French Theory Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Co. all’assalto dell’America - François Cusset - Il Saggiatore, Ita, 11 ottobre 2012

Sapevate che Michel Foucault è stato negli Usa un’icona delle battaglie per i diritti civili, mentre Jacques Derrida diventava una celebrità accademica senza eguali? Che Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari hanno ispirato i precursori di Internet e i primi deejay di musica elettronica? E che la fantascienza americana, dal romanzo cyberpunk alla saga di Matrix, ha attinto a piene mani dal pensiero di Jean Baudrillard? Dopo aver incrociato a New York la controcultura dei mitici Seventies, le opere dei filosofi francesi del poststrutturalismo sono entrate nei dipartimenti di letteratura delle università americane e hanno sovvertito tutti i canoni del sapere, abbattendo il muro che separava cultura accademica e cultura pop. Riscoperte e reinterpretate come base teorica per le lotte identitarie di fine secolo, hanno poi fecondato il terreno da cui sono sbocciati i cultural studies, i gender studies e la critica multiculturalista. Decostruzionismo, biopotere, micropolitiche, si mulazione: French Theory ricostruisce la singolare evoluzione di questo pensiero iconoclasta, accolto con più successo oltreoceano che nella madrepatria. Un passaggio misconosciuto, eppure cruciale, dell’epoca contemporanea che ha mutato il paesaggio intellettuale, culturale e politico degli ultimi decenni. François Cusset, storico delle idee, è professore di Cultura americana all’Università di Nanterre. È autore di numerose pubblicazioni, fra cui Queer critics e À l’abri du déclin du monde.
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A Ballardian Bestiary @ ballardian.com: “Fiction is a Branch of Neurology” by Matteo Pasquinelli

ballardian.com just published some excerpts of ‘Ballardian philosophy’ from Pasquinelli's book Animal Spirits bit.ly/tdHIvJ

The novels of J.G. Ballard can describe the nature of technology and the contemporary mediascape better than any philosopher, media theorist or cultural studies academic. During the mass media revolution, while spectres of the collective imaginary were flourishing on everybody’s television screens in a genuine “atrocity exhibition”, both academic and radical theorists were imploding in the semiotics of the image: postmodernism indeed reduced the image to a linguistic sign. Ballard and other science fiction writers, meanwhile, were left alone to map the new becoming of the media unconscious. In retrospect, it is increasingly apparent how the postmodern agenda and the church of simulacra functioned as an immunisation strategy of an armchair intelligentsia against the monsters emerging from the collective Id.

Ironically, the notion of ‘collective unconscious’ can itself be interpreted as a high culture sanitisation attempt to what was visibly and consciously intensifying at the core of mass media society: libido. As much as Deleuze and Guattari recognised that delirium is always social, political and historical (something not simply isolated to the morbid intimacy of a psychoanalyst’s couch), Ballard understood that “after Freud’s exploration within the psyche it is now the outer world of reality which must be quantified and eroticised”. Significantly, he began his cartography of the machinic unconscious of the West outside the mediated discourses of philosophy and psychoanalysis. His context was the American cultural imaginary of the ’50s and ’60s that colonised the European psyche by broadcasting morbid televisual images of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Marilyn Monroe’s second lives, the Vietnam war and so on. At the time of May ’68, Ballard’s own personal “counterculture” was on the other side of the barricades, on the side of power and mass media, where he discovered far stronger and more lysergic forces than in any leftist movement. From this science-fiction perspective on the mainstream, Ballard effectively anticipated the Guattarian schizoanalysis of the collective machinic unconscious. (...)

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