Adding this to my watch list! Chomsky really helped open my eyes about the world. I never understood how certain structures of power maintain control over society until I started listening to him. I’m so happy many of his talks are on YouTube.
Chomsky doesn't seem to have read up on the issues Foucault is talking about, and he admits as much in an interview on the topic, about how he was surprised that he could not find /any/ common ground from which to build a conversation with Foucault.
This is more of a failure of communication on the part of French intellectuals, who use verbose language helps keep their radical tradition so insular.
So... it's what you would expect an exchange between the analytic and continental philosophers to be like. Chomsky takes the enlightenment humanism tradition for granted, and assumes he can find common ground with Foucault there, but Foucault had been working in a tradition where the humanism vs anti-humanism debate (e.g. Althusser) was front and center.
In fact, Foucault himself was on the anti-humanist side. (anti-humanism doesn't mean "evil", it's just an unfortunate tongue-in-cheek terminology). What you end up with is Foucault trying his best to introduce Chomsky to the basics of a core part of the French intellectual tradition, more-or-less unsuccessfully.
What the debate highlights is the extent of the divide between continental philosophy and analytical philosophy. It doesn't make new ground.
Be sure to check out Manufacturing Consent (90s) and his criticism of the raise of (Maoist) Posmodernism in academia (interviews and lectures from the 80s). Do it before it gets removed.
Are there links you can recommend?
The results are a good start. I read all this a long time ago so I don’t have a list of links. I’d stay on his work and opinions before 2000.
The Documentary “Is the man who is tall happy” is easy to watch. His academic material is borderline incomprehensible. There was a Chomsky generator somewhere.
I'm sorry but in a country where people call Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton communists without a hint of irony I can't help but at roll my eyes at such a premise.
It's not a reasonable and realistic premise - it's word salad trying to scare.
Thank you for that, sir :) True and funny at the same time.
On the other hand, Chomsky supported many socialist and even marxist leaders. Like Chavez nationalizing every profitable sector of the economy. Note this is very not anarchist as it concentrates power in the state and a rulin elite. Perhaps he was blinded by his anti-war and anti Western establishment feelings. Who knows.
Postmodernism rejects any theories of the world that have any kind of absolute structure, while marxism is explicitly about defining such absolutes. In marxism, all people are either workers or capitalists (or outside the system); any good has an intrinsic value, and any work has an intrinsic plus-value; and on and on.
You can also see this in the art favored by countries which liked to claim to be marxist-leninist (though they weren't). Far from being post-modern, it was in fact traditionalist and realist.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/was-the-philosopher-...
I do admit that I may be completely off base, I know very little of her beyond what I could find on Wikipedia (which does list her as Marxist, but provides no further insight on why) and a handful of scholarly articles.
Note: a much better example you could have given was Slavoj Žižek, to which I have no answer..
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/03/noam-chomsky-h...
Chomsky supported Chavez' oil sector and other seizures. He turned a blind eye when Chavez armed civilian militias in 2005. Ignored all the blatant election fraud and growing corruption, and the long list of growing human rights abuses.
But he took issue when Chavez jailed an opposition journalist. He did this 180 turn in 2011, as per your own link. After over a decade of support and close friendship.
That's why I said, too little, too late.
Chomsky also supported many other messianic personalistic murderers like that in Latin America. It's sad, but he is just human and very, very old.
Indeed, postmodernism itself was a reaction to the perceived failure of Marxism (the failure of liberalism was already accepted in most academic circles), and the two are violently opposed.
Attempts to somehow liken the two are generally motivated by classical liberals trying to guilt-by-association all post-liberal ideologies and critical frameworks.
There were a lot of people that after the atrocities of the USSR and Mao simply stopped being hard-line Marxists and became Postmodernists. Others became revionist Marxists to attempt to learn from those disasters. That doesn't mean being both at the same time, and Postmodernism itself is quite a ways older than them.
Instead of a bunch of links to academic works, why don't you go to "liberal" academia and see what is imprinted in tshirts and who they have in their portraits.