"Since no one has succeeded in showing me what I'm missing...

>"Since no one has succeeded in showing me what I'm missing, we're left with the second option: I'm just incapable of understanding. I'm certainly willing to grant that it may be true, though I'm afraid I'll have to remain suspicious, for what seem good reasons. There are lots of things I don't understand -- say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat's last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I'm interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. --- even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest --- write things that I also don't understand, but (1) and (2) don't hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of "theory" that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) ... I won't spell it out.

Again, I've lived for 50 years in these worlds, have done a fair amount of work of my own in fields called "philosophy" and "science," as well as intellectual history, and have a fair amount of personal acquaintance with the intellectual culture in the sciences, humanities, social sciences, and the arts. That has left me with my own conclusions about intellectual life, which I won't spell out. But for others, I would simply suggest that you ask those who tell you about the wonders of "theory" and "philosophy" to justify their claims --- to do what people in physics, math, biology, linguistics, and other fields are happy to do when someone asks them, seriously, what are the principles of their theories, on what evidence are they based, what do they explain that wasn't already obvious, etc. These are fair requests for anyone to make. If they can't be met, then I'd suggest recourse to Hume's advice in similar circumstances: to the flames."
Can you respond friends?

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Did Chomsky say that? Where?

He's right to a certain extent in that the French poststructuralists are deliberately obscurantist. There's that famous anecdote by Searle that Foucault told him as much, and specifically singled out Derrida (with whom Searle had a published feud). Chomsky is also very likely right about Lacan, that he was an outright charlatan and the worst of the bunch.

But he's wrong overall in thinking they're inscrutable. Yes, they're cunts for being obscurantist. But what makes them even bigger cunts is that it's really not even that difficult to decipher them, and what is left after the deciphering is done immediately reveals that their obscurity added nothing and was totally unnecessary, in fact it hindered their philosophical development by simply cluttering up their conceptual frameworks without any gain in conceptual complexity. It's not difficult in the sense Schelling once said, meaning that philosophy should challenge the reader to build up his mental landscape to be able to encompass it, rather than condescending to "fit" into the mental landscape of the average joe. It's more like Camille Paglia said about the French: "Is there anything more affected, aggressive, and relentlessly concrete than a Parisian intellectual behind his/her turgid text?" Ultimately it's a result of French philosophical immaturity and inadequacy compared to the Germans, from whom they derived all of the conceptual frameworks really operative in their own writings, simply buried under a sloppy bricolage of intertextual allusions, metaphors, and "style."

That's the critique that the French fucks really need, is one that shows them as effeminately, pathetically self-styling, desperate for attention and validation, hopelessly solipsistic, and incapable of real metaphysics, meaning incapable of real philo-sophia, love of wisdom. A Frenchman can only take German philosophy and reduce it to a social "philosophy," vulgar social theory barely better than an Anglo's, and deck it out in typically effete Parisian amour-propre.

Chomsky is not a philosopher. He's never given any indication of having read any philosophy past Locke and Hume. He received the standard Anglo schoolboy education in distinguishing "rationalism" from "empiricism" and that's it. The most recent (joint) publications on his UG that venture into philosophy of mind territory are just reductive materialist cognitive science garbage. He's never written anything philosophical in his life.

Except obscurantism isn't strictly a French phenomenon. The Germans were guilt of it as well, starting with Fichte, and Schelling, and culminating in the colossal windbag Hegel. You could even blame Kant, insofar as he was a bad writer with very good ideas. The former however were all bad stylists with incoherent ideas

hardly a critique of philosophy itself. plato, aristotle, descartes, leibniz are very clear. if not you can talk to an expert and they can help you learn more.

I don't OP meant to suggest Chomsky was being critic of philosophy here. Just of the "Parisian" bubble".

20th century French philosophy was a hideous mistake.

Yep. Would be really helpful if you posted the source.

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Foucault and Deleuze are more accessible than most German and Austrian thinkers

I fully agree with him. Everything Chomsky learns he learns to such an extent that it's useful in some way. If it's not useful, then it's nonsense.

What about all the times he references his friends work or how he talked about he doesn't like the documentary on him because it doesn't feature Edward S. Herman?

He defended the Khmer Rouge without a hint of irony

Don't take shit he says to the heart. Chomsky is the kind of person who is very often wrong but he will be able to spin it in a way that will make you think he's correct. Back in the 1970's he BTFO'd some linguists in academic debate so hard that some of them dropped linguistics, but it was pure rhetorics on Chomsky's side, nowadays linguists are kind of coming back to the ideas of these "losers". Now if you'd confront Chomsky with it, he'd say "oh yes, but you see, I've written about it in the 1950's already" and his fangirls from around the world will comb their way through every single fucking paper he has written in that decade and cherry pick sections that somewhat hint towards him indeed being on track to something similar(that he argued against it - who cares!), which is another peculiarity of Chomsky's linguistics - this man creates theoretical system which is reworked whole the time on his whim, but he doesn't per se advance the field. It more or less works like this:
>Chomsky rewords his shit again
>Chomsky's groupies do actual empirical and analytical research
>Chomsky partially reworks his shit again
>groupies are confused
>sometimes some of their empirical/analytical work actually makes sense

I mean he's not a total brainlet, as his revisions are written in a way that imply that he wasn't wrong or disproved, as in - he is certainly very good academic writer - but believe me or not - he doesn't "ask" anyone to explain him anything.

Who were the "losers"?

He did not defend it read what he said about it.

>There's that famous anecdote by Searle that Foucault told him as much
Foucault said you need to be 10% incomprehensible to be popular in France, and Searle himself had great respect for Foucault and did not, unlike Chomsky, consider him an obscurantist

no he didnt. post quotes

To be fair, you have to be able to parse Locus Solus to understand french philosophy