Dangerous Thinkers

20th-century philosophers' love affair with totalitarianism

Mark Goldblatt from the October 2002 issue

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In a 1971 debate with Noam Chomsky, Foucault's agenda became clear: "When the proletariat takes power, it may...exert toward the classes over which it has triumphed a violent, dictatorial, and even bloody power. I can't see what objection could possibly be made to this."

Revolution itself held little interest for Foucault aside from its concurrent "limit-experience" -- that is, bloodletting. He publicly applauded the Iranian revolution, visiting the country twice under the Ayatollah. In the late 1970s, he immersed himself in the sado-masochistic gay subculture of California and contracted AIDS -- and continued to engage in unprotected sex. Toward the end of his life, he remarked, "To die for the love of boys: What could be more beautiful?" He succumbed to the disease in 1984.

With more than a touch of irony, Lilla notes, "For the generation that came of age in the 1960s and 1970s [Foucault] served as an exemplar of what it is to lead an intellectually and politically serious life." In retrospect, however, perhaps the kindest thing you can say about Foucault is that if he'd truly had the courage of his convictions, he could have been the Marquis de Sade.

The last "reckless mind" Lilla portrays is Jacques Derrida, who describes himself as "a man of the left" but whose theoretical stance effectively negates the possibility of political allegiance. The fact that Derrida is even classified as a philosopher -- rather than, as Lilla suggests, a performance artist -- tells you more about the state of the humanities in the West, and especially in America, over the last quarter century than it does about Derrida's own work.

Following the then-fashionable habit among late 1960s French intellectuals to regard "universal ideas" such as "reason, science, progress and liberal democracy" as "culturally specific weapons fashioned to rob the non-European Other of his difference," Derrida early on posited that "man" himself was a cultural construct; there was no essential human nature, no ideal against which to judge human behavior or compare cultures. "Man" was a product of language, and language in every case could be taken apart to expose its internal contradictions. Philosophical texts could likewise be "deconstructed"; indeed, the process of deconstruction could be substituted for philosophy.

This early Derrida, observes Lilla, is wholly irreconcilable with the Derrida of recent years, who has turned to lengthy disquisitions on the necessity for, and universality of, justice. Such irreconcilability would be fine if Derrida had renounced the premises of his earlier work. He hasn't. But of course Derrida's response would be that pointing out his own contradictions amounts to a logical critique, and the thrust of his thought has always been to subvert logic itself. Thus, his inconsistency is perfectly consistent.

It's an invincible position. And it is the antithesis of a rational enterprise. If contradicting yourself does not undermine what you're arguing, you're not arguing anything. The only way to read Derrida on his own terms is mentally to insert the words "or not" after each of his statements. Derrida, indeed, represents the logical endpoint of the desire to work free of logic. Though by no means the most reckless of the reckless minds Lilla profiles, he is without question the most pointless -- as evidenced by the fact that he has spawned a cottage industry of jargon-spewing academics struggling to explain why he isn't really as pointless as he seems.

Lilla's brief but sobering book should remind us that the denial of reason as the final arbiter of ideas leads, in the most benign cases, to texts so masturbatory that their pages virtually stick together. In the most malignant cases, it leads to the rhetoric of genocide.