Marc asked for a translation. Here is my feeble effort:
Dear Sir, I have just come from examining a bit your work: it is pretty silly; we do not need silly American thinkers (we already have enough problems with our own thinkers, influenced by the Americans); you can read or reread Tocqueville (and Marx) and leave this country, please, best regards Jean-Pierre Joffrin
As I say, somewhat less charming in English. Oh well, he gets his wish. We have sold our apartment and our visit in early June may well be our last. In any event, I seem to have made almost no impression on French philosophers so he need not worry.
24 comments:
Have you written anything on Toqueville?
He is confusing you with the host of the Open Mind obm
In other news, Biden's Sec of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, a former McKinsey & Co consultant, was asked on Face The Nation about the nationwide shortage of baby formula. He replied:
"Fundamentally, we are here because a company was not able to guarantee that its plant was safe, and that plant has shut down.... Let's be very clear: This is a capitalist country. The government does not make baby formula, nor should it. Companies make formula. And one of those companies, a company which, by the way, seems to have 40 percent market share, messed up."
In Buttigieg's neoliberal vision of the perfect world, countries do not make baby formula. Nor do they or should they make COVID-19 vaccines or insulin. This isn't Cuba [where the government has been developing 5 COVID-19 vaccines, which it has offered to share with countries around the world, and where nearly 90 percent of the population is reportedly fully vaccinated] or China.
Along the same lines as Eric's warning, unforeseen consequences in Ukraine:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/ukraines-new-labour-law-wartime/
Eric,
That's interesting, but not surprising, right?
Buttigieg did run for President, after all, so his general outlook on politics is well known. Btw, I tend to doubt that even Bernie Sanders, not a neoliberal of course, would favor the gov't making baby formula (though I'm not positive).
Eric, as I recall the US and Europe had no problem developing covid vaccines because most of the research had already been done over the past decade. Once the genome was worked out, it took a weekend to do the basics for one of the vaccines.
We don't need to radically restructure the economy using the Soviet Union as a model (you might explain how that would happen and wouldn't it be easier to merely start enforcing anti-trust law and FDA regs). I assume plant executives gamed the FDA. Back in 1961 GE executives actually went to prison for price fixing. Send a few Abbott execs to Club Fed and attitudes will change.
We began dismantling the regulatory state in the 1970s. It's likely to get worse - actually we are screwed:
https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/20/20-61007-CV0.pdf
Wasn't Buttigieg accused of helping Canadian companies price gouge on bread or something? Interesting that he seems to hold strong neoliberal values, but more interesting that he seems to discard them so easily.
Anyway, people send troll letters like that because they want to get your attention. I wonder what this person wants your attention for though. They want to make an argument to you about Toqueville? That seems so random.
LFC
IIRC, Bernie has said that he does not favor government ownership of the means of production, which has led some to say that he's a New Deal liberal, not a socialist.
Roger Angell died yesterday at 101—the only person to be in both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Baseball Hall of Fame. His is the most magnificent prose I’ve ever read. RIP.
@D.P., yes
@ Sonic
We're calling this a troll letter and it is kind of silly, but it hasn't actually done any concrete harm. It doesn't make any threats. Someone writes a letter like that as an act of self-expression and as an alternative to grumbling to (in this case) himself. Though the author doesn't make clear exactly what he objects to in RPW's work. (I noticed that the writer used the word "travail," possibly because he thought the word "oeuvre" would signify more of a compliment than he wanted to convey.)
@ DP - that was in reply to your Sanders remark.
LFC,
I don't believe that "travail" is necessarily more negative than "oeuvre". For example, in Spanish there are also two words, "trabajo" and "obra" and "trabajo" in this context has no more negative connotations than "obra" does. Let's say that "oeuvre" is more
"works" and "travail" is more "work".
s.w.
Ok that makes sense.
"Oeuvre" also communicates something terminated. I don't know if you can speak of the "oeuvre" of someone who is still living and in this case, practicing philosophy, capable of writing another book. In English I don't believe that you would speak of Peter Singer's works (I take Singer as one of the most famous living philosophers), but rather of his work.
