Dear Reader,
The U.S. Supreme Court is a serial catastrophizer. Chief Justice Roberts appears to have started this unfortunate pattern in his opinion in NFIB v. Sebelius, where he reasoned that the Affordable Care Act (i.e., Obamacare) was “a gun to the head” of the States. Legal commentators, including myself, noted that the result was an apparent violation of the Constitution’s requirement that Congress enact uniform taxes by allowing all 50 States to choose their own healthcare insurance adventure.
Then, in King v. Burwell, the Court followed up Sebelius with reasoning that the Court must allow Obamacare to continue or else “death spirals” might ensue. Roberts’ catastrophization in Sebelius was King’s fait accompli. Then in Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections, the Court quoted Chief Justice Roberts’ “‘gun to the head’” line to deny the statutory enforcement of religious liberty rights in prisons.
The same reasoning might apply to efforts to hold State officials responsible for participating in murders like that of George Floyd. From there it would be a short leap to also use catastrophizations like “a gun to the head” and “death spirals” to justify literal guns to the head of real human beings in the recent ICE murders of Alex Pretti, Renee Nicole Good, Keith Porter Jr., Luis Gustavo Núñez Cáceres, Geraldo Lunas Campos, and others. It appears that the Court’s catastrophization strategy to justify or cover-up actual catastrophes are rooted in Jeremy Bentham’s original catastrophizations about the French Declaration Of The Rights of Man And Of The Citizen as “non-sense upon stilts.”
As Mary Wollstonecraft observed at the time, it was not the French declaration of the rights of human beings that caused the French Reign of Terror. Rather, it was the trickery of the French leaders who lied about their emotions of rage and terror in order to gain public trust to destroy the French people. In his paradoxically unreasonable tract the Age of Reason, Thomas Paine seemed to agree with Wollstonecraft about the problem of lying the sat at the root of French ruin.
So it was, as Emily Eakin tells us, with the French theorists who poured into elite American institutions in the mid-1900s. For example: Paul de Man was revealed to be a Nazi sympathizer who reached the height of American notoriety by using his good looks and sex appeal to enchant his way to success through fraud; Michel Foucault contracted HIV in California, spent his life attempting suicides that he rationalized as a sexual kink, and never overcame the rumors that he was probably one of the first “Gift Givers” in America; and Louis Althusser murdered his wife and then published a memoir about it where he attempted to excuse the crime as an expression of his love.
One strand of observation in Eakin’s retelling of the horrifying details of each of these French thinkers was the corruption of emotions, especially sexual passion and love, as an excuse for heinous crimes. Under the influence of Freud, the Frenchmen each appeared to catastrophize about sex and passion to cover-up their crimes. Eakin explained this function of sex and passion as a way to excuse crime in a passage about Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s confession of a crime, in which he appeared to excuse himself for harming a woman who he was sexually attracted to and for whom the underlying offense was allegedly committed.
Eakin’s review allows the possibility that the French women, including Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Weil, and Hélène Cixous, among others, did better than their male counterparts. Perhaps the French women did not go quite as mad as the Frenchmen did. Potentially, they had not catastrophized about their sexualities or about their “lack” as the Freudians blindly diagnosed them. Yet, even Beauvoir was influenced by Claude Lévi-Strauss’s somewhat awful treatment of women in his anthropology of kinship, perhaps, giving it more credit than it deserved.
The problem with these French catastrophizers was their way of seeing the entire world as though it were all French, so that their theories about French language might apply to all languages and all peoples. Yet, what is French potentially says nothing about the rest of humankind, such that if France were to attempt to superimpose its language and culture on the entire earth it should attempt to explain its relationship with the rest of us in order to justify its presumptuousness. This could explain the endless fascination France has with America, because the Americans could potentially justify the French as an example of the rest of the world France believes it can represent.
