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To: betty boop; beckett
Wow! Excellent essay beckett! Thank you so much for the heads up, betty boop!
40 posted on 02/07/2003 8:30:30 AM PST by Alamo-Girl
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To: VadeRetro
What, I asked, do you propose to put in the place of this “bourgeoisie” whom you so despise, and to whom you owe the freedom and prosperity that enable you to play on your toy barricades? What vision of France and its culture compels you? And are you prepared to die for your beliefs, or merely to put others at risk in order to display them? I was obnoxiously pompous: but for the first time in my life I had felt a surge of political anger, finding myself on the other side of the barricades from all the people I knew.

She replied with a book: Foucault’s Les mots et les choses, the bible of the soixante-huitards, the text which seemed to justify every form of transgression, by showing that obedience is merely defeat. It is an artful book, composed with a satanic mendacity, selectively appropriating facts in order to show that culture and knowledge are nothing but the “discourses” of power. The book is not a work of philosophy but an exercise in rhetoric. Its goal is subversion, not truth, and it is careful to argue—by the old nominalist sleight of hand that was surely invented by the Father of Lies—that “truth” requires inverted commas, that it changes from epoch to epoch, and is tied to the form of consciousness, the “episteme,” imposed by the class which profits from its propagation. The revolutionary spirit, which searches the world for things to hate, has found in Foucault a new literary formula. Look everywhere for power, he tells his readers, and you will find it. Where there is power there is oppression. And where there is oppression there is the right to destroy. In the street below my window was the translation of that message into deeds.

natural selection

41 posted on 02/07/2003 8:35:36 AM PST by cornelis
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To: Alamo-Girl
Glad you found it enjoyable, A-G. So did I. We both have JohnHuang to thank. I found it on my daily trip to Arts & Letters Daily, was going to post it, and then found John had beat me to it.
50 posted on 02/07/2003 3:34:15 PM PST by beckett
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