Do french write obscurely on purpose, so as to hide their

both

>>9847300
I hope this is supposed to be an ironic joke.

Non, they write obscurely _by accident_ to hide their cluelessness.

>>9847273
>tfw to intelligent
>tfw that juicy Jouissance kicks in

>Lacan is obscure
sure thing buddy

>>9847452
Isn't he? Honest question

>>9847273
French are usually hyper-specific. Please provide an example of this so called "obscure" language

>>9849133
Ok sure, where do I get it?

>>9849125
For me it's the general impression they give. The feeling i get whenever i hear a french "intellectual" is that he does a word dance around a subject he doesn't have a concrete idea about. Anglosphere and Germans seem more exact

Do other anons get the same impression?

>>9849182
their idiot retards liberal. Real men speak with logic and rationality

>>9849182
So you're saying you have no idea and just going by memes.
Hmm ok

>>9847273
yes, here is a smart Analytic Philosopher BTFOing french obscurantism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvwhEIhv3N0

yes, the only exception is bourdieu

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>>9849199
>I had a short conversation with a dude so this is what I think of their whole tradition now

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>>9849223
>I need to extensively study their whole corpus before forming an opinion

>>9849233
He's a professor of philosophy, yeah why not

>>9849223
more like
>I read and taught a bunch of continental philosophers, and since their obscurantism was so obvious i asked some them why they write like that

>>9849243
Yeah but they were just being polite to the dumb American. I bet if he pressed them on specific examples of their obscurantism they wouldn't have been so ready so say some their work was unnecessary

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>>9847300

>>9847273
Form>Function when it comes to lit and poetry

>>9849257
T.bh i wouldnt have any problem if their psychobabble ramblings were presented as literature

>>9849271
And what the fuck is philosophy, science?
Anglos need to get over themselves

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>>9849278
You can always approach your subject with scientific method

>>9849293
Doesn't work with non-empirical objects.

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>>9849199
John Searle is a cool dude. I really liked his Rediscovery of the Mind where BFTOs reductive and eliminative materialists who claim consciousness and mental phenomena aren't real.`

>>9849293
Kant's notion of Science was very different from the common understanding of it as the hypothetico-experimental model

>>9849199
Foucalt and Bourdieu have a much better analysis of this style than Searle. It's the style of the French academy which was very elitist and relied on references to Hippolyte's History of Philosophy lectures.

Anyway, I unironically like Deleuze obscurantism and all. If you want to see a defence of Deleuze's project from himself, I recommend you read "Letter to a Severe Critic"

>>9849182
French intellectual here. The issue is quite complicated actually. No thinker or writer ever decides to intentionnally produce obscure bullshit. However, some are stupid and end up producing pointlessly obscure bullshit.
Good examples of guys whose obscurity is rationally justified and understandable : Merleau-Ponty, Bourdieu. They're not even as obscure as Heidegger, actually.
Example of a stupid prick unable to explain and justify his statements : Foucault.

>>9849412
You had me until you said Foucault, I think he's perfectly clear. Whats an example of him being obscure?
also >French intellectual here

>>9847273
all of french philosophy since 1950 is basically just a rationalisation for the philosopher's degenerate pomo lifestyle/ a means to bang gullible undergrads of all genders

>>9849182
yes

>>9849430
Foucault was one shady motherfucker. Whatever he might have said about the societies of control, he was also an advocate for Hayek and Thatcher's neoliberalism which is the society of control incarnate.

>>9849635
I don't know if he was an advocate so much as he enjoyed baiting Leftists

>>9849430
>You had me until you said Foucault, I think he's perfectly clear.
He literally admits to being needlessly obscuritan because it's part of the french academic culture

>>9849687
citation needed

>>9849125
>Nevertheless, because need has already passed through the filter of demand to the plane and the stage of unconditionality, it is in the guise, as one might say, of a second negation that we are going to find beyond, what it is precisely a question of finding, which is the margin of what is lost in this demand, and the beyond is precisely the character of absolute condition which is in desire, what presents itself in desire as such is this something which is of course borrowed from need. How could we construct our desires, if not by borrowing the raw material from our needs? But this passes over to a state of being unconditioned, not because it is a question of something borrowed from a particular need, but of an absolute condition out of all proportion to the need for any object whatsoever, and in so far as this condition is perhaps called for precisely in this, that it abolishes here the dimension of the other, that it is a requirement in which the other does not have to reply yes or no. It is this which is the fundamental dimension, character of human desire as such


That's Lacan. I honestly don't know if he was insane or not.

