Intellectual Breakups

The Five Stages

Romantic breakups are tough. They often involve the five stages of grief and, even then, the fifth stage of acceptance can remain elusive. Moreover, romantic breakups shatter our self-conception as if we are ripping ourselves in two, severing a bond which was once integral to our self-definition. However, as I will argue, anguish cannot only be reserved for romantic breakups; in fact, intellectual breakups are often equally, if not more, devastating to our self-conceptualization. In this piece, I sketch a personal intellectual breakup with the French poststructuralists against the five stages of grief. With ample tissues in hand, let us begin. 

Denial

When I first read Roger Scruton’s Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left and Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont’s Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science, I was aghast at the provocative evisceration of some of my foremost intellectual idols. Most notably, I denied that the criticisms of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Jacques Lacan had any merit and were, instead, the obtuse ramblings of, in the first case, a dim-witted conservative and, in the second case, joyless scientists. What was I to make of my revelatory experience in the O’Neill and Bapst Libraries where I attempted to decipher Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, and Lacan’s Écrits? 

Anger

It is important to note that I believe I was and am rightly angry at some of the depictions of left intellectuals in these two works. For instance, Scruton mainly criticizes Eric Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson, John Kenneth Galbraith, Ronald Dworkin, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Michel Foucault in the first half of his book because of their ostensible objectionable political positions. In my opinion, at the very least, all of these writers have important things to say and, at most, are deserving of their places in the left intellectual pantheon. In particular, Sartre and Foucault can be distinguished from their intellectual successors in Paris by their comparatively accessible writing style. One need look no further than Sartre’s lecture Existentialism is a Humanism or Foucault’s The History of Sexuality to see what I mean. In both cases, the writing (or speech) is lucid, concise, and intellectually riveting. Sartre’s insights on the nature consciousness and Foucault’s on the nature of power are indispensable to understanding modern society’s pathologies and pitfalls. Similarly, Scruton’s targeting of Antonio Gramsci, Edward Said, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Žižek in the second half of the book also seems politically motivated and fuelled by resentment rather than reasoning. But, as I will argue soon, where Scruton, Sokal, and Bricmont converge in their assessments is where I happen to agree: that the work of the aforementioned Delueze, Deleuze and Guattari, and Lacan are perhaps intentionally indecipherable.

Bargaining

As I mediate between what these thinkers provide that are useful and what these thinkers provide that are useless, it is helpful to provide some examples. Lacan’s idea of the mirror stage –– the developmental stage between 6 and 18 months when an infant sees its reflection and forms an ego –– is intriguing even if it doesn’t necessarily hold scientific water (see Scruton: “blind children become adroit in the practice of distinguishing self and other at the same age as sighted children”). Additionally, Deleuze and Guattari’s signature contribution to epistemology –– the rhizome –– is intriguing because it offers an alternative path forward for thought and scholarship. Instead of privileging top-down, hierarchical processes resembling a tree, the rhizome is a “acentered, nonhierarchical, non-signifying system.” Simply put, their scholarly output accords to a schizophrenic logic whereby digressions appear and disappear and any central subject of thought remains elusive. To read Deleuze and Guattari is to get stuck in an intellectual corn maze constructed of poststructuralism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis where the only way out is through the dense, challenging text. For these reasons and more, Lacan, Deleuze, and Guattari remain challenging, influential, and important sources of knowledge. 

Now, time for the damning passages. In what is often cited as one of Lacan’s most famous (or infamous) contributions, we find a peculiar interpretation of imaginary numbers. As Sokal and Bricmont cite: 

“No doubt Claude Levi-Strauss, in his commentary on Mauss, wished to recognize in it the effect of zero symbol But it seems to me that what we are dealing with here is rather the signifier of the lack of this zero symbol. That is why, at the risk of incurring a certain amount of opprobrium, I have indicated to what point I have pushed the distortion of the mathematical algorithm in my use of it: the symbol -1 , which is still written as ‘i ’ in the theory of complex numbers, is obviously justified only because it makes no claim to any automatism in its later use.

