In a controversial article titled An Oasis in the Desert of Eurotrash Philosophy published in the The Chronicle of Higher Education of January 23, American literary critic Carlin Romano praises Pierre Hadot and lambasts European philosophers for their views on 9/11:
- “In the infancy of the 21st century, Eurotrash philosophers give European philosophy a bad name. Like Eurotrashers at trendy clubs, the philosophical species lives for the moment, spouts from the top of its careerist head, and makes little sense.
- …We think of Jean Baudrillard, the Eurotrash patron saint, a man whose mastery of argument falls somewhere between that of Kim Jong Il and the Raelians, and his ugly, exploitative little 9/11 “book,” The Spirit of Terrorism (Verso Books, 2002).
- …We think of the laughable French “urbanologist” Paul Virilio, whose works read as if a nasty wind blew his notes in the air, then haphazardly bound them into a book. (Ground Zero, Verso Books, 2002).
- …Of course, you don’t have to be French to be a Eurotrash philosopher. Consider Slovene Slavoj Zizek, the Roberto Benigni of corrupt intellectual discourse, a tiresome court jester always happy to walk across the chairs of any American university willing to meet his salary demands. To this often English-challenged jet-setter, in his Welcome to the Desert of the Real (Verso Books, 2002), the collapse of the WTC towers was “the climactic conclusion of 20th-century art’s ‘passion for the Real,'” and “the uncanny satisfaction we got from it was jouissance at its purest.” —Carlin Romano, An Oasis in the Desert of Eurotrash Philosophy, The Chronicle, January 2003
Well it’s a little unfair to quote them so out of context. These comments only make sense when you’ve read the enormous structure of thought that lies beneath them, and must sound completely ridiculous to anyone who hasn’t any experience of the Lacanian Real (so that would be most people, then). You could say the European philosophers ask for it by refusing to produce the kind of soundbite thought that sits happily with the media. I don’t always agree with a lot of this kind of thinking myself (particularly not the deconstructive approach to the Holocaust), but I don’t think I’d feel the need to be quite so rude in my remarks about it. That crack about Zizek, for instance, has nothing to do with the theory he’s created and is just a low, personal attack. Shouldn’t the writer be as concerned about his own ethical approach to others as he is with the theories he doesn’t like?
Hi litlove,
Yes, it does seem unfair but understandable. There seem to be a rift between analytical and continental philosophy and thus between the U.S. and Europe.
For purely aesthetic reasons, I always go for the continental strain of philosophy. Despite of having had a website that was erased without warning by a very big American provider, presumably for reproducing some of the views of European artists (Stockhausen and Hirst) on what happened in September 2001, the subject is still important to me, and so are the three works by Verso.
Thanks for your comment.
Jan