We

>>9849125

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>>9849675
>I don't know if he was an advocate so much as he enjoyed baiting Leftists

Foucault = French Milo.

the similarities are truly uncanny

>>9849697
I don't see your problem, do you need something explained in that passage?

>>9847273
>French
>Obscure
I think you meant Germans OP

>>9849719
explain the entire passage

>>9849690
>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.

The fact that you don't know this makes me think you have never read Foucault in your life.

>>9849697

Lacan was pretty fucking awful, both as a thinker and as a person

>>9849764
Haven't read that part but I've heard about it. I wish you would have given me a source, though.

>>9849751
I could write all year expanding on this but to keep it short, he's describing the relationship between needs (things we absolutely must demand off others) and desires (things we are granted and can live without).

Essentially he's saying desires always involve other people, that a certain act of consent is always implied, while things thought about as needs have no relationship. It becomes a pure material problem of acquisition

>>9847273
I once heard a French CS player say
>the enemy can't know what you're doing if you don't either

Such is the condition of people who eat snails

>>9849781
Searle claims he said it to him. That's the source, I think.

>>9849805
That's how I play CS though, and I win a lot. If you're intelligent and skilled, and just do what feels right each time without making plans, its impossible for the opponent to predict and to react in successful way. I don't know if it would work in a war (doubtful) but it works in games.

>>9849835
>I don't know if it would work in a war (doubtful)

It probably would actually, but the problem with real life is that you have to actually worry about dying

>>9849697
There's nothing confusing about that. I can even see the scene play out in my head.
>I need water or else I will die. If I don't get water I will need it but if I do then I won't need it any more.
>I want money because I want it. If I don't get money I will want it and if I do then I will still want it. I could never get enough money so that I would no longer want it.

>>9849635
I'm suddenly interested in Foucault

>>9849797
surely you can see how the language you used is much less obscure than the language he used. I mean come on, "filter of demand to the plane and the stage of unconditionality", "if not by borrowing the raw material from our needs".

>>9849866
Yeah but the language I'm using is only explaining one small portion of the propositional content in that paragraph. If I was to fully explain all he said there it would require a few pages.

The big problem in trying to read this is he assumes you have a familiarity with his work and terminology already.

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>>9847300

>>9849697
>>9849697
time cube

>>9847273
hmm

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>>9850020
That is exactly what Lacan reminds me of. Especially with his diagrams that explain nothing and try to introduce unnecessary geometry

>>9849840
Yeah. This is explained in a far more concise way in Plato's Gorgias. Lacan is a hack.

>>9849590
I unironically agree. The frog intelligentsia is a circlejerking cult of petty narcissists

>>9847273
they try to be like the Germans w/ their philosophical language but are bad at it

really all you need to know

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>>9849697
There are millions of people taking this shit seriously
They spend time and money dissecting this
There are million of impressionable french qts that STILL fall for this

Where did we go wrong?

>>9850287
Git gud faggit

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>>9850041
> For over a decade before his death, he was obsessed by the notion that certain topological figures might cast light on psychiatric illness and the human mind. He believed, for example, that the torus was `exactly the structure of the neurotic'. (The ludicrous `exactly' beautifully exemplifies the way intensifiers are used whenever counter-intuitive notions of huge scope and nearly zero comprehensibility are being asserted without argument, fact or illustration.) His disciples too, therefore, believed in the torus -- in the ever-deferred hope, perhaps, that belief might bring understanding. (Credo ut intelligam). At any rate, they listened in awe to his day-long seminars on such things as the Borromean knot and continued to do so even in his pathetic last years, when, as a result of multiple strokes, his speech was mangled by dysphasia and his cognitive functions were somewhat intermittent. By then even his silences, as dysphasia gave way to aphasia and his mind emptied, were attended to and subjected to lavish reverential interpretation.
> Now S&B have shown, what no one has hitherto been knowledgeable enough to demonstrate: precisely what was wrong with Lacan's use of mathematics. It is not only empty glitter but also internally flawed. Lacan's writings, in addition to being bad or lunatic psychiatry, are also bad mathematics. Lacan, S&B show, makes advanced errors -- muddling the very specific technical meanings of certain terms from topology (such as `compactness') and so on. But he also makes elementary ones, as when he confuses irrational and imaginary numbers or the universal and the existential quantifier -- the latter the kind of mistake a first week student in mathematical logic would not perpetrate.

