*PATREON EXCLUSIVE* Forget Foucault & Forget Baudrillard: Power Versus Seduction and Why Fascism ...

[00:00:02][music] >> Welcome back, friends, to a special Patreon exclusive edition of Acid Horizon. Every month, we put out episodes like the one you are about to hear as a way to thank our supporters and to sit down with friends of the podcast sharing longer discussions and more candid takes on topics we ordinarily cover. If you are a contributing subscriber to our Patreon account, you are about to get almost 90 minutes on the work of Jean Baudrillard.

[00:00:32]If you're listening on our main feed, head over to our Patreon and become a contributing subscriber for just $5 a month. There you'll find episodes like this one plus access to our Discord server where these discussions keep going. Today, we are welcoming our friend, occasional guest, and fellow philosophy presenter Cooper Cherry from Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour. Okay, let's slide into the green room with Cooper and discuss Forget Foucault and Forget Baudrillard.

[00:01:06]>> Welcome to Acid Horizon, the theory podcast in a very special patrons-only discussion with Adam from the podcast and our special guest, good friend Cooper Cherry of the Institute for Revolutionary Semiotics and the Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour podcast. Coop has joined us to discuss this book, this essay, this compilation of essays put out by Semiotext entitled Forget Foucault, Your Genealogy Too Tough, Your Theory Too Magistral, Your Power Too Capillary. They'll forget you for it.

[00:01:46]And this is Baudrillard's charge against not only Michel Foucault, but by extension Gilles Deleuze.

[00:01:54]Basically, putting forward the question of whether it's possible to create a theory so magnificent, so magistral, so complete in its moves and gestures that it's essentially dead on arrival. That it forecloses on the possibility of acknowledging something beyond the constraints of what it has theorized.

[00:02:15]And Baudrillard wrote this essay basically as a book review to Michel Foucault's The Will to Knowledge in the late winter or early spring of 1977.

[00:02:25]Written with the title Forget Foucault.

[00:02:28]And as I understand it, he sent this book review to a journal or magazine called Critique, of which Foucault was on the editorial board. And Foucault had gotten around to reading this particular article, at which point it prompted a meeting. Now, by this time Foucault was very well known in the French philosophical milieu, has established himself as a kind of superstar of sorts, and it's at a point at a very pivotal point from a revolutionary perspective in the year 1977, whereby French theory is essentially beginning to leave its shores and have an impact on American philosophy departments and the the broader intellectual milieu of the United States and other places in the Anglophone world. And what's interesting is when Foucault caught wind of this criticism, where Baudrillard takes up this line of thought that Foucault's system was articulated in such a genius and complete way that Foucault's theory of power, right down to the very sort of capillary form that it takes, where power finds itself invested and infused in all aspects of society, in all aspects of discourse, that what happens to theory at that point, or at least Foucault's theory in any case, is that in its attempt to fully circumscribe the nature of reality, the real world as we understand it. It fails to do something where it challenges reality.

[00:03:56]And so this is the essence of Baudrillard's argument. He sends it to Foucault, whereupon they sit down and have a 3-hour meeting with each other to discuss how to proceed with a critique.

[00:04:08]And in a manner of speaking, Baudrillard, we might say, took a sort of comradely approach. He approached Foucault by saying, "Look, I'm going to criticize you, and I'm going to do it in this particular essay, and I'm going to submit it to the magazine where you're an editor. But with all due respect, I'm going to let you look at it first. And then let's talk about what a response to that looks like."

[00:04:31]And so they went over it, and it seems, well, on the basis of the rumor or the hearsay, that Foucault had tentatively agreed to respond to this essay.

[00:04:43]But in the ensuing days and weeks, no response was forthcoming.

[00:04:49]And at that point, it seemed like Foucault was going to take a silent approach. So his response is ultimately a non-response.

[00:04:58]But where things get interesting is Baudrillard decides to go ahead and publish this anyway, and he puts it out.

[00:05:06]And it may seem like on its face that Foucault's non-response, or response through silence, was a way of him sort of exiting the symbolic exchange, as it were, between Baudrillard and Foucault as as contemporaries, as colleagues in a particular philosophical milieu.

[00:05:25]But what happens after that, on the day of this text's release, Foucault tells his students to go to all