Thus the erectile organ comes to symbolize the place of jouissance, not in itself, or even in the form of an image, but as a part lacking in the desired image: that is why it is equivalent to the -1 of the signification produced above, of the jouissance that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the function of lack of signifier (-1).”

What to make of this incoherent rambling? Your guess is as good as mine. Perhaps the greatest contribution of all this is that the erectile organ is equal to the square root of negative one. That’s not something you learn in pre-calculus! 

Now, time for Delueze and Guattari. Here, I have quoted a passage that Sokal and Bricmont also quote which I think is demonstrative of the issues posed by a relativist view of science and the pursuit of truth. Delueze and Guattari write:

“Subjectivist interpretations of thermodynamics, relativity, and quantum physics manifest the same inadequacies. Perspectivism, or scientific relativism, is never relative to a subject: it constitutes not a relativity of truth but, on the contrary, a truth of the relative, that is to say, of variables whose cases it orders according to the values it extracts from them in its system of coordinates (here the order of conic sections is ordered according to sections of the cone whose summit is occupied by the eye).”

Huh? What does Delueze and Guattari mean by scientific relativism not constituting “a relativity of truth but, on the contrary, a truth of the relative”? Admittedly, I have no idea. As we bargain between the good, the bad, and the ugly of these intellectuals’ works, we must remain cognizant that often complexity is a sign of confused rationality rather than transcendent profundity. 

Depression

As my intellectual Mount Rushmore has come crashing down in dramatic fashion, the detritus of “rhizomes,” “erectile organs,” and “conic sections” strewn across my mind like corpses on a battlefield, I must admit that I am rather saddened. What to make of writers we once found inspiring who are now revealed to be charlatans? This ideological depression has induced in me a desire to find other writers who speak to the human condition more authentically and accessibly. Consider, for example, writers like Albert Camus and George Orwell who are often written off as philosophers fit only for high-school syllabi. 

This being said, in works like Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus and The Stranger as well as Orwell’s 1984 and The Road to Wigan Pier, we find glimpses of the common decency which binds us which is sorely lacking in the work of the aforementioned poststructuralists. Although this perspective may be more attributable to a reading of Orwell than Camus, Camus nevertheless succeeded in providing hope in a chaotic world. What else to make of his assertion that one can only imagine Sisyphus being happy pushing his boulder up the hill. Additionally, there are  pithy revelations in these writers’ works such as Camus’s argument that the true philosophical meaning of life is doing whatever you’re doing that prevents you from killing yourself. Meanwhile, there is Orwell’s line that “in a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” 

And then there are the heterodox, counter-counter cultural Marxists Michel Clouscard and Jean-Claude Michéa who, as I discussed with Professor Behrent, wrote for large audiences. One can imagine a working-class intellectual reading Michéa’s work on the “unity of liberalism” and having the wool pulled from his eyes. It is hard to imagine the same about a working-class intellectual discovering the rhizome. What I’m trying to say is that, perhaps paradoxically and counterintuitively, the works of “simplistic” authors like Camus and Orwell provide more emancipatory potential than the works of Deleuze, Guattari, Lacan, and other poststructuralists. The left vanguard must be composed of people not only concerned with the working class but concerned for the working class. 

Acceptance

Ah, the last stage. By now I have come to the conclusion that I perhaps unintentionally elevated Deleuze, Guattari, Lacan, and the other French poststructuralists (who, along with Althusser, Scruton pejoratively dubbed as inventing and promulgating the “nonsense machine”). But if we read their works less doctrinally as more as poetic prose or prose poetry than strict, continental  philosophical texts, I think we can still glean insights from them. After all, they were all incredibly intelligent and, at least, Deleuze had interesting things to say about Spinoza and other continental philosophers. While intellectual breakups are tough, I can only look fondly on the time in O’Neill and Bapst Libraries reading the French theorists. And, with all new beginnings, I look forward to delving deeper into the works of Clouscard, Michéa, and other heterodox thinkers. Sometimes we must kill our idols, but we still remember them even as we appreciate the thinkers who emerge in their wake.