With the help of his pseudo-mathematics, Lacan could gibber for hours, while his disciples listened in silence:

I will posit here the term `compactness'. Nothing is more compact than a fault, assuming that the intersection of everything that is closed therein is accepted as existing over an infinite number of sets, the result being that the intersection implies this infinite number. That is the very definition of compactness ... (quoted p. 21)

The confusion here -- pointed out by S&B -- of the topological notion of compactness with other notions within and without topology would have entirely escaped the attention of his un-mathematically schooled audience. One wonders what they thought as they listened to this stuff for hours. Perhaps they were simply awestruck, like the villagers in Goldsmith's poem: `And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew, / That one small head could carry all he knew.' A wonder that would have been greater had anyone among the psychoanalysts and other quasi-medical hangers on at his seminars noted the all-too-obvious and tragic fact that that head was afflicted for its last years with a progressive dementia.

>Irigaray has famously argued that science is sexist; for example E=Mc2 is `a sexed equation'. The reasons she gives for believing this are extraordinary.
>The sexism of science, Irigaray argues, explains why fluid mechanics is not as well developed as solid mechanics. The inability of (masculinist) science to deal with turbulent flow is explained by the association of fluidity with femininity: whereas men have sex organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids. Hence male science cannot cope with fluid dynamics.

>>9850370
its funny because this could easily be flipped by saying women have nipples that become hard when aroused and men ejaculate fluid

>>9850349
based

>>9850389
Men also have nipples retard

so how will post ww2 french philo age in a hundred or two years?

>>9850454
A lot better than autistic analytic diatribes

>>9850370

...wow. I wonder which gender quantum fields relate to.

>>9850449
why are you pointing that out to me?

>>9847300
o i am laffin

>>9850545
kek i only got it now

>>9849412
>No thinker or writer ever decides to intentionnally produce obscure bullshit.
I see no reason to believe this.

>>9849866
>surely you can see how the language you used is much less obscure than the language he used
You're really dumb. He was describing the content in that passage; the passage itself describes a phenomenon. A description of the passage does not in any way need to resemble the passage itself.

>>9850462
This, the only reason French intellectuals have so much authority is the failure of analytic philosophy to be anything other than a literally autistic intellectual front for imperial neoliberalism. Your favorite analytic philosopher is probably a warmonger--the one exception is Bertrand Russell, who is basically well-known for being wrong about math and for writing a terrible history of Western philosophy. His logical work is insightful, however, and necessary for an understanding of what happened after him in logic.

>>9849182
Not in the least.

>>9850605
this has to be the worst post I've ever seen on /lit/. of course the description doesn't need to resemble the original but I never said it needed to. I was just making the point that the passage could be said in simpler language

>>9849779
and you're any better?

>>9850645
Why does that matter? Don't tell me you still by into the Occam's Razor meme.

>>9847273
>Reading in translation

>>9849271
They basically are literature if you read Derrida

>>9850628
and continental philosophy wasn't a front for Soviet propaganda?

>>9849764
Doesn't this quote give you an explanation as to why French are 'obscurantists'? It's not because they are clueless but that they won't appear deep.

>>9850712
Well, Kant and Hegel were pre-Soviet, so it's not possible that all of it is.

>>9850389
Yeah...... if your dumb. Literally no point in Western thought is femininity associated with the rigid

>>9850716
bah I meant to put it in quotes, probably should be double quotes too because a chunk of the French intellectuals aren't mouth pieces at all.
For example Lacan has this great essay about Sadeian socialism, which is mind-blowing.

>>9850693
this thread is about french writers writing in obscure ways you autist

>>9850717
are you really trying to argue against a joke post

>>9850732
The only joke post here is you.

