The Surprisingly Sunny Origins of the Frankfurt School | Hacker News Reader

The Surprisingly Sunny Origins of the Frankfurt School

newyorker.com

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Articles like this get posted and yet if you use terms like “post modern neo-Marxism” to describe critical theory, Frankfurt school, continental philosophy, post modernism/post structuralism, situationalist internationale, you get described as a “right wing conspiracy theorist”. I hate Peterson so much for having ruined the ability to critique these charlatans.

I actually read a ton of shit from these groups. Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Lacan, Freud, Sartre, De Bouiver, etc. I had to both for university philosophy and Sociology classes and for competitive debate.

They’re all fashionable nonsense charlatans. All of their ideologies are intellectual bankrupt and scams. I firmly believe that the success of these movements was engineered on purpose by your local spy master to prevent leftists from doing impactful stuff.

The oedipus complex, Electra complex, object petit a, rhizomatic thinking, biopower, etc literally do not exist. Every single idea that most of these people had was so hilariously off base that their fame today is an indictment of the entire human race.

Oh and that’s not even bringing up the real heavy hitters on why these folks are disgusting:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_petitions_against_age...

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/4/16/reckoning-with-...

I haven’t really read these guys but that seems like a very strong claim.

You really should try reading them. I am not even scratching the surface. Just open up a book called “anti-oedipus” or “A Thousand Plateus” by Deleuze and Guattari.

It’s all full of shit. The moment that you start with Freud (and all of these figures implicitly assume he’s right as they do for Marx) you’ve become intellectually bankrupt.

_Anti-Oedipus_, is fairly critical of Freud, as the name implies. To refuse to engage with a subject is intellectually bankrupt.

I unfortunately cover to cover read and engaged with these authors far too much in my competitive debate career.

I repeat, they are all full of shit. Their “criticism of him” is not even close to on base. They literally advocate for “Schizoanalysis”. Everyone claims that they critique everyone else in this field. “Critique” in the sense of “your mostly right but made a few mistakes” instead of being like “I’m pretty sure that young children don’t want to fuck their mom and kill their dad” (oedipus complex, which Deleuze and Guattari think is real)

It’s telling that their attempted psychiatric hospital was an epic fail, that Deleuze famously said guattari told him to “write stupid shit”, and Deleuze ends up flinging him self out of a window in an apparent suicide later.

From what little I know, their use of schizophrenia is different from how we use it now, and when they refer to the schizophrenic they mean someone who doesn’t systematize and abstract things in order to make sense of the world like most people, so they want to try and use something like this state of mind to observe things as they are rather than reducing them into constituent parts and abstracting their function like we tend to do when analyzing, hence schizoanalysis. I think that’s a neat idea, lmk if I’m misreading.

I keep my copy in my bed and draw little flowers in the margins and give it sweet kisses and sleep with it every night. :3

> The oedipus complex, Electra complex,

Indeed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westermarck_effect

Conflating Derrida and Sartre with Frankfurt's school is extremely weird. Especially Sartre.

Sartre's ideology is existentialism, it have close to nothing to do with the post-hagelism/neo-marxism of the Frankfurt school. The only common point is that they're continental philosophers and atheists.

Concerning Derrida, his main contribution is that the best way of criticizing a book is to make abstraction of who wrote it and when, of current ideas and laws and only judge the book for itself, finding internal contradiction,and that what he called 'deconstruction'. Yes it's the same word as Frankfurt's school 'deconstruction' but it has nothing to do with it. I get why he's classified as a post-modernist,but he is post-structuralist before everything, and post-structuralism is anti-marxism by definition, so making him a friend of Frankfurt's school is disingenuous. Also he disliked Foucault.

Also, Freud, Deleuze, Lacan and Foucault are frauds and while most post-modernism is basically wankery (if this word doesn't exist,it should), Derrida, and especially Lyotard and Baudrillard do not deserve to be put in the same basket. Lyotard because he explained Marvel 'films' 50 years before Marvel, and Baudrillard because anybody who wants to understand social media has to read him, despite the fact that he died before Facebook was a thing. And conflating all of them with hagelians is an insult to any intelligent being who read them.

