject testifies to that. But I think if
• 1:05:43
  you look in his work, but Coo is very cognizant of the fact that
• 1:05:45
  this kind of hyperfixation on the importance of sexuality and sexual identity is extremely problematic
• 1:05:51
  and has been problematic from the very beginning. And in fact, one of
• 1:05:56
  the comments that he makes about his own sexual identity, or at least the
• 1:05:59
  one that he's tagged with as a gay in man, is that he wants
• 1:06:02
  to resist being ascribed or interpolated in this fashion. And one of the things
• 1:06:06
  that he says about homosexuality that's quite interesting is that what's provocative about it isn't
• 1:06:13
  necessarily that it shows you that we could we could have two men who enter
• 1:06:18
  into a sexual relation together, but that it shows you that different kinds of
• 1:06:23
  social organization are possible than the ones that are conceived of in our current sexual
• 1:06:29
  regimes, right, and they don't necessarily have to be sexual relations. And
• 1:06:32
  he doesn't really develop this in great detail because he died of aides, right,
• 1:06:38
  But it seems like he was moving in the direction that Boudriard is arguing,
• 1:06:41
  not necessarily stuff about hyperreality, but being antagonistic to this magisterial conception of
• 1:06:46
  sex like you're talking about. I mean, I don't know if he would
• 1:06:48
  carry I would have carried on this way had he lived, but that's just
• 1:06:51
  my take on it. Well, he says that, I mean, he's
• 1:06:56
  using Fucaou's understanding of sex ruality as a metaphor for power, which is what
• 1:07:01
  Fucou does as well. Power knowledge is a single concept, but Budred's claim
• 1:07:08
  is that that thing needs you to believe that exists, not that it exists.
• 1:07:13
  So believing that it exists and investing all this energy into it was for
• 1:07:16
  him the French left's fault, because the political sphere had already been destroyed,
• 1:07:21
  and then you're reinvesting all this meaning to it, and you could, I
• 1:07:26
  mean I could. I don't want to jump into analogies to today, but
• 1:07:30
  you know what I'm thinking, right, he says, here's quote. Its
• 1:07:33
  strategy is in fact always creating a space of optical illusion, maintaining itself in
• 1:07:39
  total ambiguity, total duplicity, in order to throw others into this space.
• 1:07:45
  Yeah, I love that. What I'm just trying to say is that Fuko
• 1:07:48
  has sometimes read as agitating for a kind of micropolitics of identity, and I
• 1:07:54
  certain think that you can see elements of that in his work and the kind
• 1:07:57
  of causes that he supported, right, And so we have to be careful
• 1:08:00
  here, But I do think that if you read particularly is later work against
• 1:08:04
  stuff. Near the end of his life, he was becoming increasingly critical of
• 1:08:08
  this in a way that we later echoed by gender theorists like Judith Butler,
• 1:08:11
  who's extremely critical of identity politics. Ironically enough, when you think about the
• 1:08:14
  discourse around her, because you know, again, what Foco says isn't that
• 1:08:16
  we should centralize the emancipation of sexual identities or refocus our attention on the construction
• 1:08:23
  of new sexual identities in a kind of roat way, But see the interrogation
• 1:08:28
  of sex as an opportunity to think about how it is that human subjects are
• 1:08:32
  created and how it is that we can move past these kinds of political systems
• 1:08:38
  and power dynamics in order to conceive new modes of existence that might not have
• 1:08:43
  anything to do with sexuality per se, particularly given the way that sexuality has
• 1:08:47
  become so centralized and commodified in late capitalists society. And there's been some very
• 1:08:54
  interesting f cody and work done on this. You know, a very good
• 1:08:56
  example is how it is that talks about prostitution in nineteenth century England and how
• 1:09:03
  even at this point, sex was becoming increasingly commodified during a time period where
• 1:09:06
  apparently the repressive hypothesis hypothesis or sorry, repressive viewpoints were ubiquitous. Right,
• 1:09:14
  That's where you see this extreme disconnected peering between the desire of capital to commodify
• 1:09:20
  sexuality and on the other hand, Victorian ethos and the power associated with that
• 1:09:26
  still trying to impose is kind of a moral view on society. So there's
• 1:09:29
  a lot of ways that you can kind of complicate this Fucodia narrative. I
• 1:09:31
  mean, you're not wrong, but you're reading a lot into it. You're
• 1:09:35
  being you're being extra extra charitable. I am I like those course of course
• 1:09:41
  we can. We can come back and defend Fukut later. And no knocks
• 1:09:45
  on the guy and not saying that he didn't like sort of modify his views,
• 1:09:48
  even maybe he secretly read this article and really took it to heart and
• 1:09:51
  wrote his later books with it in mind. But I mean, I'm just
• 1:09:55
  interested right now and sort of sussing out what Boudriard is saying in this artic
• 1:10:00
  call, rather than sort of leaping to the defense of each of those who
• 1:10:03
  he's wronged with his out of nowhere unknown intellectual at the time attack in the
• 1:10:10
  big wigs who need your defense. They need us to jump to our the
• 1:10:15
  We could mount a robust defense on behalf of the people we like being being
• 1:10:19
  called out here. But the purpose of the episode is review someone else's challenge.
