More brilliant quotations from Postmodernist scam artists by Gad Saad, an evolutionary behavioural scientist and YouTube personality.
It is well known that Foucault admitted he had to have 10% incomprehensible gibberish in his writing to be “taken seriously” in French Poststructuralist circles and in French intellectual life. Even worse, Bourdieu put it at 20%.
Saad misinterpolates the intertextuality between tripartite dualities, eliding the hegemonic patriarchal racism of the ambient grammar, thereby bifurcating the ontological eschaton to obscure the racial trichotomy -- the coming apart of the coming together-- of the implicate and predicate herstory.
ReplyDeleteAs another commentator did point out, it is quite unfair to put Bourdieu in the post-whatever-ism bag.
ReplyDeleteBourdieu was a genuine social scientist, committed to the idea of objective truth, as is evident from his interest in statistical methods (see for example the appendix to La distinction where he states his reasons for using multiple correspondence analysis when modeling social classes).
He openly criticised the intellectual BS you are concerned with and suggested an explanation as to why some educated people were so fond of it : intellectuals deprived of any usual contact with ordinary reality and wishing to tell themselves they were "radicals" and eagerly confused saying weird things about classics and changing the world.
As far as philosophy is concerned, Bourdieu allways recognised his debts toward people like Bachelard, Canguilhem (philosophers and historians of sciences), and Vuillemin (the first french philosopher to lecture on Russell and Frege and the epitome of a rationalist).
He wrote a book debunking Heiddegger as a far right irrationnalist in disguise and had the main books of german neokantian Ernst Cassirer translated in French.
At a time where it was not fashionable, he read Wittgenstein and Quine and built on their works, especially on the question of "rules" (be they grammatical or matrimonial) and "rule following".
Last but not least, he helped Jacques Bouveresse (who can be labelled an analytic philosopher) get elected to the Collège de France and as far as I know fully agreed with Bouveresse's defense of science and common sense.