File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-01-31.063, message 47


Date: Thu, 30 Jan 1997 11:10:20 -0500 (EST)
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: M-I: Foucault, Nietzche and Marx (Post #1)


>
>Oh it's worse than that. On pp. 135-6 of Knowledge/Power, writing about
>Marx and Lenin: "Rather than searching in those texts for a condemnation of
>the Gulag, it is a matter of asking what in those texts made the Gulag
>possible, what might even now continue to justify it, and what makes it
>intolerable truth still accepted today.... [We must give] up the politics
>of inverted commas, whether damning or ironic, round Soviet socialism in
>order to protect the good, true socialism - with no inverted commas - which
>alone can provide a legitimate standpoint for a politically valid critique
>of the Gulag. Actually the only socialism which deserves these scornful
>scare-quotes is the one which leads the dreamy life of ideality in our
>heads."
>
>Doug
>

Louis: I have a little Foucault at home. I keep it under lock and key with
my Deleuze and Guattari. It is the interviews he gave to Semiotexte. What
struck me was the heavy presence of Nietzsche. Isn't something that
generally characterizes the "posties" is this really silly enfatuation with
Nietzsche? 

Now it's one thing to read Nietzsche when you are an adolescent. I must
admit that my head was full of Nietzsche when I was 16. The big influences
on me were Nietzsche, Jack Kerouac, Lenny Bruce, and Zacherley who used to
be the emcee of a TV show in the 1950s that showed nothing but classic
monster movies like Frankenstein and Dracula. Zach provided comic asides on
the films that were in some ways much funnier than Nietzsche or Lenny Bruce
could ever come up with in their riffs on bourgeois society.

Speaking of Nietzsche, isn't it amazing how he was capable of such
penetrating wit when it came to the subject of bourgeois society, but how
incapable he was of mobilizing such insights when it came to the character
of Nietzsche himself?

The other guy to steer clear of is Kierkegaard. What a nut. He writes a
whole book extolling that bloodthirsty fable from the Jewish Bible about God
asking Abraham to make a sacrifice of his son. Ghastly, simply ghastly.

Marx was the only one of those post-Hegelians who had his head screwed on
right. It took the Vietnam war and the racism I saw in Harlem when I worked
as a welfare worker in 1967 to make me appreciate Marx. When I was a student
of Heinrich Blucher (Mr. Hannah Arendt) back at Bard College in the early
1960s, he was always bad-mouthing Marx and rhapsodizing over Nietzsche.
Blucher used to work in the psychological warfare department of the OSS
during WWII. I have a feeling that he transferred his "anti-totalitarian"
focus from Nazism to "Communism" without skipping a beat, the way most
German exile intellectuals did who fell in love with American imperialism. I
suspect that the biggest problem I had in accepting Marxism was trying to
unlearn the existentialist brand of anticommunism that I picked up at Bard.
To me Foucault represents a new packaging of the same old product.



     --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---


   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005