• 1:10:27
  And also, you know, I mean, I mean Fu and and
• 1:10:30
  Dello's really need our defense compared to it's like nobody's reading them anymore. She's
• 1:10:39
  these dead guys. Who's going to speak for them? Though? Is just
• 1:10:45
  a quotable factory, right, such good lines. Yeah, but you know,
• 1:10:51
  on the on the point of like the critique, I'm kind of curious
• 1:10:54
  pills, like, like, do you, generally speaking, like find that
• 1:10:59
  bog or its critiques here are fair, Like you don't have to go into
• 1:11:01
  detail because as we said, we're not going to try to defend Deluz and
• 1:11:06
  Fuco, but like, I'm just kind of curious on your take, like
• 1:11:10
  generally speaking, well, they're fair insofar as we've read this in a lot
• 1:11:15
  of graduate seminars, right, And I think people read Fukot rightly and they
• 1:11:18
  come away with the same feeling that it's like, oh, power is just
• 1:11:23
  everything, Okay, now what so I think that part is correct, not
• 1:11:28
  right now extending to biopolitics, which is a little a little different from that.
• 1:11:32
  But with respect to Deluz and Guitari, they said that they were doing
• 1:11:38
  this. It's not like Bodyard's pointing out something that they didn't know they were
• 1:11:41
  doing by talking about de territorializing flows and they say capitalism is like the productive
• 1:11:49
  desiring machine par excellence. I don't have the quote in front of me,
• 1:11:55
  but it's from Desert Islands. I think. So they said they were doing
• 1:11:59
  that, and then the quotes is should philosophy be doing that or not should
• 1:12:02
  it be doing something else? And to that I have absolutely no answer.
• 1:12:05
  I don't know what philosophy should be doing. Yeah, I mean, I
• 1:12:10
  don't actually like the idea of somebody being like that, should philosophy shouldn't be
• 1:12:13
  doing this? Like you know, like I think. My kind of ad
• 1:12:16
  hoc reaction to that is just like, well, I don't think, like,
• 1:12:19
  I don't. I just don't like the idea in principle of people being
• 1:12:23
  like, well, philosophy shouldn't be doing that, it should be doing this.
• 1:12:26
  It's like, I don't know. That's has to be much more free
• 1:12:27
  flowing than that, I think. And the answer to that might be that
• 1:12:31
  everyone that everyone is heralding this is like the most revolutionary philosophy, and it
• 1:12:38
  might be as simple as Budria is pointing out, you know that's not true.
• 1:12:41
  This is not the most revolutionary philosophy. It's just mirrored production. And
• 1:12:46
  if that's the case, then then fair enough, it's a fair critique.
• 1:12:51
  Yeah, but it depends And I don't want to answer this for anybody,
• 1:12:55
  but what do you think theories should be doing, and I don't even Yeah,
• 1:12:59
  that's why I hesitate to answer. I stutter to answer that point because
• 1:13:02
  I don't think that's for me to say. I'm a YouTuber. Yeah,
• 1:13:05
  agreed, Well, we know that Victor is a maoist. You know,
• 1:13:08
  let a thousand flowers bloom. So there's that answer settled there. No,
• 1:13:13
  but I think, I mean, I agree. I don't want to be
• 1:13:15
  the person to say, like, what's what should or shouldn't be philosophy or
• 1:13:18
  theory? Yeah? Yeah, at this point, I would have a hard
• 1:13:21
  time even drawing a line between philosophy and other disciplines. I mean, Buco
• 1:13:27
  himself ran into this difficulty, and I would argue Boudriar fits into it too.
