Let Us Attack "Continental Philosophy" & Philosophers!: Thursdays in Academia

Theodore Adorno, Greta Karplus, & a Late-Capitalist Frankfurt-School Marriage; or, why what Theodore Adorno needed was not respect and attention from philosophers, but treatment by psychiatrists for a tremendously dire case of patriarchal misogynistic self-oblivious delusion. Or, bluntly, for being a callow a**hole egomaniac (which is, admittedly, a common failure mode for boys whom too many authority figures told them they were very special when young, but even so)…

How did I get there? By chasing links due to an insufficient ability to keep myself on-task.

Let me start with a little throat-clearing: Back in the Day, when I was a college senior, I had the extraordinary privilege of taking a seminar on “Deconstruction” from the truly brilliant Stanley Cavell.

I ended it thinking that much of “Continental Philosophy” was an intellectual power game, in which sometimes the—very true—argument that “the map is not the territory” was decisive and led to the rejection of a group of authors positions, sometimes it did not, and that the only intelligible reasons for why it was sometimes one and the other were reasons of social-network allegiance and academic-positional power.

In short, bad “Continental Philosophy” was a series of the following intellectual moves:

1. Viewpoint X is bad because it is a map.

2. The map is not the territory.

3. Therefore we reject viewpoint X.

4. Here is my map: viewpoint Y.

5. My map is good.

6. FULL STOP.

Now there are good “Continental Philosophers”! I was and am wowed by Keith Tribe’s deployment of Foucaultian theory to understand the British classical economists: <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/hoisted-from-e-archives-two-months>

But there are a very great many bad Continental Philosophers.

And so I find myself agreeing with Matthew Adelstein here:

Matthew Adelstein: How Continental Philosophers “Argue” <https://benthams.substack.com/p/how-continental-philosophers-argue>: ‘On the unseriousness of the discipline…. One way [bad] continental philosophers argue is by brazenly asserting “A is not B… but instead C” where C is some random thing that makes no sense… [and so] A is C and anyone who thinks it’s B is naive…. An example… from Butler…. “Gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or ‘a natural sex’ is produced and established as ‘prediscursive’, prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts. This construction of ‘sex’ as the radically unconstructed will concern us again in the discussion of Lévi Strauss and structuralism in