A friend of mine shared a video of an interview between Gad Saad and Michael Rechtenwald, a professor at NYU who evidently has been “castigated for daring to criticize safe spaces and related thought policing, postmodernism, literary Darwinism, secularism in science, and the relationship between science and religion.” I’m including the video link here (I’d suggest watching 24:00-28:00ish) as well as my comments on YouTube. The point: The two speakers are hashing out the “bullshit” involved in postmodernism and the work of thinkers like Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and other poststructural scholars, stating that these thinkers are obscurantist and concern themselves with sounding intellectual rather than making salient and socially applicable points. What do you think?
The two speakers are aiming to be critics, which I can appreciate. However, to say simply that Butler is “full of shit” is to ignore her contributions to scholarly thought, which are valuable. She’s an important philosopher of language. One of the issues I think they’re conflating is the idea with the mode of expression. I agree that Butler’s sentence is abstruse and very very difficult to understand (weirdly, I understood it for the most part!) but I don’t think we should throw the baby out with the bathwater. I’d look for a middle ground where we can still find ideas and assume that scholarly work can be exploratory and push the reader to think, even if at times it is hard to read.
I agree with the speaker on the left that literary/critical theory is often worshipped for the lofty and inaccessible (obscurantist) ways of speaking. For example, Derrida wrote a dissertation that was widely rejected for its meaninglessness. I read Derrida’s work for about 50 pages and it occurred to me that he could have said what he wanted to say in 5-6 pages. However, I think it’s facile to call it “bullshit” or a “false prophecy.” I agree with the gentleman on the right that literary/critical theory at times divorced itself from social reality…however, again, I think this is a reaction to the rock star-ness of French intellectualism in the 1960s and its social excesses and doesn’t justify a perspective that none of it contributes anything to scholarship and creative ways of resolving philosophical and political questions in society.
The moral of this story: READ FOR YOURSELF. We are in anti-intellectual times when we count on pundits to tell us how we feel. This temptation for the shorthand version of things is to be avoided at all costs.