• 1:13:30
  Is he a media theorist, is he a cultural critic? Is he
• 1:13:31
  a philosopher? Is he kind of a weird Marxist? Who knows this?
• 1:13:35
  Bukoha Nietzschean, a Kantian, a historian of ideas, a commentator of society?
• 1:13:42
  Who knows? I think it's an interesting question, and if I thought
• 1:13:45
  about it a little bit more, I could come up with a better answer.
• 1:13:47
  I just think it's so hard to demarcate theory today from other disciplinary activities
• 1:13:53
  that we need to spend at least a little bit of time trying to come
• 1:13:56
  up with a kind of quasi essentialist answer about what we're talking about when we're
• 1:13:59
  g ge theoretical activity. Perhaps a topic for another episode. Yeah, well
• 1:14:02
  that's what I wanted to say. Something exactly on those lines is Baudiard was
• 1:14:08
  like ostracized for this, and people read his later work and go, you
• 1:14:12
  know, what the fuck is this guy talking about? But this shows that
• 1:14:15
  he's got some theoretical chops. He's not afraid to go after people. He
• 1:14:18
  was like everyone basically took Fucout's side as far as I've read and can tell,
• 1:14:25
  And Baudriard had a lot more difficult time getting jobs than fu Co did.
• 1:14:30
  And I'm not sure why Baudriard went the way he went, which is
• 1:14:34
  far less argumentative, but I think he tried to bring what he's saying here
• 1:14:40
  into the style where you can't say, you just can't replace my words with
• 1:14:44
  someone else's words, because my words are like, oh now I'm writing in
• 1:14:46
  aphorisms. So he did he made his form the content of the argument that
• 1:14:54
  he's sort of making here. He can't be replaced. There is only like
• 1:14:57
  when Boudrard, yeah, I mean just to give a testament to help to
• 1:15:01
  speak to your point pills. And how famous for coat was. I can't
• 1:15:04
  remember what institution it is. It was the University of Paris, whatever number
• 1:15:08
  it is, eight or nine or twenty five. But they actually created a
• 1:15:12
  special chair just for him because he didn't, like me call the philosopher,
• 1:15:15
  kind of back to the point. He wanted to be the historian, a
• 1:15:17
  historian of ideas, right, and he was so famous at this point that
• 1:15:21
  the university was like, if you fucking want to do that, call yourself
• 1:15:26
  it. We don't give a shit, you know, but it speaks to
• 1:15:28
  his power that Della's got, I mean not till that Baudryard got. He
• 1:15:34
  had to go to Disneyland by himself. He was riding the teacup right,
• 1:15:42
  all alone with a cigarette, hanging out with Cinderella. Little kids coming up
• 1:15:49
  to him, They're like, what do you think about this? He's like,
• 1:15:53
  enjoy this as soon as you will be all your reality and then there'll
• 1:15:56
  be nothing that was on the idea is standing backs at you. I mean.
• 1:16:00
  The weird thing about it too, though, is again he did eventually
• 1:16:02
  become a celebrity. I mean, this is going to sound really, really
• 1:16:05
  cheesy, but my first exposure to his work wasn't the Matrix. You know,
• 1:16:10
  when Neo picks up the book and it's simulacra and simulacram and he opens
• 1:16:15
  it up and there's a little fucking thing in it simulation. Oh sorry,
• 1:16:17
  yeah, excuse me. And you know, I read that about the guy
• 1:16:21
  later on, and I picked it up and I read it and stuff.
