[foucault, who] you learn in almost every single introductory...philosophy class in Univ?
this isn’t true
Even though Foucault was the Marxist.
He was as much of a Marxist as you had to be in 60s/70s France. Which is to say, engaging with Marx academically like you would Hume or whoever, without having to be an actual, you know, commie. I have a hard time considering his politics were meaningfully Marxist given:
i) “Marxist thought exists in nineteenth-century thought like a fish in water: that is, it is unable to breathe anywhere else. Their [viz. classical, ‘bourgeois’ economics and revolutionary, ‘Marxian’ economics] controversies may have stirred up a few waves and caused a few surface ripples; but they are no more than storms in a children’s paddling pool.” The order of things pg. 262
and ii) his boner for Gary Becker and flirtations with what he took as the neoliberal turn towards the end of his career.
Really, to a man all of the poststructuralists were boring socdems (but what is a socdem but a half-hearted Marxist amirite?). Part of what this subversive conspiracy narrative that tries to pigeonhole everyone who’s French or German (and let’s be real, Jewish) into an unproblematic commie obscures are the real faultlines and incommensurabilities between, for instance, the deleuzians/derrideans/foucauldians and the
legit ‘cultural marxists’ of the Frankfurt school. Not to mention everyone else who doesn’t fit neatly into either camp, like lyotard, Althusser(lol), and, probably, baudrillard. Some of them can be legit styled ‘postmodern’ understood
narrowly as subscription to either epistemic or metaphysical anti-realism (and potentially both). None of their works/thought can be reducibly described in colloquial ‘isms’ taken from contemporary American political discourse because they were far too careful of thinkers to be summarized within five bullet points.
Jake, does your company offer policies that can be cashed out even in the event of a suicide
Only if you consider purgatory to be a benefit.
Incidentally,
great example of Christianity not being committed to individual autonomy:
Everyone is responsible for his life before God who has given it to him. It is God who remains the sovereign Master of life. We are obliged to accept life gratefully and preserve it for his honor and the salvation of our souls. We are stewards, not owners, of the life God has entrusted to us. It is not ours to dispose of.
Suicide contradicts the natural inclination of the human being to preserve and perpetuate his life. It is gravely contrary to the just love of self. It likewise offends love of neighbor because it unjustly breaks the ties of solidarity with family, nation, and other human societies to which we continue to have obligations. Suicide is contrary to love for the living God.
I’m not sure the individualism/collectivism binary isn’t just a feature of literally every group dynamic ever rather than an ideological struggle between light and dark.
