John Searle on Foucault and the Obscurantism in French Philosophy

It is some­times noted–typically with admiration–that France is a place where a philoso­pher can still be a celebri­ty. It sounds laud­able. But celebri­ty cul­ture can be cor­ro­sive, both to the cul­ture at large and to the celebri­ties them­selves. So it’s worth ask­ing:  What price have French phi­los­o­phy and its devo­tees (on the Euro­pean con­ti­nent and else­where) paid for the glam­our?

Per­haps one casu­al­ty is clar­i­ty. The writ­ings of the French post­mod­ernist philoso­phers (and those inspired by them) are noto­ri­ous­ly abstruse. In a scathing cri­tique of the­o­rist Judith But­ler, an Amer­i­can who writes in the French post­struc­tural­ist style, philoso­pher Martha Nuss­baum of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go sug­gests that the abstruse­ness is cal­cu­lat­ed to inspire admi­ra­tion:

Some precincts of the con­ti­nen­tal philo­soph­i­cal tra­di­tion, though sure­ly not all of them, have an unfor­tu­nate ten­den­cy to regard the philoso­pher as a star who fas­ci­nates, and fre­quent­ly by obscu­ri­ty, rather than as an arguer among equals. When ideas are stat­ed clear­ly, after all, they may be detached from their author: one can take them away and pur­sue them on one’s own. When they remain mys­te­ri­ous (indeed, when they are not quite assert­ed), one remains depen­dent on the orig­i­nat­ing author­i­ty. The thinker is heed­ed only for his or her turgid charis­ma.

On Fri­day we post­ed an excerpt from an inter­view in which lin­guist Noam Chom­sky (some­thing of a polit­i­cal celebri­ty him­self) exco­ri­ates Jacques Der­ri­da and Jacques Lacan, along with Lacan’s super­star dis­ci­ple, Sloven­ian the­o­rist Slavoj Žižek, for using inten­tion­al­ly obscure and inflat­ed lan­guage to pull the wool over their admir­ers’ eyes and make triv­ial “the­o­ries” seem pro­found. He calls Lacan a “total char­la­tan.”

Lacan had a pen­chant for using trendy math­e­mat­i­cal terms in curi­ous ways. In a pas­sage on cas­tra­tion anx­i­ety, for exam­ple, he equates the phal­lus with the square root of minus one:

The erec­tile organ can be equat­ed with the √-1, the sym­bol of the sig­ni­fi­ca­tion pro­duced above, of the jouis­sance [ecsta­sy] it restores–by the coef­fi­cient of its statement–to the func­tion of a miss­ing sig­ni­fi­er: (-1).

Chom­sky’s crit­i­cism of Lacan and the oth­ers pro­voked a wide range of com­ments from our read­ers. Today we thought we would keep the con­ver­sa­tion going with a fas­ci­nat­ing audio clip (above) of philoso­pher John Sear­le of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley, describ­ing how Michel Fou­cault and Pierre Bour­dieu–two emi­nent French thinkers whose abil­i­ties Sear­le obvi­ous­ly respected–told him that if they wrote clear­ly they would­n’t be tak­en seri­ous­ly in France.

Sear­le begins by recit­ing Paul Grice’s four Max­ims of Man­ner: be clear, be brief, be order­ly, and avoid obscu­ri­ty of expres­sion. These are sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly vio­lat­ed in France, Sear­le says, part­ly due to the influ­ence of Ger­man phi­los­o­phy. Sear­le trans­lates Fou­cault’s admis­sion to him this way: “In France, you got­ta have ten per­cent incom­pre­hen­si­ble, oth­er­wise peo­ple won’t think it’s deep–they won’t think you’re a pro­found thinker.”

Sear­le has been care­ful to sep­a­rate Fou­cault from Der­ri­da, with whom Sear­le had an unfriend­ly debate in the 1970s over Speech Act the­o­ry. “Fou­cault was often lumped with Der­ri­da,” Sear­le says in a 2000 inter­view with Rea­son mag­a­zine. “That’s very unfair to Fou­cault. He was a dif­fer­ent cal­iber of thinker alto­geth­er.” Else­where in the inter­view, Sear­le says:

With Der­ri­da, you can hard­ly mis­read him, because he’s so obscure. Every time you say, “He says so and so,” he always says, “You mis­un­der­stood me.” But if you try to fig­ure out the cor­rect inter­pre­ta­tion, then that’s not so easy. I once said this to Michel Fou­cault, who was more hos­tile to Der­ri­da even than I am, and Fou­cault said that Der­ri­da prac­ticed the method of obscu­ran­tisme ter­ror­iste (ter­ror­ism of obscu­ran­tism). We were speak­ing in French. And I said, “What the hell do you mean by that?” And he said, “He writes so obscure­ly you can’t tell what he’s say­ing. That’s the obscu­ran­tism part. And then when you crit­i­cize him, he can always say, ‘You did­n’t under­stand me; you’re an idiot.’ That’s the ter­ror­ism part.” And I like that. So I wrote an arti­cle about Der­ri­da. I asked Michel if it was OK if I quot­ed that pas­sage, and he said yes.

NOTE: For more on John Sear­le, includ­ing links to his full Berke­ley lec­tures on the phi­los­o­phy of mind, lan­guage and soci­ety, see our post, “Phi­los­o­phy with John Sear­le: Three Free Cours­es.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Michel Fou­cault: Free Lec­tures on Truth, Dis­course & The Self

Clash of the Titans: Noam Chom­sky & Michel Fou­cault Debate Human Nature & Pow­er on Dutch TV, 1971

90 Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Philoso­pher Slavoj Zizek Inter­prets Hitchcock’s Ver­ti­go in The Pervert’s Guide to Cin­e­ma (2006)


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