• 1:16:24
  But people commented on how weird it is that Bougiard himself became kind of a
• 1:16:29
  celebrity, appearing in Hollywood blockbuster films and having people argue about his work in
• 1:16:34
  them and stuff. Yeah, I'd say he's a fascinating He's got a fascinating
• 1:16:40
  and sort of offbeat perspective compared to all of these other philosopher's theorists, whatever
• 1:16:47
  you want to call them. But he's also like, I don't get the
• 1:16:51
  sense he's doing anything radically different, but he does have interesting ideas that feel
• 1:16:57
  like they're new, you know, just these quotable little equips, like instead
• 1:17:01
  of Fuco's functional vision of power, we need to say power is something that
• 1:17:08
  has exchanged power seduces, and he brings all these different words in like simulation
• 1:17:14
  and simulacrum later on in a book he publishes a couple of years after this
• 1:17:18
  article we're reading, and so he's got a very interesting and lately I'm having
• 1:17:25
  looked into Marshall McLuhan a little bit more. You know, there's a lot
• 1:17:29
  of echoes of mccluan in Boudriard as well, which I find very interesting because
• 1:17:34
  I find a lot of thinkers tend not to address media and technology or anything
• 1:17:43
  in depth anyway in a way that people can find, you know, like
• 1:17:47
  relatable, whereas Bodriard is giving us that he's giving us the sort of high
• 1:17:53
  philosophy, but you can also think about like our surrounding world in it that's
• 1:17:59
  very very media by technology and media and images and messages. And I think
• 1:18:04
  that's part of what makes Bodriard extremely appealing, despite this sort of early kerfuffling
• 1:18:11
  he had with the French intellectual community. Yeah, and I agree with Pel's
• 1:18:15
  completely that Bodiard. I agree this piece is more dense than some of his
• 1:18:18
  later work, but it was just fantastic at spinning off remarkable ideas, some
• 1:18:24
  of which are a little underdeveloped, but they're extremely provocative. I mean in
• 1:18:28
  Simul Lacra and Simul Lacram he has that famous statement about how he says,
• 1:18:30
  we shouldn't even be talking about the reel anymore because you've now entered into the
• 1:18:34
  desert of the reel, which is later on the title of his Jiujuic book
• 1:18:38
  and also appears in The Matrix, Right, I mean that's extraordinarily provocative,
• 1:18:42
  right, talking about boor his stories and then discussing the desert the reel or
• 1:18:45
  to title a book. You know, the Gulf War never happened. I
• 1:18:47
  mean, before you even read the book, you're going to have a fucking
• 1:18:51
  opinion on it, right, Like something in this visual is going to be
• 1:18:56
  there inside of yourself wanting to respond to it, this whole notion of hyperreality
• 1:19:00
  and stuff. So just to our listeners who think that I'm shitting on him
• 1:19:03
  for, you know, defending foot and stuff, I think the guy is
• 1:19:05
  fascinating, right, He's there's a few thinkers on the French left that I
• 1:19:10
  can conceive it for a more enigmatic and interesting than he is. I just
• 1:19:14
  also find him frustrating sometimes, and just a quick correction, I think before.
• 1:19:18
  So then the title of the book definitively is simulacra and simulation. Just
• 1:19:24
  to be clear. Okay, there we go. I actually fucked that up
• 1:19:27
  all the time. Always put simulation first. Yeah, just say, any
• 1:19:31
  any declension or organs of that body is a fuck it up. Okay.
• 1:19:35
  So, as this is fight night, I don't think it was a knockout,
• 1:19:41
  but we're gonna we're gonna have to give it to the judges. See
• 1:19:44
  the scorecards to see whose hand gets raised at the end of this. Uh,
• 1:19:47
  we are not the judges. We'll leave it to you. Yeah,
• 1:19:50
  hopefully we present today well. And can I just a quick little aside about
• 1:19:55
  the text, and I should mention too for the listeners that this text is
• 1:19:57
  very short, like I think the actual the actual text of the get fuco
• 1:20:00
  is only what like forty pages or something. Yeah, so stay tuned for
• 1:20:05
  our next fight nights. We have a lot to choose from. Thankfully,
• 1:20:12
  maybe give a recommendation if you have one for us. Yeah, that's good.
• 1:20:16
  But we're gonna do a few of these because they inspire debates on both
• 1:20:21
  sides and interesting, interesting content. So thank you guys. We'll see you
• 1:20:28
  later. Yeah, fatality