How Responsible is Sartre for the Decline of Continental Philosophy?

A London philosopher sends the following along which I take to be a quotation from Jasbir Puar:

One, I examine discourses of queerness where problematic conceptualizations of queer corporealities, especially via Muslim sexualities, are reproduced in the service of discourses of U.S. exceptionalisms. Two, I rearticulate a terrorist body, in this case the suicide bomber, as a queer assemblage that resists queerness as sexual identity (or anti-identity)—in other words, intersectional and identitarian paradigms—in favor of spatial, temporal, and corporeal convergences, implosions, and rearrangements. Queerness as an assemblage moves away from excavation work, deprivileges a binary opposition between queer and not-queer subjects, and, instead of retaining queerness exclusively as dissenting, resistant, and alternative (all of which queerness importantly is and does), it underscores contingency and complicity with dominant formations. 

The London friend then comments:

Bill, to me this reads like a parody of Continental Philosophy. What are ‘corporealities’? ‘Identitarian’? ‘Deprivileges a binary opposition’?? What other kinds of opposition are there?

Sartre has a lot to answer for.

A lot of recent Continental 'philosophy' is gibberish, and the above passage reads almost like a parody of it.  So my London friend and I agree that the above is rubbish, and as such, beneath critique.  How would one even begin to criticize writing like this?

What is Puar trying to tell us in the first sentence?  Continentals are big on verbal inflation.  So Puar can't just write bodies, she must write corporealities.  It sounds impressive to the unlettered.  She wants to give the impression that she is engaging is some really deep theorizing here. Referring to a body as  a corporeality is like referring to a method as a methodology or a truth as a verity. 

It makes some sense to say that the bodies of homosexuals have been "problematically conceptualized," to use another pretentious phrase.  To supply my own politically incorrect example,  you would be 'problematically conceptualizing' the dick of a homosexual male if you maintained that it was but a social construct.  But for a body to be problematically conceptualized  via Muslim sexualities makes no sense at all.  Is she trying to say that the bodies of homosexuals have been dubiously understood or perhaps wrongly understood by Muslims?  But then how do sexualities come into it?

Puar has a thing for the plurals of abstract substantives: corporealities, sexualities, exceptionalisms.  But we are only half-way through her meaningless opening sentence.  We are told that dubious theories about homosexual bodies somehow support U. S. exceptionalisms.  Who would have thought?  What does it even mean?

It only gets worse, so enough of this.

Now if this junk were merely the scribblings of some crackpot on her personal blog, we could ignore it.  But she is an associate professor at Rutgers University.  File this under Decline of the West.

As for Jean-Paul Sartre,  I would say say that my insular friend is not being quite fair.  A lot of important work has been done by Continental philosophers up to an including the Sartre of Being and Nothingness.  (I confess to not having studied Critique of Dialectical Reason.)  Here is a list of (some) Continental philosophers who are well-worth close study:  Franz Brentano, Alexius von Meinong, Kasimir Twardowski, Edmund Husserl, Adolf Reinach, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Edith Stein, Roman Ingarden, Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Nicolai Hartmann, Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus.

I would point out to my London correspondent, who is interested in medieval philosophy and logic, that Paul Vincent Spade, no slouch of a scholar, has a lively interest in the early Sartre.  See here.

So I don't think too much can be laid at Sartre's door step.  The rot sets in in good earnest later with characters like Derrida who, according to John Searle, "gives bullshit a bad name."

John D. Caputo is another Continental 'philosopher' that I criticize in a number of entries.  He is not as bad as Puar, however.  But he is very bad!

Related articles

Continental Philosophers I Respect and the 'Continental-Analytic Divide'

Hell for Philosophers

Micro-Totalitarianism

Comments

[Dave Bagwill]

You stole the premise of my upcoming paper in the Village Voice: "The Dick as Social Construct".
Ah well - maybe I will make a counter-proposal, 'Vaginazation Nation: The Popularity of Puerile Penilism in the Penal Population, and the de-urgification-ness, in a triple (!) sense, of the return of the for-itself in the stead of the other-as-corporeality/object/slave/.

[BV]

Hi Dave,

I think you are getting the hang of it. You have a bright future as a Continental 'philosopher.'

Here is another cognate piece of stupidity featured at the NYT: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/08/a-postcard-from-paris/?_r=1

[Cretan Liar]

Once you translate into plain language, it does make a sort of sense. It is from her critique of homonationalism, also known as ‘pinkwashing’, namely the supposed masking of Islamophobic prejudice behind a seemingly pro-LGBT agenda.

E.g. ‘I don’t know about you but I am gay and I do not want to be stoned to death’ is a form of homonationalism.

[Cretan Liar]

Here is another of her papers which is slightly easier to read.

She criticises the ‘narrative of progress’ which aligns the struggle for gay rights with enlightened Western values emerging. ‘The narrative of progress for gay rights is thus built on the back of racialized others’. I think ‘racialised others’ means Muslims.

‘Pinkwashing works in part by tapping into the discursive and structural circuits produced by U.S. and European crusades against the spectral threat of “radical Islam” or “Islamo-fascism.”’

[BV]

A spectral threat is an unreal threat. But the reality of the threat of radical Islam is proven by its execution in New York, London, Madrid, Paris, San Bernardino, Orlando . . . .

This is leftist reality denial in an extreme form.

We are in deep trouble because what used to be our best universities are now infested with reality-denying idiots like this.

That other idiot you mentioned teaches at Yale.

So it's a war on two fronts against radical Islam and against the liberal-left enablers of radical Islam.

[BV]

>>supposed masking of Islamophobic prejudice behind a seemingly pro-LGBT agenda.<<

To understand the Left you have to understand that they practice the hermeneutics of suspicion -- read the genitive as a genitivus subjectivus -- which they picked up chiefly from Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.

Nothing can be taken at face value. Thus a sincere avowal of toleration for gays and their practices must hide something sinister and malevolent -- wait for it -- Islamophobia! It can't just be what it plainly is.

It is hard to imagine any sort of productive 'discourse' with such suspicious hermeneuts.

Now Cretan, I would like to know if you agree with this astute analysis -- which I develop in some old posts that I need to resurrect.