Deconstructing French duplicity

Stephen Rittenberg, at Horsefeathers, draws back the curtain to expose the philosophy behind France's foreign policy machinations.

WAR OF IDEAS: FRENCH POSTMODERNISM VS. AMERICA

Colin Powell, our skilled and sophisticated practitioner of diplomacy has, by all reports, been deeply shocked and angered by French duplicity at the UN. The sophisticated Powell somehow believed that words have shared consensual meaning and that treaties and resolutions, based on agreed meanings are achievable goals. But what if words possess no fixed meaning? What if the people you are bargaining with view words as merely expressions of subjective power relations, having no reference to objective facts, since none exist? Having signed on to resolution 1441 the French, ever since, have behaved as if the demand for Iraqi disarmament was not what it seemed, that words like "immediate" and "disarm" do not mean what Powell assumed. None of this should be surprising in light of the grip on France's educated elites of such thinkers as Lacan, Foucault, Lyotard and the grand master of obfuscation, Jacques Derrida. While the Soviet Union collapsed and Marxism has been generally discredited, Marxist modes of thought survive in the form of fashionable French philosophies, including Deconstructionism and Post-Modernism. Old fashioned Marxist hatred of capitalism combines with a misunderstood Heisenbergian principle of indeterminacy to produce Post-Modernism.

Read the rest of Rittenberg's analysis and a Derrida interview