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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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Eisenman is also a bit of an odd figure to play the part of the socialist hell-bent on the cultural destruction of the west, I doubt he has much sympathy for anything approaching the doctrinaire socialist reorganisation of the economy. He's also a bit too in love with the work of Speer and the italian fascists (see his book on Terragni). In this interview, he largely claims his personal political affinities run conservative and notes his American projects were mostly funded from the right. This also includes this very funny aside:

(The interview is briefly interrupted as Prof. Eisenman takes a phone call from a member of the conservative Catholic organization Opus Dei who wants to know if he would mind being nominated for an architectural prize of theirs in connection with his cultural center in Santiago de Campostela in Spain. He does not, and the interview resumes.)

To the extent I've had much impression of his public persona it has been one that is a bit self-obsessed and if aesthetically radical at one point in time, never really had a broader political project and had since settled back into cantankerousness. The other thing I remember from him recently is him comparing Trump's buildings to Stalin's architecture.

It seems to me that it is far from uncommon for people to be 'high-decouplers' regarding the linguistic/semiotic/philosophical/epistemological observations of the postmodernists and deconstrutionists like Foucault and Derrida, and their political and economic positions. Another classic example: the IDF's use of D&G

It seems to me that it is far from uncommon for people to be 'high-decouplers' regarding the linguistic/semiotic/philosophical/epistemological observations of the postmodernists and deconstrutionists like Foucault and Derrida, and their political and economic positions.

I don't think much decoupling is actually required. Both Foucault and Derrida had a relation to orthodox Marxism that was complicated at best, and both have been criticized by more strictly doctrinaire leftists as being "conservative" (not in the Fox News sense of course, but in the sense of providing insufficient support to the cause, and being liable to interpretations that could aid the enemy). So it's not surprising that people from all over the political spectrum could take inspiration from their work.

This talk also happened ten years before Specters of Marx.