I don't know Deleuze or Guattari well enough to address your main
thread.  But I do enjoy Foucault and Deleuze, and like Derrida (in
particular and especially Plato's Pharmakon in Dissemination) even
better, so you can strike me from your list of those who become rabid at
mention of French post-structuralists.  I agree with you that they have
a lot to offer (though you didn't mention Derrida, so you might not
agree there).

Could it be that they're roundly hated just because they're French?  In
the US, at least, anti-French sentiment is powerful -- one can now
easily observe it's depth and breadth in the media simply because the
French disagree with the US government regarding war against Iraq.

Another explanation may be the simple fact of the trendiness of 20th
century French philosophy.  I don't mean that French philosophy is
trendy, but that it has been put to a lot of trendy use, with disastrous
results especially in the visual arts, where meaningless aggregations of
critical jargon borrowed from structuralist and post-structuralist
French philosophy (and also from Benjamin) stand in for thought.  The
essays read on the surface as though something's going on, but nothing
is.  The purpose usually seems to be simply to make other people feel
stupid. The essays certainly throw no light on the art being criticized
-- and which the author probably doesn't "understand" or care about anyway.

But I don't blame the 20th century French philosophers for this any more
than I blame Ezra Pound for Allen Ginsburg.

Jon & Anne Weidler wrote:

> Another figure (or rather, set of figures) that my head has been
> associating with EP lately is Gilles Deleuze and his partner, Felix
> Guattari.  I thought about writing about them first, a little before I
> thought of Benjamin, but then I thought better of it when I remembered
> that French post-structuralist writers seem to make members of this
> list rabid.  Is that hostility towards Foucault I've noticed around
> these parts applicable generally to others of his generation?  Is this
> hostility a symptom of some sort of modernist/post-modernist debate, or
> does it have more specific grounds?  Is it a symptom of
> academy-resentment?  Deleuze and Guattari are absolutely fearless
> theorists, and have a lot to offer to those who read them with sympathy
> and curiosity.  If you know anything about D & G, and want to talk EP
> connections, again, I'm right here waiting (as Richard Marx once
> reminded us, so beautifully.)
>
> -Jon
>

--

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