“Why political intellectuals, do you incline towards the proletariat? In commiseration for what? I realize that a proletarian would hate you, you have no hatred because you are bourgeois, privileged, smooth-skinned types, but also because you dare not say that the only important thing there is to say, that one can enjoy swallowing the shit of capital, its materials, its metal bars, its polystyrene, its books, its sausage pâtés, swallowing tonnes of it till you burst – and because instead of saying this, which is also what happens in the desires of those who work with their hands, arses and heads, ah, you become a leader of men, what a leader of pimps, you lean forward and divulge: ah, but that’s alienation, it isn’t pretty, hang on, we’ll save you from it, we will work to liberate you from this wicked affection for servitude, we will give you dignity. And in this way you situate yourselves on the most despicable side, the moralistic side where you desire that our capitalized’s desire be totally ignored, brought to a standstill, you are like priests with sinners, our servile intensities frighten you, you have to tell yourselves: how they must suffer to endure that! And of course we suffer, we the capitalized, but this does not mean that we do not enjoy, nor that what you think you can offer us as a remedy – for what? – does not disgust us, even more. We abhor therapeutics and its vaseline, we prefer to burst under the quantitative excesses that you judge the most stupid. And don’t wait for our spontaneity to rise up in revolt either.”(LE 116)

Of course Alberto could have misheard.

But very recently there was much discussion on these threads about Niles Fergusons’ comment concerning Keynes’ homosexuality vis a vis his economic theories, time preference, etc, and some people were saying that everything – right down to whether someone preferred blueberry or raspberry jam – is potentially of significance in relation to how they develop their theories, and therefore how we should interpret them.

I’m not surprised that Foucault has come up, here. His critique of the inherent ‘leftness-to-come’ nature of the human is pretty damning – I think the debate with Chomsky is a highlight. Sociology teachers worldwide have an ambiguous relationship with him. On the one hand he can’t be overlooked because of the diversity of his scholarship (madness, prison life, sex etc.), on the other, he lays a path for tactics contract strategy – something anethema to the (neo)marxist ideology. In fact, like Hayim Bey’s TAZ (Temporal Autonomous Zone), Foucault’s tactics of resistance mirror the reactosphere in a way. However, Foucault’s ideal ‘harems’ were hedonistic and homosexual. This sphere is hetero-normative and emphasising intellectual work. Same could be said for Bey, actually. Although I heard he likes his sexual conquests a tad too young, to put it diplomatic as possible. (don’t want NAMBLA after me).

FOUCAULT:
Yes, but then isn’t there a danger here? If you say that a certain human nature exists, that this human nature has not been given in actual society the rights and the possibilities which allow it to realise itself…that’s really what you have said, I believe.

FOUCAULT:
And if one admits that, doesn’t one risk defining this human nature which is at the same time ideal and real, and has been hidden and repressed until now – in terms borrowed from our society, from our civilisation, from our culture?
I will take an example by greatly simplifying it. The socialism of a certain period, at the end of the nineteenth century, and the beginning of the twentieth century, admitted in effect that in capitalist societies man hadn’t realised the full potential for his development and self-realisation; that human nature was effectively alienated in the capitalist system. And it dreamed of an ultimately liberated human nature.
What model did it use to conceive, project, and eventually realise that human nature? It was in fact the bourgeois model.
It considered that an alienated society was a society which, for example, gave pride of place to the benefit of all, to a sexuality of a bourgeois type, to a family of a bourgeois type, to an aesthetic of a bourgeois type. And it is moreover very true that this has happened in the Soviet Union and in the popular democracies: a kind of society has been reconstituted which has been transposed from the bourgeois society of the nineteenth century. The universalisation of the model of the bourgeois has been the utopia which has animated the constitution of Soviet society.
The result is that you too realised, I think, that it is difficult to say exactly what human nature is.
Isn’t there a risk that we will be led into error? Mao Tse-Tung spoke of bourgeois human nature and proletarian human nature, and he considers that they are not the same thing.

…

Of course some people might prefer to stay entirely secreted away in their virtual cloisters…

RSP: I might be one of those people. I’m also so remote the information wouldn’t be of much use. Currently north of the border anyway.