For example, at one point in Eakin’s book, Michel Foucault visited an American prison, which appeared to him to prove his point about prisons being an expression of sheer State power over individuals. But, in so doing, Foucault had to admit that he never was allowed to visit a French prison and so could not compare. Had Foucault known the American history of crime and punishment, he might have known more about our development of several prison alternatives like Abby Hopper Gibbons’ idea of halfway houses and other Quaker reforms including the development of a concept of the prison-as-penitentiary rather than a way to administer civil death.
But Foucault did not know American history, and instead sought to impress upon America and the whole world his view of crime and punishment from his own experience as an oppressed homosexual in France. He visited an American prison, without appreciating the transparency and openness of Americans to his critique, and apparently declared it a proof of concept. Nevermind that if an American prison proved his concept of power and punishment that it would have meant the American prison betrayed all the American ideas about how to reform power and punishment to avoid the unconstitutional accumulation of power that Foucault was writing about.
The primary proof of this flaw in French theory lies in English people, who have continually denounced the French as their colonizers since the Norman Conquest in 1066. The result had been several centuries of imposed French-Latinate words into the English system of law and eventually into the English language itself. As a result, as observed in a wonderful new book about writing by Neal Allen & Anne Lamott, entitled Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences, the English language retains a just prejudice against French words as they generally sound clinical and cold to the English-speakers’ ear.
The American legal system generally adopted the English common law system, including its prejudices and forms. This means that the English rejection of French-Latinate words from within the very system shaped by French-Norman conquerors is controlling in most of the United States. Notably, Ms. Eakin did not track this development alongside the French invasion of American thought she eulogized.
Ms. Eakin seems to have given the Frenchmen a fair shake, rather than introduce ancient English oppositions into the mix. In fact, at every turn, it appears, Ms. Eakin presented French theory in the light most favorable to the French. And even then her book appears as a masterful literary takedown even as it fairly presents the French in their own words, according to their own terms.
The fairness on the face of Ms. Eakin’s book, and her patience for the ideas of the Frenchmen, appears to be what makes The Frenchmen so effective as an implicit invective of a quintessentially American variety. In it, there is no reliance upon the English or on American legal tradition, as those would already counsel against fully trusting the French. Yet, by taking the French at their own word, it appears that, according to Ms. Eakin’s telling, the Frenchmen themselves lead us back to language as the all-constituting force of societies and of sovereign power itself.
The French idea that language is more real than reality, or that it somehow creates or manifests reality, is an untenable extravagance that was preached into America by Norman V. Peale, in whose church Donald J. Trump was raised. Only an elitist can truly believe that language shapes all. And France can only maintain it by disavowing its role in the creation of English law, which contains within its spirit a rejection of French-as-tyrant symbolized by Robin Hood’s mythical defense of the English people.
It would be an oversimplification to say that Americans agreed with the English that the French version of government was the bad guy, especially after the American Revolution. However, the elements of law that eventually corrupted English monarchy to the point where it effectively assassinated its own empire on November 30, 1774 by effectively declaring war on the people of Massachusetts were French. The speech the mad King George III gave in Parliament on that day was effectively a gun to the head of his colonies.
To be fair, the Americans had just gone to war for the king in Canada, where the French were defeated. The campaign against French Americans led by English monarchy is the source of several enduring paradoxes in America, including French Canada’s consistent loyalty to the English crown. Indeed, for Americans, the betrayal of ourselves by edict of English monarch has proven the proper cause of Margaret Atwood’s critique of the United States during the Reagan era.
We North Americans, Mexicans, Canadians, and people of the United States, remain divided over the question of how it is best to love ourselves, and on this topic the example of the Frenchmen is relevant. The corruption of sex and love to cover-up our most heinous crimes is untenable, insane, and self-destructive. The Americans have fallen into this madness now and again in the antebellum era, in the eugenics era, and now with Trump as our Commander in Chief.