It's always "work in progress", never "works in progress".
LFC & David Palmeter: "Bernie has said that he does not favor government ownership of the means of production, which has led some to say that he's a New Deal liberal, not a socialist."
Sanders is absolutely not a socialist. Whatever his personal beliefs may be, he is as a practical matter a capitalist social democrat, who says an essential role of government is to keep capitalism in check. And in terms of his Senate activities, he is largely on board with the US imperialist project, whatever his feelings about US foreign policy may have been 40 years ago, when he was praising the Sandinistas and honeymooning in the Soviet Union. The fact that he is one of the furthest left high elected officials in the US today—and that many in the US who consider themselves opponents of American conservatism regard him as a standard-bearer for leftism—is a travesty.
When he was a very young man, before he became a Democrat (he labels himself an Independent and has been elected to Congress and the Senate as such, but let's be honest, he is Democrat in all but name), Sanders did call for nationalization of essential businesses (utilities, banks, pharmaceuticals, major industries). And in recent years he has tepidly called for nationalization of energy companies, especially as part of his plan to mitigate the effects of the climate catastrophe. But on the whole he is a capitalist social democrat.
s.w.
I don't want to get into a battle royal about English, but I think one can certainly speak of Peter Singer's "works." You can say "I like Singer's works," meaning "I like what he's written." It's formal and maybe a little pompous-sounding, but not incorrect. You can also
say "I like Singer's work," which would be more commonly said, I think.
weird spacing there, sorry
LFC,
No problem. I accept your correction.
Regarding your translation, my French wife says it's not that your work is 'pretty silly' and that Americans are 'silly'; rather, it's that your work 'is of no interest' to them, and ditto for Americans, they are 'of no interest ' to the French. She says your translation is too literal. Anyway, it seems you are being gently brushed aside and dismissed. Anyway, enjoy Paris, dear Professor.
Thanks for the clarification, stephenmdarling. So the 'trolling' really consists of nothing but a single Frenchman, Jean-Pierre Joffrin, saying that the work doesn't amount to much and is of no interest to him, and only to him, as he provides no evidence that other Frenchmen agree with him on the issue. In fact all reputable polls indicate that up to 50 million Frenchmen share our keen interest in and admiration of the professor's work; and you know what they say: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-IP0DE2kTI&ab_channel=almonkitt
John,
Thank your for that great rendition by Sophie Tucker, the Last of the Red Hot Mamma’s. I had never heard of the song, or her rendition.
Below is another great song, dedicated to the memories of l’mour Francais.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQxM5rJ-uiY
And here is another version, with Chevalier and Tucker:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JB5o_J7tOHQ
Marc, I had no idea that Chevalier and Tucker had performed together on Ed Sullivan--Wow! (A great deal of the Sullivan archive of musical performances has only recently showed up on YouTube; one can finally see, for example, Buddy Holly's two performances.)--The most striking thing to me about that segment is a purely personal association: what Chevalier says from 2:25-3:25 about first hearing and seeing Sophie Tucker is astonishingly close to what a Pole once to me about Edith Piaf. The Pole was born in the early 1960s, and had come to the U.S. in the mid-1980s. I once asked him what music he and his generation of (closeted gay) adolescents had listened to in Poland. He immediately replied that it was Piaf, and described the effect she had on him in very much the way Chevalier does with regard to Tucker in the clip, even with some similar phrases.
Last night, in its season finale, Saturday Night Live had one of its best skits ever, about stupid voters. You can see it in the link below by scrolling down to the video under the PSA heading.
https://ew.com/tv/recaps/saturday-night-live-recap/
Kate McKinnon also said good-bye in a very raunchy skit about alien abduction.
In light of Stephenmdarling’s comment above, perhaps the best rendering for this French troll’s use of “nul” would be “trifling”, a word that isn’t common in white American English but which has survived in Black vernacular — Robert Paul Wolff’s work is trifling.
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/09/28/351245332/people-be-triflin-from-bills-bills-bills-to-the-bible
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