Ideology of Tyranny
* Book: The Ideology of Tyranny. The Use of the Neo-Gnostic Myth in American Politics. Guido Preparata. Palgrave-MacMillan,2007
URL = https://guidopreparata.com/ideology-tyranny-bataille/
Description
"The Ideology of Tyranny traces the contemporary jargon of political correctness and the so-called “politics of diversity,”so prevalent in the academic and administrative discourse of the United States, to the fantastic sociology of an obscure French pornographer, Georges Bataille (1897-1962). The celebration of violence sung in his works, re-elaborated in abstract form by the late followers of Bataille, has led to the creation of a peculiar talk emphasizing difference, antagonism, intellectual despair, and a profound political conservatism. As the so-called Left has lately come to adopt this troubling gospel of divisiveness, the consequence for a wholesome culture of dissent in our society have been a disastrous paralysis of its critical and moral faculties in the face of a new dawn of never-ending wars."
Review
Luc Reynaert:
"In this profound analysis of the postmodern movement G.G. Preparata unveils the hidden reasons why this (in the words of the great French economist Jean Fourastié) conceptual delirium had such a success in the US. It fragmented dissent, enhanced corporate power and prevented the formation of a united political force between the middle and the working class against the ruling elite.
Its main `theorizer', Michel Foucault, had a liberal aura, because he sided with the madmen and the poor who suffered abuse in asylums, hospitals and prisons.
- Georges Bataille (Foucault's main inspirational source)
G. Bataille assailed the modern conviction that people function for the most part as rational beings, while in fact the whole realm of our existence is violence. He wanted to restore the `Dionysian frenzy' even in its extreme form (like Aztec sacred sacrifices) by breaking the power of the `authoritarian nightmare', the modern State with its thrift and capitalistic accumulation. His means were intellectual destabilization, eroticism and its subversive nature, the squandering of the economic surplus (potlatch) and attacks on all traditional taboos (sex, murder, excretion, holocausts, intoxication). But seeing that his `Dionysian dream' had no chance in a Liberal State, he championed separatism (individualism) and tried to undermine `the compassionate tradition'.
- Michel Foucault
Bataille's Dionysian violence became Foucault's `madness'. His madmen were not those human beings who we now consider as ill, but homosexuals, blasphemers, libertines, alchemists or venereal patients. Their madness of desire, their most unreasonable passions were, for him, wisdom and reason for they were of the order of nature. The true sin was the attempt by religion, morality and State intervention to neutralize that `dark rage in man's heart.' Through madness, Foucault denied the existence of a conscious, knowing subject, thereby pulverizing concepts of oligarchy, power, oppression or ideology. There is only relativism. For him, we should cease to ask: who has power? What is the aim of the powerful? It doesn't matter who exercizes power. Madness is the way of the world.
- Lyotard, Hardt and Negri, Baudrillard
For J. F. Lyotard, science is only a sort of discourse. Power is given and there is no pure alternative to the present system. The delirium went to a new nadir with `Hardt and Negri' pretending that `marketing has perhaps the clearest relation to postmodern theories.' But, the ultimate scandal was J. Baudrillard's thesis that `the Gulf War didn't happen'.
- Kojève, Strauss, Jünger (other inspirational sources)
Alexander Kojève gave a new interpretation of Hegel by stressing that the game of life was man's desire for recognition and prestige (cfr. F. Fukuyama). Leo Strauss supported the right of the strongest and proclaimed the necessity of tyranny. Ernst Jünger saw in the the rabble and its violence the purest form of Carl Schmitt's `Partisans'.
G. G. Preparata shows us clearly and perfectly how postmodernist narcotic verbiage is a devilish doublespeak. It masks the real power structures (social control, wealth distribution, empire policy). It embraces violence and the cult of war, oligarchic and tyrannical domination and the necessary clash of civilizations.
While A. Sokal and J. Bricmont with their book `Fashionable Nonsense' prepared postmodernism's coffin, G. G. Preparata hammered the nails in it and buried it deeply.
Never has a `philosophical' movement sunk so deeply in the language morass.
This book based on a massive bibliography is a must read for all those interested in modern philosophy and in the world we live in."