But, if we take into account the French, we may see the U.S. Supreme Court’s catastrophizations as a mere cover-up for legal nihilism. Michel Foucault’s agreement with Jeremy Bentham may be a confession of self-hatred dressed up as though it were self-love. In English, this conundrum is embodied by the meaning of selfishness in contradistinction from self-care or self-love, which the English-speaking world has yet to resolve. This problem regarding the meaning of self-love was summarized by Mercy Otis Warren’s revolutionary warning to John Adams:
Self, the sole point in which [Caesar and Brutus are] both agreed,
By this Romes shackled, or by this shes Free’d,
Self Love, that stimulous to Noblest aim,
Bids Nero Light the Capital in Flame
For now, the French have proven their madness and reason in Michel Foucault’s fashion of suicide-as-kink, a selfish release from the responsibility of living by imagining a release from life could be orgasmic: A glamorization of death as indulgence, which only self-hating madmen like Foucault seem to buy; an appropriation of Ciceronian discourse in contradiction to his tract On Old Age; and a subsequent corruption of Augustinian confession that is still defended by the Arendtians of the United States despite the influence of the Frenchmen.
The idea that death will relieve us from the pain and suffering of living is pure imagination. None know for certain what lies beyond these mortal coils. But Cicero believed that life is necessary for us to complete our purposes through action, which suicide betrays — dooming the dead to the incapacity of action. From this thought, according to St. Edna St. Vincent Millay’s elucidation of it in The Suicide, we can imagine the anguish of the dead whose tasks in life were cut short by their own hand.
As Sylvia Plath symbolizes, there may be some who are so oppressed in this life that suicide is the only last option of freedom left open to them. But Hannah Arendt would likely quibble over the question, as certain Jews whom she acknowledged, beyond a certain point, had no hope and might have chosen suicide as their final act of freedom during the Holocaust were incomparable to Plath’s circumstance. The issue of mental health looms large over these questions, which Plath herself, perhaps confusingly, colored-in with Nazi imagery.
The corruption of human emotion through catastrophization by the U.S. Supreme Court (who has not been held at gunpoint to my knowledge), is something that requires our attention. What are they covering up by claiming mortal wounds shall befall the States if they do not decide cases in certain ways? The whole thing smacks of Robespierre’s dubious citations of terror and rage to inspire public support for the removal of French madness through the beheading of the French people en masse.
Ms. Eakin calls us to reconsider the Frenchmen now that Donald J. Trump is the President of the United States. She guesses that our answers about their apparent irrelevance might be different now in the time of data centers and artificial intelligence. The centrality of language seems to be at issue in matters of computer code, which we have analogized to language, which appears to have been apt now that it has produced evidence of computer generated discourse potentially absent of human participation.
Did OpenAI or Anthropic make a product that can travel “outside” of John Searle’s Chinese Room? If they did, does it indicate sentience? Will it produce power over human beings as the Frenchmen theorized? Or is artificial intelligence’s language mastery merely a tool that could be particularly useful to increase the power of those who already have power — like a gun or an army?
As Ms. Eakin noted, French Theory is only “dead” in the sense that Freudian psychology is dead: Both are everywhere. It was everywhere when the internet was invented and theorized about. It appears that only thereby did the American judiciary analogize computer code to language to justify copyright protection of big computer company products, by which artificial intelligence companies make their profits.
Therein lies the real question: Are the artificial intelligence models a consequence of the Frenchmen’s theories or a fulfillment of their prophesies? Might the French prophets have prophesied differently to inspire a different world? It seems that we are left with the same ancient contemplation of free will and destiny, hope in the capacity of human action and nihilistic fate, as was recently presented in The Matrix. Americans are faced anew with the tension between our secular prophets, like the Silent Generation’s Joan Didion, and our most vibrant muses, like the same generation’s Eve Babitz.
As Ms. Eakin presented the issues, America is left with the encroaching sense that suicide might become our one last expression of free choice if things go as bad as Didion guessed they would. Maybe the center will not hold. But also, maybe, American artists and visionaries will inspire the people to persevere by convincing their audiences and listeners to choose happiness, as Roland Gérard Barthes, alone among his contemporaries, appeared to offer, and as Babitz appeared to have perfected in the style of the French Collette for the people of the United States.
Yours Cordially,
Joshua J. Schroeder, Esq.