>>9850628
The fuck Anon, analytical philosophy uses AP level mathematics.

>>9849412

Merleau-Ponty is actually the shit. People rag on Heidegger for being obscurantist, but Husserl is a fucking chore to slog through. Reading french phenomenology was a delight for me. Maybe this has to do with the difference of directness of translation between French and German to English. The French thought I've read has always been clearer and more well organized than the German (except in the case of Schopenhaeur and others).

>>9850454
Everyone will joke about them like they do now

We take our language and literary heritage extremely seriously. There's almost nothing more important to the French than being well-read and articulate.

Because of this, the more erudite the prose, the higher the status. People here think philosophy is about poring over impressive authors and hopefully, with enough diligence, begin to discern what they're actually talking about. The goal is not to join the conversation about some set of ideas, or to develop a sense for the arguments around a given position; it's literally just a lexical puzzle which you win by deciphering the obscurantist prose.

It results in a deranged intellectual scene where plain-speaking is considered useless at best and uncouth at worst.

That isn't to say we don't have any insightful authors, but if you're not the right type of person -- either a masochist or someone with an extraordinary aptitude for language who can thrive in such a demented environment -- you're going to have a hard time.

>>9847273
philosophy is aesthetics.

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>>9849843
dude was a living meme. the organisers of the famous debate with chomsky allegedly paid Foucault in species with hash. Foucault's friends back in Paris referred to the hash in question as 'the chomsky stash'.

>>9849687
Well, he was wrong.

>>9849590
This. Once I read up on Sartre and Beuvior's little college student orgy's I came to realize this. Fucking pseud perverts

>>9849635
No he was not, this is a serious misreading. Read SMBD and his interviews, he's very radical

>>9852142
>if you're not the right type of person -- either a masochist or someone with an extraordinary aptitude for language who can thrive in such a demented environment -- you're going to have a hard time.

I'd say this is pretty true. You have to be a little decadent and devil-may-care to enjoy French philosophy. That's why the frogs took to Nietzsche's self-destructive impulses so well. Anglos especially have trouble with French philosophy because French philosophers are masters of playing with language, extending concepts into new territories and not announcing that they've done so. If you can't let yourself go with the flow, you will just be buffeted around by the current and you'll quickly get annoyed.

All philosophy does this, but in different ways. The Germans do it self-consciously, iteratively, in gigantic crystal structures of increasing complexity, but glacially, and in a way that leaves them trapped in their own systems. Anglos do it without realising that they're doing it, because they pride themselves so much on their simplicity, transparency, and clockwork rigidity that they even don't notice when their own language is playing tricks on them. But the French are masters of leading language along as far as she'll go, then being led by her for a while, then taking the lead again, etc.

The Germans are sort of like the Greeks, trying to infallibly court Truth herself, all at once, in a gigantic epoch-spanning research project. The Anglos are basically the cuckolds of Truth, thinking their stern rules and upfront protocol can control her, while she fucks around and does what he likes behind their back. But the French know how to play with her, tease her, flirt with her, submit to confusion and madness for a while, flirt with destructive consequences without caring too much. And ultimately they do get access to Truth, but only as a lover. Consummation is a little bit of ecstatic union in a world where ecstasy never lasts for long, and the French are mostly fine with that.

You should do German and French philosophy so that you can both fuck and love Truth. But only do Anglo philosophy if you want to get cucked, and live a long, stuffy, dreary life bereft of sex and love.

>>9853851
>trickery, fucking, flirting, confusion, destruction
lol that's not Truth you fool that's the Devil. Love is pure.

You could already learn about them from a second hand source.

>>9853851
Nice prose, absolutely awful idea.

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>>9847341

>>9853851
generalizing much?

>>9850712
>communist propaganda didn't start until the Soviet Union
Lol ok

>>9849764
This "quote" is what he was claimed to say by John Searle in a "conversation they had once". How do we know it wasn't a joke?

>>9850370
Can you explain to me how "sexed" is the same as sexist?

>>9850712
in the first half of the 20th century, most european intellectuals had a political agenda, being on the left meant joining the communist party and supporting uncle joe, being on the right meant siding with the church and the pope or else supporting fascism. Most of the big name post structuralists fell for the mao meme at some point. But there was always an anti stalinist left, the situationists, for example, criticised both mao and the USSR as state capitalists.

