Tom Wolfe: Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970)

Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, Tom Wolfe’s fourth book of social commentary, consists of two devastatingly funny essays, closely related in theme and substance, dealing with political stances and social styles in a status-minded world. In “Radical Chic,” Wolfe describes an intriguing phenomenon of the late Sixties: the courting of romantic radicals-Black Panthers, striking grapeworkers, Young Lords-by New York’s socially elite. He focuses primarily on one symbolic event: the gathering of the radically chic at Leonard Bernstein’s duplex apartment on Park Avenue to meet spokesmen of the Black Panther Party, to hear them out, and to talk over ways of aiding their cause. Tom Wolfe re-creates the incongruous scene-and its astonishing repercussions-with high fidelity. But he gives us more than just a wry account of life among the Beautiful People; he also provides a historical perspective on that impulse of the upper classes to identify themselves with what they imagine to be the raw, vital lifestyle of the lower orders.

In the companion essay, Wolfe travels west to San Francisco to survey another meeting ground between militant minorities and the liberal white establishment: the newly emerging art of confrontation developed by young blacks, Chicanos, Filipinos, Chinese, Indians, and Samoans in response to the bureaucracy that grew up in and around the poverty program. Wolfe’s account of the performances of such masters as the Mission Rebels, the Youth for the Future, and the New Thang, and the responses of the catchers of the flak, including the Mayor himself, makes for uproarious farce. But the points he makes about racial and ethnic game-playing in America’s class wars are inescapably valid.

Radical Chic article first published in the Jun 8, 1970 issue of New York
Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970
ISBN 9780312429133

commentary (Michael Bracewell, Frieze)

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Benjamin Noys: The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory (2010)

The Persistence of the Negative offers an original and compelling critique of contemporary Continental theory through a rehabilitation of the negative. Against the usual image of rival thinkers and schools, Benjamin Noys identifies and attacks a shared consensus on the primacy of affirmation and the expelling of the negative that runs through the leading figures of contemporary theory: Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, Antonio Negri, and Alain Badiou.

While positioning the emergence of affirmative theory as a political response to the corrosive effects of contemporary capitalism, Noys argues that, all too often, affirmation is left re-affirming the conditions of the present rather than providing the means to disrupt and resist them.

Refusing to endorse an anti-theory position that would read theory as the symptom of political defeat, The Persistence of the Negative traverses these leading thinkers in a series of lucid readings to reveal the disavowed effects of negativity operating within their work.

Overturning the limits of recent debates on the politics of theory, The Persistence of the Negative vigorously defends the return of theory to its political calling.

Publisher Edinburgh University Press, 2010
ISBN 0748638636, 9780748638635
196 pages

review (Baylee Brits, Parrhesia)
review (Raphael Schlembach, Shift Magazine)

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Gary Genosko (ed.): The Guattari Reader (1996)

Félix Guattari (1930-1992) was a radical analyst, social theorist and activist-intellectual. Best known for his collaborations with the philosopher Gilles Deleuze on Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy?, The Guattari Reader makes available for the first time the broad canvas of Guattari’s formidable theoretical and activist writings, many previously untranslated, to provide an indispensable companion to the existing literature.Aside from illustrating the salience of Guattari’s collaborative work with Deleuze and other European intellectuals, this volume charts Guattari’s own solo writing career – from his tenure as Lacan’s analysand in the 1950s and his prominent role in the international anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s through his participation in queer politics, outlaw radio, and the formation of subversive collective organizations. This volume provides an important register of Guattari’s more political side, documenting his interventions in particular political conflicts in contemporary Europe. Guattari’s ideas and projects defy disciplinary boundaries and escape compartmentalization. They will appeal to those working in and between politics, philosophy, semiotics, psychoanalysis, sociology, and cultural studies.

Publisher Blackwell Publishers, 1996
ISBN 0631197079, 9780631197072
304 pages

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