Ceci n’est pas un Post About Dominique Strauss-Kahn

Last updated on August 17, 2011

From The Economist’s Schumpeter blog:

“Michel Foucault was a colossal bore — and a bore, moreover, who encouraged the practice of seeing history exclusively in terms of the exploitation of an ever-multiplying band of victims even as living standards rose to unprecedented levels. Louis Althusser was a wife-killing buffoon. Pierre Bourdieu labored the obvious. Jacques Lacan produced incomprehensible bilge. (France has produced its share of greats, of course, most notably Raymond Aron, but they are routinely ignored).

Yet Foucault et al. look like giants compared with the current crop of intellectuals, if the commentary on the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair is anything to go by. Bernard Henri-Lévy (…) has written a paean of praise to his friend, DSK, which is remarkable for its lack of sympathy for the unfortunate Muslim immigrant at the heart of the affair.”

You can read the whole thing here.

Ceci n’est pas un Post About Dominique Strauss-Kahn

I grew up in Montreal in a francophone family and attended French schools until I moved to the US for graduate school in 2001. I thus believe I have had a good amount of exposure to French intellectuals.

I started college at the Université de Montréal (UdeM) wanting to major in Philosophy. Because we did not have a freshman year, this means that I took nothing but philosophy during my first year at the UdeM.

After hearing some of my classmates tell me just how much they enjoyed reading Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, etc., I decided to check some of those authors out for myself. I distinctly recall trying to read Michel Foucault’s Surveiller et punir, and then his Archéologie du savoir. I could not make it past the first ten pages! So, because my mind would just start wandering after a few paragraphs, I concluded that I must be dumb.

Enter Sokal

It wasn’t until the fall of 2009 that I realized I might not be dumb. When I arrived in Belgium for my sabbatical, I realized I now had time to read for pleasure. I visited a few of the bookstores in Namur, and stumbled upon Sokal and Bricmont’s Impostures intellectuelles, which was published in English under the title Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science.

I remembered hearing about that book back in the late 1990s, so I decided to buy it. It turned out to be both a synthesis of the Sokal Affair and a masterful takedown of French intellectuals like Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, and Julia Kristeva, i.e., authors who willingly wrote so as to not be understood because that very impenetrability gave them an aura of intellectual prestige among their peers.

It was then that I realized that as an economist, I belonged to a distinctly different — and, in my view, considerably better — tradition of intellectual writing. The Anglo-Saxon tradition — I don’t know that this is what it’s called; this is my personal name for it because I write for an English-speaking public — puts the onus on the writer. It is the author who has to make every effort possible to be understood by his or her readers, and not the other way around.

Given that, it is no surprise that my earlier academic writings are now particularly painful to read. Having done both my B.Sc. and my M.Sc. degrees in French, learning to communicate scientific findings for an English-speaking public was an uphill struggle. I am still learning to do so effectively to this day.

This probably explains why I still cannot write interesting blog posts in less than 150 words.