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>>9853851

>>9850726
What is your point?

>>9853066
sauce on that claim? Would love to read more.
>tfw reading PKD on LSD and experiencing the opposite of the Foucaultian "Acid Nietzsche"

>>9854617
op asked about a topic so we're discussing what he asked about. for you to say "why does it matter" in the middle of a discussion about it is just retarded

>>9854717
But what you said was irrelevant to the topic at hand. You're dense.

I dunno man but Deleuze is the only french intellectual I really read, and he seems to write obscurely in order to hide his points.

>>9854738
It isn't that obscure, most of the weirdest passages in Anti-Oedipus are quotes from sources. The rest is flamboyant prose describing interesting theories of sociology and the ontology of production and desire.

>>9854738
>he seems to write obscurely in order to hide his points
But he's not. How did you come to that conclusion?

>>9854732
how is it irrelevant to argue against someone who thinks that a french writer wasn't using obscure language by pointing out to them that the summary they provided was able to say what they said in much less obscure language?

>>9854857
You didn't point anything out.

>>9854874
"surely you can see how the language you used is much less obscure than the language he used". that says exactly what I just said.

>>9854878
What?

>>9854886
I know you don't want to admit it but thanks for finally understanding what I've been trying to tell you

>>9854894
Don't be so eager to throw yourself flowers, I'm another anon. I think you're wrong to believe Lacan could write any other way.

>>9854902
any information can be expressed in any number of ways

>>9852142
>deciphering the obscurantist prose.

Bruh have you ever read Sartre?

>>9854917
You sure sound smart. I wonder why you don't get Lacan.

>>9854955
I wasn't the anon who posted the original lacan greentext. I first started posting here when I asked the person to explain it as a way of showing how it can be said much more clearly.

>>9849182
>germans
>more exact
>Nietzsche and Heidegger
Sure thing, buddy.

>>9849121
Anon is trying to sound smarter than everyone else.

So I'm down with Deleuze, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty and the rest. But I can't for the life of me discover why Lacan is considered anything other than a hack charlatan.

>>9854960
>he thinks interpretation is the text

>>9854973
I think you are implying that I didn't understand the greentext before I asked for it to be explained which isn't true.

>>9849182
>Germans seem more exact
>Three most influential thinkers are Kant Hegel and Nietzche

And Anglos are direct, they are just so autistic and boring that you end up rereading passages not because you didn't understand it but because your eyes glazed over.

>>9854978
Your whole argument lies on the premise that the quote is abstruse and requires simplification.

>>9854992
My argument is that it could be said in simpler language. I'm not saying that it requires simplification to be understood at all, just that it is written in obscure language. OP asked if they do this on purpose to hide their cluelessness, I didn't give my opinion on that, I'm just agreeing with OP that they do in fact write in obscure language.

>>9849797
But you're wrong. Desires are the basis for needs and needs are the basis for behavior. This has nothing to do with sustenance or pyramid of needs.

>>9849366

This is true.

>>9855022
kant and others of his time used science to refer to a "body of knowledge" of something, right?

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>>9855011
you're such a meme, anon

>>9855036
thanks

>>9855038
I hope you're ironic because I don't think anon meant it as a compliment.

>>9847300
fpbp

>>9855021
Thats interesting actually, thanks for the correction

>>9855021
>>9856240
>Desires are the basis for needs
But you don't need to eat because you desire food, anon. What am I not getting here?

>>9855011
>in fact
what an ass

>>9847273
>reading translations

>>9850712
>evola was soviet plant

He did say the soviets had preserved more traditional values that the capitalist West. Guess you are right.

>>9847273
they have cheap good wine. like, why are the irish and russians so great at writing? it's easy to get transcendentally blind drunk when you're starving. it's also why americans love the great gatsby: it's the closest to a book they have which doesn't say "beer"

>>9857242
kek

>>9857242
It says gin?

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>>9847300
hell yeah

>>9856376
But if you didn't desire anything there would be no point to 'needs' as you could just die and nobody would care. What a 'need' even is can only be defined if you actually say, want to survive. You only 'need' in order for some particular purpose.