And for the 'age of consent' petitions you linked at the end, the story is that the age of consent in France was 21. It was then reduced for non-homosexuals to 18, then 15. The petition (at least the one signed by Françoise d'Eaubonne) was to have the same age of consent for both homosexuals and heterosexuals, which ended up happening. The latest petition I think was to either have consent lowered to 13, or have the penal responsibility raised from 13 to the current consent age,but it was signed by like 60 people and quite weird.

P.S I checked the English version and the French version, one has a lot of facts, citations, point of view and seems quite complete, the other seems quite targeted. I wasn't exact in my description of what happened but I'm a lot closer than the English Wikipedia.

Derrida belongs in the fraud bucket so hard I got him a specially labelled bucket to put him in.

Is he a fraud because it takes him two books to finally get to a fucking point (in that case I totally agree) or is he a fraud because someone who didn't read him made him say stuff he didn't write or said and you now think that his deconstruction, inspired by Heidegger's 'Destruktion', is the same as critical theory deconstruction, which it is not?

If your only issue with him is his deconstruction, I implore you to read what it means, in his main subject, linguistics and literary criticism.

If it was his weird affection for psychoanalysis and other new-age shit, you're right but it isn't really present in his most known works, and I would not understand why put him in a special bucket.

Being into "weird new-age shit" taints you to the point that you should not be listened to. It hints that their whole epistemological world-view is biased by charlatanism. I don't care if a chiropractor is right about some stuff, they're too tainted to listen to... at all...

Look at what happened to people who were almost coherent. I actually love "Mass Psychology of Fascism" by Wilhelm Reich. Great explanation of the right-wing fear of sexual pleasure. Too bad he went loony as hell right after: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orgone

Or Althussuar killing his wife suddenly and without warning? (his wife was a hardcore communist woman who apparently summarily executed "collaborators" shortly after WW2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A9l%C3%A8ne_Rytmann

Or Jung's literally mystical ideas of collective unconscious?

This ideology literally makes you nuts. Hence why they want you to be "Schizoanalytical" and "Rhizomatic".

I don't like to defend what he wrote once again, it's mostly unactionnable and unreadable, so useless for anyone, but he never published new age shit, the only criticism you can do on him would be that he doesn't criticize it as much as he should. His complacency with Deleuze and Garrati (or whatever his name was) is problematic, but once again, he never reference it in any published work.

Also he was clearly in the non-Lacanian branch of poststructuralism, at least in what he published, so i think you have conflated his writing with a Zizeck or someone else. In his book on Freud, while he is quite incomprehensible as always, it's also clear he tries to deconstruct and refute Psychoanalysis through freud's writing (this is a point i really disagree with Derrida, he make everything about literature and his textual deconstruction). You can criticize the fact that he does not finish, but i don't see where this taints him.

My opinion is that he was such a poor and distracted writer that it makes it easy for people to misread him on purpose and make him say shit he never did.

Also his method of literary analysis is good, even if hard to pull on really good books (bu that's why it is a really good method), and i think it is hard to disagree on this.

> you get described as a “right wing conspiracy theorist”... I firmly believe that the success of these movements was engineered on purpose by your local spy master

I think I figured out why you're called a conspiracy theorist. Academic leftism is very stupid, though.

> post modern neo-Marxism

I wouldn't label you a right wing conspiracy theorist for using this term, that's much to grandiose. Things like "underinformed", "pseudo intellectual", or "silly billy" do come to mind though. Using this term shows that you completely missed the point on what either marxism or post modernism is. It's completely oxymoronic. Post modernism is about rejecting grand narratives, and marxism is _all_ grand narrative ("history is driven by class struggle").

> It's completely oxymoronic. Post modernism is about rejecting grand narratives, and marxism is _all_ grand narrative

For some straight talk and level-headed mythbusting on this and other common misconceptions, A Postmodernism FAQ[1] is a great listen.

    part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmYegIGhwtc
    part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4hS5NSzPxw
    part 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsfKrNLIwhM

"The CIA and the Frankfurt School's Anti-Communism": https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-cia-the-frankfurt-scho...

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