“During the 1960s a new generation of vociferous critics of democracy emerged, above all in France. There, the intellectual “event” of the postwar period was the rehabilitation of Nietzsche and Heidegger. Discredited in Germany owing to the taint of fascism, they emerged as the maîtres penseurs for poststructuralists such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jean Baudrillard. In this way, Counter-Enlightenment views that, heretofore, had been the exclusive preserve of the European right came to permeate the standpoint of the postmodern left.”

Annotation

This topic endlessly fascinates me and I've been preoccupied by the strange inversion of the left and right in academics circles sine college. A decade later — what do I think? Yes, of course, there is some truth in the idea that all power is violent. But power is also so much more than violence and the left (lost in the intellectual baroque) and the right (lost in a sense of proving value) often liked to ignore that power was so much more than violence. The tiger in the wild, competition in sports, the writing of laws, etc — to take violence as their primary vehicle is to miss a great deal. The power of the tiger invokes beauty, completion invokes fun, laws aim at higher ideals, etc.

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