“All veteran humanities people know the reasons: intentionally obscure French philosophy is an established performance art; there’s money to be made, appointments to be secured, prestige to be garnered. Just as rich white American pop-music execs grasp that giving a tyro singer one name automatically wins teenage fans, operators in the master of though biz know that positioning a properly hieratic obscurantist correctly can lead scholarly publishers to issue any dreck the thinker produces. Once a French thinker hits the mark, of course, no one dares shut them up or suggests such plebeian activities as editing or rewriting.”
So writes Carlin Romano, himself a professor in philosophy, in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It was syndicated in todays Australian. His inspiration? The death of Jean Baudrillard; an intellectual fraud according to Romano. Aside from observations that Romano’s piece is likewise a performance, I couldn’t really say with any confidence that I knew Baudrillard’s work well enough to say he was incorrect, although the few pieces I had read I certainly thought were interesting and effective pieces of criticism.
In addition, his obituary smacks all too much of the pomo bashing that takes place from time to time; in particular the triumphant trumpeting of the ‘death of deconstruction’ in certain quarters, following the death of Jacques Derrida in 2004. Surely measured and scholarly assessment of a thinker’s contribution doesn’t call for a delight in their demise, regardless of one’s thoughts on their work.
Filed under: Baudrillard, Derrida, death, postmodernism
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